I hesitate to post this editorial because it is such flimsy propaganda.
Two weeks ago, the charters in New York City held a mass rally of parents and students to demand more charters for their corporate boards. Now, teachers from the charter schools will hold their own rally. Will they dare to mention the high churn of charter teachers? Surely no one will acknowledge, as the New York Post does not, that the turnover rate of charter teachers is staggeringly high. Will they rally for a 40-hour work week? Not likely, since they have no union. They rally now, but in two-three years, most will be gone.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why do charter schools need so much promotion, anyway? You’d think if people were really dying to abandon public schools and close them all charters wouldn’t need all these media, government and lobbyist cheerleaders.
Shouldn’t “the market” be sufficient to prop up “market based ed reform”? Why do they need all these powerful people in government, media and the private sector selling these schools so hard?
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I was wondering this the other day. If charters are so freaking awesome and obliterate public schools in all measures, then they should sell themselves. No crooked politicians, grants, and govt branch infiltration needed. No spinning of the truth, cherry picking students, or deceptions of any kind. Truth, logic, and decades of peer reviewed studies would justify charters.
With so much money, power and control being pumped in isn’t that creating an artificial market? Which is the opposite of what rheeformers say they want.
And speaking of things rheeformers want, what about accountability? With 10 to 20 years of rheeformers getting what they want, where is the accountability? Is accountability only for public schools and public school teachers?
BTW , where is the integrity and honor? Since when is the individual teacher resposible for all of societies ills. Has a general ever blamed the soldiers for a lost battle or war? Or has the Surgeon General ever blamed doctors for Americas obesity epidemic?
Most importantly WHY is nobody looking these people dead in the eye and calling them out for the lying devils that they are?
Integrity…….
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Chiara and Bob – very good points. It feels like being at one long, on-going hard-sell time-share presentation. At least with those they do finally let you go home after a few hours.
I heard a saying a while ago that didn’t make sense at the time – “any show of force is an admission of weakness”. The more I see “reform” play out, the more I understand that saying.
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The reason charters are promoted is the same reason we see endless ads encouraging us to get our doctors to prescribe some expensive new drug. Somebody makes a lot of money from our “choice.”
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Wow. What a filthy dirty piece of propaganda. Unions said “those kids” were uneducable, but charter teachers know better. How many of those charter teachers were placed there by TFA? How many of those charter teachers can’t find a job in public schools because they are underfunded and overcrowded? As you wrote, how many of the charter teachers will even be there in 2, 3 years? Likely, none. The lying rhetoric hurt my eyes to read it. Again, if public schools did this, there would be hell to pay. Guarantee you this — if the union disappeared, these edubullies would still hate public schools, public school teachers, and “those” public school students who they counsel out and worse, would never accept in the first place.
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It’s really faulty logic. If you start with the premise that public school teachers rally because they’re self interested, then wouldn’t you also believe charter teachers rally because they’re self interested?
Maybe they’re just intrinsically better people. Otherwise this whole argument falls apart. They really have to decide what it is they believe, because they have a double standard that is completely incoherent and seems to rely on mysterious determinations of “motive”.
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How ironic they would accuse unions of saying that, when Rahm Emanuel, rephormer king, really did say “25% of these kids will never amount to anything anyway”. I swear people look in mirrors when they write stuff like this.
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Why does Rahm Emanuel get to weigh in on schools at all? He’s been a disaster for that school system. It’s in absolute chaos and he was controlling all of it. I don’t care what shape it was in when he got it, he’s now in his second term. When does he get held accountable by ed reformers? How they give a complete pass to their own “movement” leaders turns all the strutting around and crowing about “accountability!” into a joke. How did it happen that The Best and Brightest got completely hoodwinked by a petty thief?
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I can’t find anything in there about “improving public schools”. Wasn’t that how this “movement” was sold to the public? What happened to that? Is this Phase Two of the ed reform marketing campaign, where public schools completely drop out of the picture?
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Chiara, in phase 2, the charters drive the public schools into the sea.
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Chiara and dianeravitch: well put.
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Wow. Seems like there’s a lot of this going around right now. Here’s a kindred op-ed published this past weekend in the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/10/maximize_impact_of_ohios_71_mi.html#incart_river
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Here’s an Akron Beacon Journal editorial explaining some of the mess in Ohio: http://www.ohio.com/editorial/ohio-republicans-and-their-scandalous-schools-1.627573
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And attendance will be taken?
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Well, when your job depends upon you attending the rally. . .
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Who is organizing this giant teacher rally? Why do charter teachers feel a need to rally? Are rallying for something or against something? Strange…
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This is what the SUCCESS ACADEMY teachers think of working at Eva’s schools:
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2014/08/citizen-jacks-compendium-of-teacher.html
They’re going to that rally because they’ll be fired if they don’t.
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Typical NY Post. Outrageous editorial, no comment thread. Does anybody even read this rag? I lived in the city for 20 yrs. On the subway, if you weren’t reading the Times, you were reading NY Newsday for the columns, comics, & sports coverage. No one read the Post.
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People on the subway and on MetroNorth trains are reading the Post. Dismissing the readership stats for the Post is not going to help. Reading the Post and The Times, and lots of other media from across the spectrum, helps prevent ideological myopia. Often The Times is wrong and sometimes the Post is spot on. In this case, the Post is wrong.
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The Post was the first outlet in Murdoch’s US propaganda empire, and is estimated to have losses of $100 million dollars a year. He has never made a dime of profit from the paper, and doesn’t care, since its been more valuable to him as a vehicle for spewing his vicious politics.
The next time someone tells you that mass media in the US is degenerate because “that’s what people want,” point out to them Murdoch’s billion-dollar subsidies to his gossip, girly and gutter politics rag.
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I have said the same about Common Core and the aligned exams. If they are so ‘transformative’ and incredible, the obvious thing to do would be to pilot them only in underperforming schools, and areas with high rates of poverty. Then, when the true awesomeness becomes evident, “White, suburban Moms” will be clamoring for Common Core for ALL.
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Of course Rupert Murdoch, and the editorial board of the execrable Post, have no interest–financial, political or social or otherwise–in pushing charter schools. This is just the disinterested Fourth Estate at work, right?
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Rupert Murdoch gifted Eva’s schools with $5 million. He doesn’t want or need to make money. He is a true believer in the magic of the market
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Wow, one one-hundredth of one percent of that money would go a long in my classroom….
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The US Dept of Ed is “partnering” with a media platform to present the acceptable options for ed reform. Who chooses which “thought leaders” get coverage? Is that a “partnership” too? How is this not just another campaign for market-based ed reform, another private-public partnership to push the narrow “movement” gospel the Obama Administration adheres to?
View at Medium.com
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Perhaps the AFT would like to do some advertising too. Fight fire with fire.
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The AFT’s fire has long been extinguished, and it is in no position to fight charters, since the UFT in NYC (which is the tail that wags the AFT dog) runs it’s own charter schools, co-located in Brooklyn public school buildings.
The only way to have any hope of changing that is for NYC teachers to rouse themselves from their apathy and demoralization, get angry, and remove the union’s failed misleaders, who have persisted in sitting on their hands while charter schools metastasize.
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A small correction, Michael: the UFT now operates only a single charter high school. The elementary and middle schools lost their charters and were closed down this summer for low performance and for failing to meet 37 of the 38 goals stipulated by a probationary renewal.
The UFT assured us that operating a charter is easy; it’s all about the cream-skimming. However, at the time of their closing, the UFT schools’ enrollment was 2% ELLs (compared to 12% for the district) and 9% SWDs (20%). Perhaps there is more to it than that.
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I didn’t know they had been running charters. That is truly heinous. I hope that, now that they’ve supposedly stopped accepting Gates money, things will change.
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Correction noted; however, the UFT did not focus on student creaming by charters when it opened its schools.
Randi Weingarten’s rationale at the time, which I spoke against at the UFT Delegate Assembly over ten years ago (I had warned the union leadership about the dangers of charter schools when the state charter law was first passed in 1998), was that by running a successful charter school that operated under a union contract, we could deflect criticism that teacher union contracts impede student progress.
That the UFT’s charter schools showed under-enrollment of ELLs and special needs students just shows how unviable the model is, and that, no matter who operates them, they are not public schools.
By opening those schools, Weingarten thereafter made it impossible for the UFT/AFT to effectively combat charter proliferation, not that she ever intended to.
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Egad, no. They would advertise for the rephormers. They’re bought and paid for (as is NEA).
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These teachers will rally because they fear what would happen to them if they didn’t.
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