Russ Pulliam of the Indystar makes a startling admission: Charter schools in Indiana are mostly low-performing schools. Instead of “saving poor children from failing public schools,” most charters are low-performing.
Pulliam tells the story of Tim Ehrgott, who “was zealous for education reform in the early years.” He worked with Pat Rooney, a businessman who fought for vouchers and created a private scholarship program. He helped build the charter movement and founded his own charter. Now Ehrgott thinks it’s time to crack down on poorly performing charters. Today, Infiana has one of the largest voucher to grams in the nation.
Ehrgott has been schooled by reality.
Ehrgott doesn’t see the overall success that was promised. “Charters in the D-F range should be closed immediately. Those in the C range should not be automatically renewed,” he said. “Produce superior results or be closed.”
“More than half the charters, he added, are getting D or F. “Even when you standardize the results for at risk factors, charters are failing at twice the rate of traditional public schools.”
The hype, spin, and empty promises of the charter movement have run their course. Teach for America’s claims that its inexperienced kids could close the achievement gap are obviously hollow. Chris Barbic’s Achievement School District in Tennessee is a failure. The chickens are coming home to roost. You can’t fool all the people all the time.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Maybe it is me but doesn’t this sound a bit ridiculous?? We took on Charters because of promises (guarantees) they would out perform traditional public schools now we are asking to shut down low performing Charters?? This just doesn’t sit right with me. Maybe it is time to abandon the idea of Charters altogether and chalk it up to just another failed attempt at the privatization of public education. The day will come when all of our traditional schools are gone and what we will have is corporate owned schools, no elected school boards, TFA drones instead of good teachers and results in the crapper so deep even the worms won’t go there. THEN WHAT??? The next money making power seeking mission to further indoctrinate our children and dumb them down to the level of a bag of rocks. Sorry but the answers are simple. SHUT DOWN the US Dept. of Education and get back to pre-1965 classical education. Until then any parent that sends their kids to public schools is guilty of child neglect. Parents have the power to implode this mess but it will take courage. It will take people that are willing to stand up and make the supreme sacrifice that comes with being a parent. Get your kids out of the system and lets sit back and watch it implode upon itself. Then instead of us on our knees to them they will be on their knees to us. As it should be!!!
Charters have taken root mostly in inner cities where academic failure is tied to minority populations that give short shrift to education and high priority to immediate gratification, flavored with a dose of disrespect for authority, including teachers. Consequently, the children of these parents are in constant turmoil and hence, receive a poor education. Getting parents of these students to organize for education is difficult, at best. Hence, the big lie about charters bringing better education to inner city students; they cherry pick students from among the few concerned parents who have always known the importance of basic education. Charters have succeeded primarily due to this fact and one other: when one of their students proves incorrigible, he/she is dismissed to a public school. When this option is exhausted because no public schools remain, then charters will crumble unless something else occurs. Businesses are unhappy with declining profit, those students who can’t adapt to the charter environment will be sent for some sort of computer-based education, at home if old enough or in educational hubs, if too young to stay at home.
Nice. Racist, but nice.
Thanks for your inaccurate judgment and back handed compliment.; but, there is nothing racist about making a factual observation based on first hand experience and stating so in a public forum. Perhaps your political correctness has gotten in the way of the obvious. .
BlackAgendaReport.com posted, “Hillary’s Family Ties to School Privatization and Diane Ravitch’s Review of Hoosier School Heist”, on 7/14/2015. In the article, the author calls for action at the state level. Bernie Sanders is the only option at the national level.
The charter problem is bigger than Ohio. It’s across the (upper) midwest. I’m sort of curious why ed reformers dumped the worst charter policy in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana. Are we just expendable? We don’t get the media coverage of a NY or DC so the race to the bottom in ed reformland ends up here?
I think Illinois will soon be joining the “worst” club, by the way. They’re taking exactly the same path Ohio took.
Truth be known Charters are not working anywhere. You see it all depends on what we consider success. To the Charters advocates Charters are working exactly as designed. You see they sold us a flawed design model from the get go and they know it. It was never about improving education but all about making money and taking power away from parents. If you look at true (not self reported) results, which they hide as much as they possibly can, you will see they are the biggest lie sold to the American parents in a long time but again many legislators tend to make a bundle off of supporting this scheme as the Charter owners themselves. It is time to roll back the clock on Charters. REPEAL Charter laws in all states. No more Charters. They did not deliver so lets cut our losses and get back to basics.
I’d like to see a real funding analysis.
Every source of funding, and then a comparison of charters in high-funding areas (NY and DC) and low funding areas (Cleveland and Detroit).
It seems to me that the charters in the high funding areas are the only charters we look at. Does the fact that midwest states fund at lower levels leave midwest states stuck with low quality charters?
If so, what does that say about the whole “throwing money at the problem” belief in ed reform circles?
Agree, Chiara. I’d also like to see a review, similar to Dr. Mercedes Schneider’s, of the involvement of Gates’ associates, Carrie Penner (Walmart), Stacy Schuster, daughter of the founder of the largest privately owned natural gas and crude oil company (Samson) and the Fisher family of GAP and KIPP, in the privatization of financing for charter schools i.e. Charter Fund Inc./Charter School Growth Fund.
Bill Gates’ involvement in NCB’s offshoot, Capital Impact Partners, in funding charter schools, brings to mind the term, impatient opportunists.
I was surprised to see a web page showing PNC Bank’s involvement in charter school financing.
Very interesting. I’ve been thinking about privatization of government services since seeing the article about Aramark (private food-service provider that was fired from its contract in Michigan prisons) on this blog a few days ago.
When does it make sense for the government to contract out work to a private company with expertise in something, and when does it make sense to have the work done by government employees? I don’t think we could say the government should never pay a private company for anything. The military doesn’t build its own planes; it pays defense contractors to build planes.
And it occurs to me that the way a business makes this kind of decision (do we contract out the work or do it in-house?) has to do with the amount of control and oversight it needs to exercise on a day-to-day basis. A company can easily contract out the manufacturing of goods, because if the resulting product doesn’t meet the agreed-upon specifications, then the contractor has not lived up to its end of the bargain and the company does not have to pay for the work.
But in other functions, such as management or the provision of complex services, there isn’t just an end product: there is an ongoing series of experiences or exchanges. The company may be better off having its own employees do the work, because it can more closely monitor the behavior, goals, and performance of its employees.
If were were to draw a useful lesson from businesses here, it would go something like this: is a city or town school district best served by hiring its own superintendent and principals, or by contracting out this work? A short-sighted focus on test scores has led some governing bodies to hire contractors (CMOs) based on the promise of a delivery of goods: better scores. But the provision of education over a span of 13 years is a complex and long-term operation, and it is the primary function of the school district. A business would probably not contract out critical work in this way. It almost certainly would not take the wasteful and inefficient approach of having *both* a contractor and an in-house department doing the same work, and yet districts do this (sometimes are forced by the state to do this), because the CMOs do not propose or agree to educate all of the district’s students.
When quality suffers, school districts are dragged into this messy business of deciding which schools to close, disrupting the lives of students and families and teachers. Had they instead committed to continuous improvement of their own schools, staffed by their own employees, they could focus on their core “business”: providing an excellent education to all students.
Your comments are brilliant and make an interesting point. Aramark is a major corporation in the food industry and I dare say expert in this area. Yet the government saw fit to fire an expert for poor services. Curiously, the same government is encouraging the spread of charter operators as replacements for public education, run by business people who are inexpert in this field. What does that suggest about the quality of the educational services they deliver?
“The military doesn’t build its own planes; it pays defense contractors to build planes.”
Maybe if it did we wouldn’t have such an aggressive illegal invasive foreign policy.
Education deform is a racket much like “War is a Racket”
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
I agree in principle, Gloria, but it’s much worse than that– charter schools aren’t govt contractors. They aren’t selected by competitive bidding. Even if they were hired via contract for services (no competitive bidding), they’d at least be thoroughly vetted before selection, & would periodically have to show their results were as good or better than competitors. And when charter schools themselves contract out services or materials, in many states they can easily get an exemption from govt procurement procedures.
So, my take on it is, the manner in which charter schools are selected, their scope of services, their stds of performance etc– are all up to how the state writes up its charter school law, a special law written just for charter schools. Instead of applying relatively common-sense principles embodied in laws applying to govt contractors for many decades, it’s recent law enacted pursuant to the political push for school choice by those w/an ed-reform agenda. Judging from Ohio’s experience, as posted often here by Chiara, it can take nearly 20 yrs of financial abuse & poor performance before there’s enough voter attention paid to generate a groundswell loud enough to initiate amending such laws.
Perhaps the antics (sadly, often with terrible consequences for so many) of the free market fundamentalists that are the core and driving force of the self-styled “education reform” movement have made me too leery of their “amazing grace” moments but—
One of my first thoughts was that “charter advocate” was simply staying entirely within the same $tudent $uccess mindset with which he started out. That is, in order to save, continue and expand the charterite/privatized education sector, it is now necessary to cull the herd. The “failures” need to be sacrificed for the good of the “successes.”
Of course, it is possible that “charter advocate” really believes, at one and the same time, that the toleration of “failures” at the expense of “successes” is somehow, someway, in conflict with the corporate education reform of which he is an integral, and founding, part.
I welcome any recognition of reality from within the ranks of those that push a business plan that masquerades as an educational model, but I won’t apologize for withholding a cheer or two. Let’s see if any deeds, however timid, follow the bold words.
Health hint: I ain’t holding my breath.
😎
But, but, but… it’s not a ‘business plan’ at all!
Ed-reform [ALEC] may have some vague business plan in mind, e.g., “Subject that govt monopoly to competition! Give the customer choice, he’ll choose the better product, let the chips fall where they may.”
The only actual ‘business plans’ here are the ones prospective charters submit to their banks/ hedge-funders/ whatever for seed money. Those potential funders scope out the prospects & see that there’s a regular cash flow (school taxes), unencumbered by any restrictive business plan at the state level: scope of services and stds of performance are vaguely defined (if at all); there is little-to-no regulation involved, in fact, charter schools are left as unregulated as possible so as to ‘promote scalable innovation practices’– bottom line, no basis to sue for non-performance!
So from the investor’s point of view, the charter school is a cash cow. Sure, lack of regulation means corruption & financial shenanigans which may put them in bankruptcy within a few years, but it’s a good short-term investment, & a smart portfolio mgr will slide new ones in to cover the earlier losses. What’s not to love?
That’s the ‘business plan’ that applies to charter schools. Such business plans didn’t even exist before ’80’s re-writing accounting laws to favor qtrly returns over long-term profits. Same phenomenon that made it possible to re-bundle bad mortgages into ‘credit default swaps’, & we know how that ended.
On the bright side, my reasoning re-defines charter-schools as a financial bubble, which means they will eventually be in the rear-view mirror.
In 2014, the amount of charter debt was $1.6 billion. The return for the major holder of the bonds, was 18% (Aaron Kuriloff-WSJ- Dec. 28, 2014). The implication is that almost a fifth of education money went to the capital markets.
In Texas, the decision was made to back Texas charter school bonds, with the Permanent School Fund, so if there is a default, the state of Texas will have to find the resources to cover the debt, incurred by the qualifying charter schools.
You know what else I’d like to see from one of these charter supporters? SOME analysis of how that this one calls the “bubble” in Indiana charters has affected public schools. I get that he probably regrets pushing charters so hard, but his concern only extends to the affect on charter school students.
Do ed reformers care, at all, about existing public schools? They do these charter analyses like public schools simply don’t exist.
Where is the PUBLIC school work in ed reform? Why the obsessive, single-minded focus on charters and vouchers from people who call themselves “agnostics”?
Is it fair to public school children in Indiana that their lawmakers completely ignore how ed reform impacts public schools?
Chiara,
The reformers don’t care about public schools, except as a punching bag to advance privatization. The reformers are privatizers. They call themselves reformers because it deceives the public about their intentions. The media has bought their PR.
His analysis should be system-wide. He promoted charters and vouchers and saw some unintended consequences in charters.
We just stop there? In a given system, charters are just neutral or positive re: the impact on the public schools that surround them? What happened to public schools amidst all this fabulous experimentation? ? Does he care?
How does that even make any sense? Is this a system, or not?
Lawmakers in the state of Ohio have been absolutely consumed with charter schools since January. That makes this year like every other year.
90% of the kids in Ohio DO NOT ATTEND charter schools. Do our public employees have some duty to do some work on behalf of those children, or am I just paying them to promote their preferred “sector”?
Diane, it’s not just businesses that have sold the public on charters. They also bought the compliance of politicians with ready access to the proverbial soapbox.
Here’s yet another piece about the varying quality in charter schools that completely ignores public schools:
https://www.the74million.org/article/all-charters-are-not-equal-time-to-shut-the-worst-and-learn-from-the-best
They opened thousands of charter schools yet there is NO analysis on the effects of “choice” on the school that were already there. Better, worse, neutral, does anyone care? I mean, this is a fantasy. It isn’t how systems work and it sure shouldn’t be how government works. When they set up a new sector ALL schools are affected. “Choice” affects every kid in every school. It has to. The complete and utter disregard for the disfavored “public sector” schools is amazing.
It’s as if they had put in Medicare Advantage and never looked if traditional Medicare was affected. For people who are so heavily funded by the tech industry one would think “systems analysis” would occur to them. Is it win/lose, win/win, neutral? Are they ever going to bother checking?
Keep hammering on this, Chiara! You are the only voice defining this issue on the blog, & you’ve been doing it for 6 mos or more, but I feel this is the slant with the potential to bring voters/ taxpayers into reality.
I feel this is an especially smart viewpoint for NYS parents & taxpayers: get onboard now! To date, Cuomo has targeted invective and outrageous p.s. policies (via his captive Regents Bd) against his public schools. It is clear to us on this board that his intention is state takeover/ closure of ‘failing schools’ in favor of charters/ vouchers. But that is not clear to the average parent/ taxpayer at the moment: all they know is there’s a s###storm hitting their public schools.
It would be very smart for NYS parents/ taxpayers (invested in the ps system by some 95+%) to re-direct their attention to the moneys being pumped into those 5-6% charter schools. Make it two-pronged: spend an equal amount of internet convo, letters to reps etc, on the ACTUAL COSTS of Common Core, NYEngage, CC-aligned tests. Pay attention: just now, NYS is beginning to make the switch from paper-pencil stdzd tests to computerized. That’s where the heavy expenditures come in. Get it out there in the press!
sorry, sign-in glitch, that is me, Sp & Fr Freelancer
The reasons that reporters at Ohio newspapers only speed dial Fordham for quotes but, never Bill Phillis or Stephen Dyer, or that national, main stream media places Microsoft’s founder/beneficiary on a pedestal but, ignores his opportunistic school corporatizing and privatizing,… likely sheds light on Chiara’s question about media blinders.
Pulliam should look next door to Ohio. Once the charters put their noses in the tents, there’s no getting rid of them. Republican State Senator Lehner bragged about the great bill she was going to get passed to stop the financial abuses of charter schools on taxpayers (after more than 10 years of laments in the House). Then, at the 11th hour she agreed to reduce the transparency requirements in the law. Then, the top Republican House leadership stopped the bill in its tracks. $230,000 in campaign donations, among the most significant contributions they received, must be hard to ignore.
May be this comment is too late.
“More than half the charters, he added, are getting D or F. “Even when you standardize the results for at risk factors, charters are failing at twice the rate of traditional public schools.”
The above statement is true. 51% of the charters, i.e., 37 out of 72 are rated D and F. Th
But there are 264 public schools out of 1767 public schools are also rated D or F.
“Ehrgott doesn’t see the overall success that was promised. “Charters in the D-F range should be closed immediately. Those in the C range should not be automatically renewed,” he said. “Produce superior results or be closed.”
If we should close all charters with ratings of D and F, should we not also close the public schools with the same ratings? Why should one group have a death penalty when the other does not have the death penalty? In this country every one should be subject to the same rules?
Last 4 years worth of raw data on school ratings is available for any one to see and analyze. If you look at the performance of the charters during the last 4 years, they have done a better job of improving than the similar public schools. Remember charters were dealt with failing schools to start with. Therefore comparisons should be made with charter schools and similar failed/failing public schools. All one has to do is more home work, like analyzing the raw data or look into the CREDO report with no pre conceived notions.
I suppose Diane Ravitch does not want to acknowledge this fact. Obviously a vast majority of the bloggers here do not want see the truth either.