Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse for Detroit, here come the stars of the corporate reform movement with advice to do more of what Detroit has been doing without success.
More than half the students are in charter schools, but Detroit doesn’t have enough, it seems. The lowest-performing schools were dumped into the woebegone “Education Achievement Authority,” under an emergency manager with dictatorial powers, but that didn’t go anywhere.
If Detroit can’t get its school problems solved, it won’t be for lack of quality advice from national education experts.
As city and state leaders seek to figure out how best to salvage Detroit Public Schools and improve performance across a complex network of school choices, top school reformers from around the country want a piece of the action, too.
Last week, Michael Petrilli, CEO of the D.C.-based Fordham Institute, and Eric Chan, a partner at the Charter School Growth Fund, were a few of the latest to drop in on Detroit. Excellent Schools Detroit, which is helping lead the conversation locally about improving all city schools, invited them to town to discuss how best to create the right environment for quality charter school growth.
The more insights, the merrier. Other cities have undergone major school turnarounds, and there are consistent guidelines for success. When asked what Detroit needs to do to start showing results for kids, Petrilli and Chan echoed similar ideas.
“Deal with low-performing schools, and encourage high-performers,” says Petrilli, whose organization works to raise the quality of U.S. schools. “There are concrete things we can do.”
The examples of success offered by Petrilli and Chan: New Orleans, the District of Columbia, and Memphis. Privatization is the answer. Neither Petrilli nor Chan has an idea about how to improve public education. Just privatize it. Get rid of it. Bring in high-quality “seats.”
Readers of this blog have read again and again that most charter schools in New Orleans are rated D or F schools by the state of Louisiana; D.C. continues to be one of the lowest performing districts in the nation, as judged by the NAEP; and Memphis is home to the all-charter Achievement School District, whose founder Chris Barbic promised would produce a dramatic turnaround in only five years. That turnaround has not happened. Not in New Orleans, D.C., or Memphis.
Surely there must be better examples of success for corporate reform. Or are there?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is, of course, the same Michael Petrilli who openly admitted on the pages of the NY Times “Room for Debate” section that getting rid of difficult to educate children is a feature rather than a bug of charters as he advocates them.
In Petrilli’s education system, there are two tiers of schools for urban children: “no excuses” charter schools that hold on to the children who are able to quickly adapt to the extremely rigid behavioral expectations and constant pressure to produce test scores, and then a either a system of public schools that are left with no additional resources but even higher concentrations of children with extreme needs or a system of constantly opening and closing low performing charters that exist solely to take on the cast offs of the “no excuses” schools. He has, literally, no ideas at all for children in poverty who do not quickly fall into line, and willingly advocates a “system” where they are even worse off than before.
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What will he say when a much higher number of these low performers turn to crime as a result of chronic failure and chaos? Invest in more privatized prisons?
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YUP! You got it.
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danielkatz2014: in the immortal words of Michael J Petrilli—
[start excerpt]
Predictably, the anti-reform crowd is having a field day with Sunday’s Washington Post article (and related video), which reported the relatively high rate of student expulsions in D.C.’s charter school sector. There’s some legitimacy to this exercise in schadenfreude, considering how many of us reformer types have used the success of high-flying “no excuses” charter schools to bludgeon middling (or worse) district schools with the accusation that “if the charters can do it, so can you.” The retort—well-founded, in my view—is that most, if not all, of these high-flying charters aren’t serving the same population of kids as their traditional public school peers. They inevitably do a bit of creaming (even if unintentionally) on the front end and a number of them push out disruptive students on the back end. Apples-to-apples comparisons are made difficult by this “selection bias.”
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In my view, we should be proud of the charter schools that are identifying and serving high-potential low-income students—kids who are committed to using education to escape poverty and are often supported in that effort by education-minded parents.
The reason to celebrate these schools and the role they play is because the traditional system has been downright hostile to the needs of such striving children and families—as have been many charter critics. …
But let’s not forget about the needs (even rights) of the other kids to learn. Isn’t it possible that U.S. public schools have gone too far in the direction of accommodating the disruptors at the expense of everyone else? Or been guilty of “defining deviancy down,” in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s words? …
To be sure, this raises tough questions for the system as a whole. As I said in the Washington Post video, there are reasons to be concerned that district schools will become the last resort for the toughest-to-serve kids.
But in life there are trade-offs, and I would be willing to accept a somewhat less ideal outcome for the most-challenged students if it meant tremendously better life outcomes for their peers.
Misguided notions of “equity” have turned many public school systems into leveling leviathans. We shouldn’t let the same happen to charters, the last salvation of the strivers.
[end excerpt]
Link: http://edexcellence.net/commentary/education-gadfly-daily/flypaper/2013/the-charter-expulsion-flap-who-speaks-for-the-strivers.html
[Also see this blog, 1-8-2013, “Petrilli: What’s Wrong With Skimming the Best Students!”]
Read the entire “thought” piece by this “thought leader” of the corporate education reform—if you follow rheephorm “thought” practices, just take both the letters “h” and one of the letters “t” out of “thought” and you get—
Tough! Tough, that is, for the many “non-strivers” on which such rheephormsters are so eager to perform educational triage.
After all, “in life there are trade-offs.”
😡
Again, any question why I call them edubullies?
😎
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“leveling leviathans”
Who ever becomes the next Rethuglican presidential candidate should definitely turn to M. Petrilli for his VP candidate. We haven’t had so much “illuminating illiteration” for quite a while now! Spiro T rhymes with Petrilli
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If they’re going to designate public schools as the backup for the choice system they should 1. admit it and 2. fund public schools higher rates.
The ed reform plan is unfair to those of us who support public schools. It benefits choice schools at the expense of public schools
I want to be compensated for my indirect subsidy to their experiment.
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In response to your last statement, Chiara: Buy Pearson stock.
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And Chan’s board has Gates Fdn rep and a Walton on it.
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Michigan ed reform is a mess. The state is right up there with Ohio in unlimited, completely deregulated charter growth.
80% of the charters in the state are for-profits.
They are offering advice? Why don’t they first fix the mess they made ?
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The vultures are circling Detroit once more with a pocket full of lies about “success and miracles.” You have to hand it them for staying on message, even if it is only hot air. These corporations prey on the gullibility and naivete of the public.
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“As an investor, I’m optimistic,” Chan says. “I sense you’re heading in the right direction.”
Shameful!
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Yes, most SHAMEFUL, indeed. It’s about GREED and POWER.
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The same people who insist that slow, incremental improvements to the school system just won’t do for children “trapped in failing schools” seem to point — as their great success stories — to examples of incremental change: very modest increases in scores or “growth” in the districts favoring market-based reforms and privatization. Their so-called successes are nothing you can’t find in dozens of unreformed school districts.
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Was anyone outside DC charter promotion circles invited?
How is this a “discussion” when we hear from the same people with exactly the same prescription?
Eli Broad’s organization led and managed the last reform in Detroit in 2012. The whole “movement” crew parachuted in to make promises – Duncan, Snyder, Rhee. How is this reform different when it’s the same people?
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The author of the article, Ingrid Jaques, is notoriously anti-public education. And she is the primary education reporter. I rarely read anything in the News that is pro-public education, occasionally they will present a “guest opinion” from “union leaders” (always labeled as such). Even the local papers that do report on local events (such as the Utica Community Schools protest against privatization) don’t get all the facts correct. The folks around here who still read the newspapers are getting a very one-sided view of how things are.
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It was always presented as “union leaders versus reformers” in Ohio too until the problems with ed reform became impossible to ignore.
Michigan will get there too. Eventually facts trump carefully crafted narrative. It just took one newspaper to break the stranglehold and they all followed – now even the Columbus Dispatch does actual reporting, and they were cheerleaders for 15 years.
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Walton-funded Fordham “dropped into” Ohio and the state got, nada, on charter school accountability, as reported in a Dispatch editorial on July 5.
Money talks and for all their verbiage, about preventing taxpayer rip-off, the vulture philanthropies, won’t spend for good government or,………they like the corrupt system as it is. No difference.
Until the mess in Ohio is cleaned up, every other state should build a wall to protect their tax dollars from the greed of privatizers.
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The reforms are a joke. The problem in Ohio isn’t going to be solved by begging sponsors to start earning their cut.
Ohio needs statutory authority to regulate these schools and it should be at the county level. It’s ridiculous to put it all on the state auditor. It simply won’t get done. They can’t regulate hundreds of schools from Columbus. No other state entity works like that. It’s bad government
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You are being kind in describing Ohio government as “bad”.
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You know, the end reformers in the Ohio legislature ran away to vacation without reforming our “charter sector”
Maybe the DC ed reform lobbyists could focus on fixing the giant mess they left in this state before expanding into another.
Maybe they can persuade their fellow “movement” members in Ohio to come back to work and regulate the “charter sector” before the damage spreads and irreparably harms the unfashionable public schools in this state – the schools that educate 90% of kids.
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