Peter Greene here responds brilliantly to those charter advocates who defend the selectivity of charters by comparing them to public magnet schools. The charter defenders say that magnet schools select their students too.
But Greene points out that the student rejected by a charter is on her own, while the student rejected by a magnet is the responsibility of the school system.
For example:
“Conversation A
“Student: Is it true Mighty Swell Magnet School is closing?
“School: I’m afraid it is, due to budgetary cuts and enrollment considerations, the district is shutting down MSMS and we won’t open next fall. However, in keeping with our legal and ethical responsibilities, we have already placed you within one of the district’s other schools. Don’t worry. Your education will continue without interruption next year.
“Conversation B
“Student: Hey! This door is locked! How am I supposed to get to class today.
“Charter: We closed. It just didn’t make business sense to keep operating, so we are outies. Go away.
“Student: But– my education!!
“Charter: Not our problem. Have a nice life.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This article in latimes.com today tacitly endorses Broad toadie Villaraigosa for governor of California by suggesting he supports magnets and Common Core instead of charters and Common Core.
http://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-pc-villaraigosa-supports-black-minds-matter-changes-to-schools-20151105-story.html
I don’t know what to make of it. Mr. Greene is right that magnets are fundamentally superior to magnets, but it seems the rephormsters are onto it. Perhaps Dr.Ravitch, Peter Greene, et al, of higher intellect than mine, can shed some light on this turn of spin.
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…superior to charters… Sorry.
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“Magnets vs Charters”
When charter folds
It’s out of sight
But magnet holds
Both day and night
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Also, no one compares magnet schools to any public school because there’s a recognition magnets are selective. That would be an unfair comparison .
One would think if they’re “transforming” a public school system that serves tens of millions of children and creating “governance” in think tanks and foundations they could at least settle on basic definitions and goals within “the movement” before we eradicate public schools and deeply regret that reckless decision.
Maybe a couple of “movement” lawmakers could gather their courage and weigh in. Are public schools still part of their job or have they “relinquished” the whole thing to private parties and contractors?
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Is anyone in government concerned about what happens to public schools if private parties just create an unplanned, ad hoc parallel system of schools?
Anyone? Public schools? What about them? Was there some decision to designate public schools as the default that backs up the choice system that the public was not told about? Any public school advocates left in government, or are they all banished?
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It’s an ad hoc parallel system that NEVER has to educate the children with the most severe special needs. So a charter chain can be educating as many students as are found in a medium size city like Pittsburgh, and yet in a city that size of course there are many children with severe special needs that require one on one (or even two aides) to manage. But charter chains pretend it’s normal to have 11,000 children who are all well-behaved and motivated to learn and it’s just a “random” sampling of students. Apparently those charter schools get an inordinately high percentage of violent 5 year olds who are suitably made to feel misery until they leave, but they somehow manage to never to worry about the cost of the education for a severely disabled child. It’s great for the students who get to remain in the charter, and great for the administrators who can pay themselves higher salaries, but terrible public policy to pay charters a similar rate to educate students who are the least expensive to teach.
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Magnets: Here is our admissions test to get in. A few years later: students who are admitted get high standardized test scores. (Silence – no advertising about how they have the best teachers and a special sauce to teach all kids as proven by their test scores.)
Charter 1: Here is our lottery. You won a spot – great! We welcome you and are looking forward to teaching your child and keeping him here even if he struggles. A few years later: students get mediocre test scores. (Silence – no advertising that they have the best teachers and a special sauce to teach all kids as proven by their test scores.)
Charter 2: Here is our lottery. You won a spot – great! Come to our meeting where we will tell you all that we expect from you and explain that if you and or child aren’t committed to that, this is not the school for you. Did your child win a spot for 2nd grade? Oops, we gave her a test and she has to repeat 1st grade. Or Kindergarten. Did your child win a spot for Kindergarten? If you signed the contract and feel confident you and your child can commit to everything asked, we welcome you to our school. Nine months later: “I know we suspended over 20% of the Kindergarten class but they were a particularly violent bunch, you know.” 3 years later: “I know 30% or 40% of the Kindergarten class disappeared, but look how well the remaining kids are doing, especially the new ones who replaced them and were tested to make sure they were at grade level! And yes, of those Kindergarten kids remaining, quite a few have been held back and are still in 2nd grade. But look how well the ones who did make it to 3rd grade did on the test! We have the best teachers ever! We have the best system ever! We should have more schools because we are really committed to serving at-risk kids! All of them except the 5 year olds who are extremely violent that we just get the bad luck to always get in our schools.
(Silence from Charter 1 who are all terrified to point out that the emperor has no clothes because then they might turn on their schools.)
Charter 3: Here is our lottery. We welcome any child and remember that your child will be expected to start taking AP classes in 9th grade and pass 5 AP exams in order to graduate. A few years later: Look how many of our students passed AP exams! all of them! Sure lots dropped out, but the 20 students that are left at graduation are spectacular so we must be a terrific school. (Silence from Charters 1 and 2)
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Hey NYC Pubic school parent,
Is it ok if I put this comment up on my blog (with whatever attribution you’d like)?
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I would be honored! You can either attribute it to “a reader of Diane Ravitch’s blog” or a NYC public school parent or whatever else seems good. Thanks very much.
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Words. Meanings. Trying to have an honest and productive dialogue when some folks assign their own meanings to words that they know others will interpret differently.
[start]
‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’
‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’
[end]
(THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, Lewis Carroll)
Unlike Humpty Dumpty, so many of the promoters of corporate education reform do not make it clear that they are doing a Humpty Dumpty—in part because they often don’t understand what they are talking about and in part in order to deceive.
It is that mix that produces so much word salad and cognitive dissonance from the “thought leaders” of the self-styled “education reform” movement.
One result of the above: when someone points out what Peter Greene has put so well, they go on the attack by claiming that their “shrill” and “strident” critics aka non-strivers just don’t try hard enough to understand 21st century Rheephormish.
For example, “choice.” Chiara has aptly described the rheephorm definition as meaning [in practice] “choice but no voice.” Put another way: when the rheephormsters are able to mandate and impose their will, they decide what choices people will have and what choices people will not have.
When pressed to defend the yawning gulf between their choice words and choice deeds, the most common defense is some variant of: “Well, you can’t please all of the customers, er, clients, er scholars & parents all of the time. But we’re workin’ on it; just give us ten more years to see if our stuff works out.”
Sure. Like for John McDonogh HS in New Orleans. The parents and students and community didn’t get 10 years. They got a lot lot less. Google. *But for the shills and trolls that can’t summon up even the slightest rigor and grit, here a freebie—
Link: https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2015/04/06/john-mcdonogh-flunkie-manager-steve-barr-is-doing-just-fine-in-los-angeles/
Thank you to the owner of this blog for the posting and to the commenters on this thread.
😎
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The bias within the “movement” language is incredible. They’re inside it so they don’t hear it but it is skewed against public schools.
Ohio named charter schools “community schools” and they refer to vouchers to private schools as “scholarships”. This is the state ed reform employees putting a huge thumb on the scale against the schools that 93% of kids they’re supposed to be serving attend.
It’s outrageously unfair and it runs all thru my state government. The clear message is public schools are inferior, which in this state is EXACTLY the opposite of the truth.
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“They’re inside it so they don’t hear it ”
They may not hear it at this point, but they (or at least ad agencies hired by people like Bill Gates) designed it.
The framing of “reform” is not accidental. The words have been very carefully chosen. Even the word “reform” has been quite literally reformed.
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Reform fish, or a few of them, don’t realize they swim in a sea of lies.
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Ok
Sent from my iPhone
>
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Here is an example of why even the so called “good” charters are desperate to excuse the practices of the ones who have been dishonest for years:
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/2015/11/06/uncomfortable-questions-about-school-discipline-suspension-and-expulsion
See, we are all supposed to believe that 20% — or even 24% in one school — of 5 year olds at Success Academy are just doing violent things. Even though the only children who enter the Kindergarten class have parents committed to their education, Mr. Pondiscio wants to appeal to the racisms that says “of course all those 5 year olds were violent because they were minorities”.
Pondiscio writes about Montclair, NJ: “the board of education approved spending nearly $5 million this year from tuition payments – an average of $63,000 per student – on “out-of-district placements” for 79 students with a variety of classifications, including learning disabilities and “other health impairment.”
We all know that 79 kids is not 20% of the students in Montclair sent to $63,000/year schools. But in Success Academy, 20% or more of the 5 year olds with the most committed parents are violent and need special schools. And if so many kids did need those kind of schools, the last thing Eva Moskowitz should be doing is claiming throughout the country that public schools have too MUCH money and don’t need more.
Pondiscio writes: “If counseling out SOME number of unruly, disruptive or hard to teach low-income students enables a school – any school – to bring 25, 50 or even 100 times that number of other students to levels of achievement that “regular” schools have historically proven unable to equal, are you OK with that?”
What is the “SOME”? That is the $1 million dollar question that Mr. Pondiscio does NOT want to address. If HALF the starting Kindergarten class is failed by Success Academy, then they are not “bringing 25 or 50 or even 100 times those students” to greater achievement.
I challenge Mr. Pondiscio — look at how many AT-RISK children who win the Kindergarten lottery remain at Success Academy. Don’t pretend that the children who join in older grades who already prove they work at grade level are “brought to higher level of achievement.”
This is why I am starting to believe I can no longer support any charter schools — because even the good ones absolutely refuse to be honest about this. Why isn’t Mr. Pondiscio DEMANDING that we know exactly how many of the low-income students who win the K lottery disappear? His dishonest implication that “100 times that many kids are educated” is the myth that has never once been looked at by any researcher. Ask yourself why that happened, Mr. Pondiscio, instead of coming up with excuses for why so many desperate families pulled their kids out. You have a chance to be honest and prove to us once and for all that charter folks will say and do anything to promote their brand. If you can’t promote it on HONEST grounds, you shouldn’t be in the charter business at all, Mr. Pondiscio. Even if it does help a few well-behaved children. Because that “help” comes at the expense of thousands of other children whose budgets are being cut thanks to YOUR dishonesty about them needing nothing but Ms. Moskowitz’ book and her teachers.
The pro-charter folks who think the only way to achieve a goal is to lie remind me of the people at the White House who believed it was better to lie to the American public about WMD because their goal of getting rid of Saddam was worth it. If your justification is based on lies because you don’t trust the American people with the truth, then chances are that you are in it for yourself and not for the higher goal you claim.
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NYC public school parent: I was struck by this sentence of yours—
“This is why I am starting to believe I can no longer support any charter schools — because even the good ones absolutely refuse to be honest about this.”
IMHO, this is an accurate insight. Look at it from the perspective of those supporting corporate education reform in all its many forms. Since they are thoroughly imbued with the “soft bigotry of low expectations” concerning public schools and pubic education, they are not going to look much (if at all) in that direction for the measures/indications of success that they truly value. Instead, they look inward at themselves [navel-gazing, to be sure] and most especially at the rheephorm heavyweights like charter chains and their leaders and enablers and enforcers. *Think Bill Gates and the Waltons and Eva Moskowitz and John Deasy and Arne Duncan and John King and Michelle Rhee Johnson et al.*
Combine the above with the public spin they put on supposedly rooting out the “bad actors” and “bad apples” from their ranks and you have an attitude that justifies anything dishonest and immoral that they do because others [only the ones that count, natcherly, meaning other rheephormsters] have done or are doing worse.
It’s a downward spiral into worst practices at all levels because they insist that we shouldn’t make “the perfect the enemy of the good.” In other words, their bad behavior is already assumed and they [the no excuses crowd no less!] feel they can be let off the hook by asserting that [by comparison with their peers] “we could have done much much worse.”
The entitlement crowd. Where’s the grit and rigor? Or can there be when their standards are set so low and keep going lower and lower?!?!?
😱
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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Both my son and I attended public magnet schools, and we both received a wonderful, comprehensive education. Both schools offered access to sports, the arts, sciences, foreign languages, etc. Test scores were never the focus of either school, but high scores on standardized tests were a normal by product of the challenging academic environment.
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This is very similar to non-magnet public schools in the highest income areas. Parents push college/education, there is money and plenty of resources in the school, access to sports, arts, etc. are normal. Also, students who don’t make the cut (the few there might be) attend a local alternative school.
Like you said, there’s primarily a focus on curriculum and not test scores. Good scores are the result, but are also the result of proper parental push/support in maintaining high grades and test preparation outside of school for college entrance exams (ACT/SAT).
This can’t be said of lower income/high poverty areas.
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I personally attended three high schools (two in middle income and one in lower income areas). I received a good education from all schools, but I also enrolled in as many AP/honors courses as I could. These schools were comprehensive high schools with plenty of students, so all of us “smart kids” were grouped together in the same courses most of the time.
The lower income school I attended had more classroom management issues and school-wide disruptions (fights, etc) compared to the middle income schools I attended. I would say, however, that my actual educational quality was very comparable across each school.
The high poverty school I taught in had the most behavioral issues compared with my personal experiences in the high schools I attended and had the worst educational quality (few course offerings, severely watered down curriculum, incorrect course titles – prob/stats was really prealgebra, Spanish was really 5th grade equivalent of Spanish with ACT English prep a main objective in the Spanish curriculum, and other courses were test prep-driven…students in chemistry literally only learned the first two chapters of the chemistry book over the entire year).
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Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
So……the magnet students are still the immediate responsibility of the district, while the charter students are set adrift if they “fail to succeed” in the charter or the charter closes, and then must find the appropriate public school.
And if the states (and the billionaires) are successful in closing more and more public schools, and opening charter schools, what is going to happen to all the children who have behavior or emotional problems, or who are disabled? Because the charters certainly don’t want to deal with them. So they will be relegated back to the public schools, which will have less and less funding, fewer resources, fewer staff to teach these students.
I guess the politicians and their enablers, the Waltons, Gates, Broad, etc, are the modern equivalent of Scrooge. “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”
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I’m so glad you brought this up on your blog. It bothers me when charter schools equate their punitive selectivity with G&T programs and other special schools. At the latter students take exams, audition, or present portfolios to gain admission. The selection criteria is fairly straight-forward, even if it also includes a lottery. At schools like Success Academy, children don’t take an exam, audition, or present a portfolio for admission. Yet, due to their aggressive attrition policies, these schools become selective. That is not fair to neither the students who attend special schools nor the students who attend general education programs in NYC.
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