The Onion on the New Charter Lottery System

June 24, 2014 //

The Onion has created a new system for selecting charter students that is even faster and more effective than a lottery.

So much for those old-fashioned public schools that let anyone at all enroll.

Categories Charter Schools, Humor

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dalta7 says:

June 24, 2014 at 2:13 pm

If we were better at keeping guns and shooters out schools, The Onion’s satire might be a little more palatable… Although state and federal governments, in refusing to pass common sense legislature about guns or supporting schools to create an educated, critical thinking citizenry, are consigning millions of this country’s children to a dead-end future. White pills might be kinder…

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Sandra Stone says:

June 24, 2014 at 2:29 pm

Not funny. Making it a life or death struggle to get into a charter which implies that charters are the only solution to a better education? No, not funny at all. A neo-liberal stab at liberal style satirical humor that is not fooling me. The Onion has passed over to the flim flam.

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- Jack says:
  
  June 24, 2014 at 2:56 pm
  
  Sandra,
  
  While I appreciate the Onion piece, I understand your criticism. Since that aspect is beyond the scope of the satire, I’m going to cut and paste a great piece by Mark Naison about how the system is rigged against the traditional public schools:
  
  ———————–
  
  Charter School Growth, Bloomberg Style, Creates Dilemma for the de Blasio Administration- A Special Report to BK Nation
  January 31, 2014
  2 inShare3
  
  Charter School in Hawaii
  
  By Dr. Mark Naison
  
  In today’s New York Post, an article appeared claiming that charter-school applications in New York City were 56 percent ahead of what they were at this time last year…putting pressure on the de Blasio administration to re-evaluate its efforts to slow charter expansion.
  
  Those numbers are REAL. They reflect the desperation of inner-city and working-class parents who hope to find high-performing, safe schools for their children and see charters as the best hope for that.
  
  However, they are making that judgment, based on what they observe in their own neighborhoods — not because of the inherent superiority of charter schools — but because the Bloomberg Administration rigged the game by giving huge preference to charter schools — both substantively and symbolically — and by using charters not as a strategy to improve public education in the city, but as a wedge to privatize it and to smash the influence of the city’s teachers union.
  
  The challenge of the de Blasio Administration is see what happens when the competition is even, and when public schools are given the resources, encouragement and support that charters were given in the Bloomberg years. When and if that happens, the demand for charters is likely to decrease as parents see public schools in their neighborhood improve dramatically and innovative new public schools open in their neighborhoods.
  
  Under the Bloomberg Administration — aided and abetted by police systems of the state and federal departments of education — charter schools were consciously selected over public schools as the preferred alternative when low-performing public schools were closed. This preference was manifested in several important ways:
  
  • Charters were given facilities in public schools rent-free.
  
  • In schools where they were co-located with public schools, the charters were given preferential access to auditoriums, gymnasiums, laboratories, and often put in the most desirable locations in the buildings.
  
  • Although charters selected their students by lottery, they were allowed to weed out students who had disciplinary problems, or who performed poorly on standardized tests. As a result, according to Ben Chapman of the Daily News, only six percent of charter students are ELL students and nine percent are special-needs students…far lower than the city average for public schools.
  
  • When you count space, charters received more city funding than public schools, and when you add to that private contributions that they solicited, charters spent significantly more per student than public schools.
  
  • Community organizations and universities willing to start new schools were encouraged by the NYC Department of Education to start charter schools rather than public schools.
  
  These preferences had an absolutely devastating effect on inner city public schools, which were in the same neighborhood as the charters. In the case of schools who had charter co-location, it led to humiliating exclusion from school facilities that they once had access to, leaving their students starved of essential resources. But in the case of all inner-city public schools, it led to a drain of high- performing students, whose parents put them in charters, and an influx of ELL students, special-needs students and students pushed out of charters for disciplinary problems–taxing those schools’ resources and making it much more difficult for them to perform well on standardized tests. The school-closing policies of the Bloomberg Administration added to the stress on those already hard-pressed schools, forcing their staffs to work under the threat of closure and of exile to the infamous “rubber room” for teachers.
  
  What occurred was a “tale of two school systems” within inner-city neighborhoods — one favored, given preferential access to scare resources…hailed as the “savior” of inner-city youth…the others demonized, stigmatized, deprived of resources, threatened with closure and deluged with students that charter schools did not want.
  
  If you were a parent, which school would you want to send your child to?
  
  But what happens when the game is no longer rigged? When charter schools have to pay rent? When they can’t push out ELL and special-needs students? When facilities in co-located schools are fairly distributed? When schools are no longer given letter grades and threatened with closing, but are given added resources when they serve students with greater needs? When universities and community organizations are encouraged to start innovative public schools…not just create charters?
  
  If all those things happen — and I expect that some of them will during the next few years of a de Blasio/Farina Department of Education — then public schools in the inner city will gradually improve…charters in those neighborhoods will become less selective…and students, on the whole, will have enhanced choice and opportunity because there will be more good schools in the city.
  
  The current hunger to enroll students in charter schools is understandable, given the policies pursued by the Bloomberg Administration, but those policies, which undermined public education, did not enhance opportunity for all students, and pitted parent against parent and school against school in a competition for scarce resources.
  
  The de Blasio policy of restoring public schools to public favor is a sound one, and should be pursued carefully, humanely, and with respect for the hunger of parents and students of New York City for outstanding educational options.
  
  Reply
- Jack says:
  
  June 24, 2014 at 3:13 pm
  
  Oh and another thing, here’s the top comment to the above piece, from Hunter College’s Kari Steeves on the recent, sneaky methods that charter advocates are further ramping up the “rigging of the system” against traditional public schools, and in favor charters:
  
  KARI STEEVES: (CAPS mine, Jack)
  – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
  Mr. Naison,
  
  I deeply appreciate your analysis and agree with it wholeheartedly. But I would respectfully propose that you’ve missed a crucial component of WHY charter applications may be up this year.. “Kindergarten Connect,” the online kindergarten application the Bloomberg administration rushed into place this fall, FUNNELS FAMILIES TO CHARTERS
  
  Families CANNOT GO THROUGH ANY OTHER VENUE THAN “KC”, even though the applications are in English only. FAMILIES MAY NOT GO THEIR LOCAL SCHOOLS AND FILL OUT A PAPER APPLICATION, AS THEY COULD LAST YEAR. It’s been a real hardship for the many families who do not own computers or have no internet access.
  
  But more to the point, “KC” FEATURES A LINK DIRECTLY TO THE CHARTER APPLICATION, and conveniently, charter schools moved up their application time to match the opening of “KC” (possibly another reason they didn’t have as many applicants last year: they weren’t taking applications this early!).
  
  The charter application deadline, however, is in April, whereas the public deadline is passed. If you missed it, who knows what school the DoE will assign your child. If you want a choice besides the ONE seat “Kindergarten Connect” will deliver you, YOU -MUST- APPLY TO A CHARTER. Families can no longer receive offers from more than one public school of choice. They rank schools and hope for good luck in the lottery.
  
  So many more families will apply to charters as a back-up. Also, word on the street is the HeadStart programs ARE VIGOROUSLY PUSHING THE CHARTER OPTION, and given the reduction in public choice with “KC”, I can’t blame them.
  
  Lastly, Vanguard, the company providing the software for “Kindergarten Connect” (with access to all K family contact information) USES THE CONTACT INFO THAT THEY GATHER FROM THEIR CONTRACT WITH THE D.O.E. TO SEND MARKETING ON BEHALF OF CHARTER SCHOOL CLIENTS. Kindie families (families with Kindergarten-age children? Jack.), because of “KC,” can now enjoy the barrage of glossy brochures most of them had to wait until summer to receive.
  
  “Kindergarten Connect” WAS BLOOMBERG’S PARTING GIFT TO THE CHARTER INDUSTRY.
  – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
  
  Here’s the link to the original piece:
  
  http://bknation.org/2014/01/charter-school-growth-bloomberg-style-creates-dilemma-de-blasio-administration-special-report-bk-nation/
  
  Reply
  - Dora says:
    
    June 25, 2014 at 10:25 am
    
    “Lastly, Vanguard, the company providing the software for “Kindergarten Connect” (with access to all K family contact information) USES THE CONTACT INFO THAT THEY GATHER FROM THEIR CONTRACT WITH THE D.O.E. TO SEND MARKETING ON BEHALF OF CHARTER SCHOOL CLIENTS. Kindie families (families with Kindergarten-age children? Jack.), because of “KC,” can now enjoy the barrage of glossy brochures most of them had to wait until summer to receive.”
    
    AH! So very wrong! I wondered how they got my address. The glossy charter brochures I received went straight in the trash.
- California retiree says:
  
  June 24, 2014 at 9:00 pm
  
  I think the Onion is making fun of both charter schools and the misguided parents who are so adamant about getting their students into them.
  
  Reply
Jack says:

June 24, 2014 at 2:46 pm

This writer has a detailed grasp of the whole charter school losttery fiascos… i.e. with his tangent about rich parents gaming the system, and the deliberately agonizing, hours-long wait to see if you are accepted.

In the actual lotteries, no one gets killed by white pills, or temporarily gets paralyzed or sent into unconsciousness, or falls to the floor in convulsions like in the parody,

HOWEVER… the satire is dead on because, just the same…

on the part of the charter honchos who administer these freak show lotters, there is indeed a deliberate attempt to inflict torment on those present, the parents and children alike—both the lottery “winners,” and more acutely on the lottery “losers,” of course.

As we know, this is totally unnecessary suffering… all to advance the nefarious goals of money-motivated privatizers like Eva and the rest.. These grotesque child-abusing spectacles could be replaced with simple notification to the winners/losers via phone calls, or emails, or regular mail.

Nope, Eva and Co. won’t do that. Instead, they deliberately orchestrate this for maximum emotional torture, one where the applicants are on display, and their extreme emotional states—i.e. wrenching, tear-filled reactions when you find you lost—witnessed and recorded, to be used for propaganda later.

Disgusting.

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Chiara says:

June 24, 2014 at 2:53 pm

Wow. The Obama Administration goes 100% anti-labor:

Obama alumni Robert Gibbs joins @campbellbrown’s #Vergara-inspired campaign, reports @StephanieSimon_ http://ht.ly/yp0gE

It may not matter. It’s not like anyone in DC are enforcing any labor protections anyway.

How many ed reformers are on the Vergara-inspired payroll, do you think? These guys don’t come cheap!

I bet Gibbs is taking home way more than any middle aged public school teacher.

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Chiara says:

June 24, 2014 at 3:02 pm

Here’s the White House Summit on “working families”. Ask them how many “working families” can get to DC for this “summit” that is supposedly about them and will consist of the same 150 DC people opining and offering helpful suggestions to the masses.

http://workingfamiliessummit.org/

I have a question. Does the Department of Labor enforce labor laws anymore, or are they “agnostics” on that?

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Chiara says:

June 24, 2014 at 3:17 pm

“The Incite Agency, founded by former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and former Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt, will lead a national public relations drive to support a series of lawsuits aimed at challenging tenure, seniority and other job protections that teachers unions have defended ferociously. LaBolt and another former Obama aide, Jon Jones — the first digital strategist of the 2008 campaign — will take the lead role in the public relations initiative.”

Cha-ching! The Obama Administration are now (officially) anti-labor.

Also? They all lied about limiting it to tenure. I knew they’d go after a whole host of job protections, and they are. When teachers unions are gone, are charter school teachers aware their wages will plummet? That’s what happened in manufacturing, and it will happen in education too.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/robert-gibbs-ben-labolt-legal-fight-teachers-union-incite-agency-108243.html#ixzz35aMgFIrh

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- California retiree says:
  
  June 24, 2014 at 9:01 pm
  
  I love the irony of the “Incite” name. In-side, lack of insight, the works.
  
  Reply
Maria says:

June 24, 2014 at 8:00 pm

The thing about satire is that it goes places that are uncomfortable. So while the violence in the piece may hit too close to home, it makes its point very well. I thought it was hilarious.

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Ellen T Klock says:

June 24, 2014 at 11:00 pm

This article is horrible (tee hee) and I’m ashamed I found it amusing.

A new twist on The Hunger Games. Instead of Schindler, call it Eva’s List.

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