Bellwether Education Partners is a consulting firm that works with “reform” organizations, with charter chains, Teach for America, and others who promote the privatization of public education and the replacement of the teaching profession with inexperienced short-timers. It prepared this very interesting report on the state of charter schools today. It projects that by the year 2035, between 20-40 percent of all students will be in charter schools (p. 60).
The report contains a wealth of information about which states and cities have the most charters, about which states do not permit charters (there are five of them), about the demographics of charters, about how many charters have opened and how many have closed, etc. The language of the report is much like an annual report to the board of directors of a corporation.
A skeptic would question the data on “wait lists,” as investigations in New York City and Boston have found that the claims about long wait lists are padded, often by parents applying to several different charter schools or other means.
A skeptic would also question the data on special education enrollments, citing the GAO report, which compared charter enrollments in big-city districts with national data, instead of comparing it to the special education data for big-city districts.
Of course, there is no consideration of the downside of creating an unregulated sector that receives public money and seeks to avoid audits and public accountability. And there is no consideration of education as a whole, whether it makes sense to have one sector that chooses its students and another sector that takes everyone who enrolls.
Nonetheless, the report is worthy of your attention.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They’re spinning like mad in my state, trying to put a good face on the Obama Administration’s huge push to open more charters in Ohio. Apparently it was all part of a brilliant plan to “improve” Ohio’s charter sector by opening more and more charter schools. It’s really just boilerplate free market doctrine- competition will weed out the losers and bring up the winners.
This completely ignores the long history of federal efforts to expand charter schools in Ohio:
“These federal charter school grants have been given since 1995. Over those 20 years and more than $3.3 billion granted, only California and Florida have received more federal money to expand high-quality charters than Ohio, which received funding in 1998, 2004, 2007 and 2015.”
http://www.10thperiod.com/2015/12/ohios-record-with-federal-charter.html
Meanwhile the state’s public schools, the schools that 93% of children attend, are either maligned or completely ignored. Our public schools are actually worse than when this “movement” completely captured our lawmakers. Something has to change. We can’t keep paying a huge group of people in government who consider existing public schools an afterthought or a barrier along the way toward their ultimate goal of 20 or 40 or 100% privatization. I don’t think the public signed up for this. They were told this “movement” was about “improving public schools”. It’s been 20 years. When do they focus on public schools?
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Does anyone in ed reform do any studies on how “the movement” has improved public schools? Because that’s actually how they pitched this to the public. That’s how they sold it. Was that purely political? They were fully aware that most children attend public schools so in order to get elected they have to present this as “improving public schools” when clearly the goal is to replace as many public schools as they possibly can?
I just find it amazing we have thousands of paid people who claim to be about “improving public schools” yet they consistently omit any mention of the public schools in these states. One would think someone in ed reform would notice this omission. Are they so completely captured they don’t even see it? Because it’s really glaring to people who aren’t members of this exclusive club.
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Chiara,
Forget about those kids not in charter school. Not their problem. Not the strivers.
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Here’s a great overview article about the state of LAUSD, as it prepares to get hit — or hit again —- by “Hurricaine Eli (Broad)”, with the corporate reformers hoping it has the same end result that Katrina had for New Orleans schools:
http://progressive.org/news/2015/12/188449/la-school-communities-resist-take-over-charter-schools%E2%80%99-%E2%80%9Churricane-eli%E2%80%9D?utm_content=bufferbf09a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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This report reads like a business plan and manifesto rolled into one. The charters’ main goal is growth. They intend to continue to grow by 20% in 2020. In the big picture they expect 20 to 40% of the “market share” by 2035. One of the issues they must overcome is “replicating new jurisdictions.” After they have conquered the urban areas, they are heading to suburban and rural districts. “Beware all soccer moms.” They plan to accomplish this through “transitions of political power.” I interpret this to mean that they will buy local influence to gain access to the schools. They are seeking “grassroots alignment.” By this they mean they will gain support of mayors, governors and other people of influence so they may circumvent the will of the community and the democratic input of citizens. We have seen this MO when urban districts are invaded by corporate charters. The angry citizens’ protests are ignored, and they proceed with the invasion. Now that ESSA has put targets on backs of special education and ELLs, I guess they will be the next group swallowed by the corporate machine. Unless we can come up with more than Opt out to resist, this manifesto could be coming to a school near you.
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It’ll be an absolute disaster for rural districts. They are so reliant on X numbers of students to remain viable and offer more than bare-bones programming. It will kill them, and fast. They’re simply not as resilient as schools with a larger population.
Fragmenting rural districts is signing a death certificate. They will not survive this, and when they don’t survive it, there goes the last remaining community center in these places. The places themselves will die, because the schools are the center.
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Make no doubt, with big money behind them, they will try to make this happen. That is why they are setting up their faux parallel teacher training sites. After they frustrate out and discourage young people from traditional teacher prep programs, they hope to have an army of faux teachers to man their faux “public” schools.
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dianeravitch
December 10, 2015 at 9:54 am
Chiara,
Forget about those kids not in charter school. Not their problem. Not the strivers.
It’s great how this shook out, isn’t it? We have zealous single-minded charter advocates and “agnostics”. You’ll notice which “sector” was left without advocates in this game of musical chairs. I’m stuck with the potted plant, completely ineffectual “agnostics” who don’t want to risk offending the “choice” caucus (and their own careers) so carefully avoid any actual advocacy FOR public schools. For some reason promoting charter schools is “agnostic” but promoting public schools is forbidden 🙂
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One interesting point is that the states that appear to be least supportive of charters such as Massachuetts and require the most oversite have better charters whereas the states most supportive of charters have the worst charters such as Texas and Arizona. Clearly unfettered charter access is damaging to students even from the prospective of “education reformers”. So, if chaters are going to be allowed, authorizing authorities need tools to be able to regulate, monitor and close underperforming charters and their number should be limited.
Also, from rwading the data it looks like the reading gains diminish and the math gap increases.
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Those “tools” reflect an unnecessary cost to taxpayers.
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A skeptic, actually, an opponent asks, did Bellwether uses the term “human capital pipeline”, in its report?
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They certainly did, along with a bunch of other offensive business jargon. Public education is just collateral damage to them in the way of them exploiting new “markets.”
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Yep, they eat you up and poop you out the “human capital pipeliine”.
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Yes but look at p. 24
“Charters in 11 states and D.C. produced greater learning gains (measured in days) in reading and math than district peers. Charters in 11 states and D.C. produced greater learning gains (measured in days) in reading and math than district peers. Overall. the gains in days seem to have been seven in reading and zero in math.”
If you look at the CREDO report cited at the bottom of the page 24, you will find how the “days of learning” metric has been invented by the artful use of gains in test scores (called growth) expressed in standard deviations with a conversion of those standard deviations into a gain expressed in “days of learning.”
“Days of learning “ is a complete statistical fiction, not linked to any actual data or estimates of days of learning, never a mention of what counts as a school year or length of a school day, or the proportion of time actually spent in teaching and studies devoted to reading and to mathematics in the various grades.
Who conjured pushed this absurdity into discussions of education as if these “fictional days” are super significant? The CREDO reference points to Stanford Economist Eric Hanusheck (promoter of VAM since 1971), Harvard political scientist Paul E. Peterson (promoter of vouchers), and University of Munich economist Ludger Woessmann, (a serial collaborator with Eric Hanusheck).
I agree with Diane that the report is worth a look including how the info-graphics work to make snippets of information look plausible without the benefit of any supporting data.
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Laura: That is why people like you are needed to review the statistics with a critical lens. We all know they like to cherry pick data just like students. Then, they set their spin doctors to work to announce how “successful” they are.
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If reformers create a metric specifically to show their success and it shows so little of it, they should be subjected to an enforced moment of shame. Then, they should be made to enroll their children in a randomly selected charter school in Ohio.
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If there are theoretical, charter waiting lists for the reformers’ kids, it won’t be a problem. Ohio taxpayers footed the $71 million dollar bill, for the fed’s coercion to expand charter schools in the state.
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Laura, or anyone else:
Here’s a link to a paper that was presented by an MIT economist (what else?) in what Peter Greene described as a Vulture Convocation, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on Monday. It purports to demonstrate that charters in MA do a better job by SWD’s and ELL’s than real schools. I confess that the paper’s way over my head, but nonetheless it seems these claims are surely bogus. (And I’m getting real tired of the claim that Boston has great charters – no.) I would appreciate it if someone with the expertise to do so could take a look-see.
http://economics.mit.edu/files/11208
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Here’s the link to Peter’s article:
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/12/ma-vulture-convocation.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FORjvzd+%28CURMUDGUCATION%29
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