John Thompson, historian and teacher, analyzes the specious arguments for market-driven reforms. (Note: Although John says that Susan Dynarsky’s New York Times article is “intellectually honest,” I previously wrote that she pulled the reformer trick of studying only successful charter schools in Boston, leaving out the ones that had no lottery, and ignoring the dreadful charters in her own state, Michigan.)
“The second shoe is falling. Hillary Clinton criticized charters for not taking their fair share of the harder-to-teach students. Predictably, corporate reformers have responded as one with their standard talking points. To get a quick overview of the herd of independent minds who are emptying the arsenal of reform soundbites on Mrs. Clinton, check out Real Clear Education.

“Susan Dynarski’s New York Times commentary is a more intellectually honest, but flawed, effort to change the subject from the issue raised by Mrs. Clinton. Dynarski repeats the same market-driven line, “Not all charters are successful, of course, but we should not expect them to be. … Some of these experiments produce great results. Others don’t. It’s the job of government to distinguish between the successful schools and the failures, and to shut down the failures.”

Dynarski acknowledges part of the problem with the research used to promote charters. Quantitative researchers seek to compare the outcomes of students who attend charters with those who applied for the admissions lottery and who were not chosen. The problem is, “Perhaps only the best charters are popular, and that’s why the lottery studies produce such positive estimates. We can’t use the lottery approach to assess a school that does not have high demand for its seats.”

“To her credit, Dynarski acknowledges the flaws in the methodologies that find big benefits for oversubscribed charters and “smaller but still positive gains” for some charters (as in Boston) that are not oversubscribed. But, then she cites a popular high-poverty, high-performing charter, Boston’s Match High School, that actually undermines the case for competition-driven school reform.

“True believers in choice admit that mistakes will be made and students will be hurt by inevitable errors. But give charters enough time and they should learn how to avoid “selection bias;” high-poverty charters that outperform neighborhood schools can somehow be scaled up. Match was established in 2001, however, and it still only serves 290 students.

“A second defense of market-driven reform is offered by Greg Richmond, of the National Association of Charter Authorizers, in his “Blind Men and the Elephant.” Richmond’s logic has a point, but it also undermines the case for charters as they are now being imposed of urban districts.

“Richmond lists multiple, discrete reasons why different people support charters – they are supposedly like blind men touching different parts of an elephant. If each effort to advance charters is as separate as an elephant’s ear is to its tail, competition-driven reform is not an existential threat to the teaching profession and public schools. The goal of the blind men who finance market-driven reform, however, is to pull these different approaches together to destroy “the status quo,” i.e. the traditional education system, unions, local governance, and the teaching profession as we know it.

“Richmond correctly recalls that teachers unions and Hillary Clinton have long believed that “the purpose of charter schools is to offer programs that supplement the offerings of the traditional system and to transfer lessons learned from charter schools into district-operated schools.” Similarly, if charters had remained simply a way to expand choices to families, they would not have carried so many risks.

“But, “mom and pop” charter start-ups were followed by charter management organizations (CMOs) and that increased the dangers of competition-driven reform by helping enable the mass closures of schools. Then, Richman notes, conservatives sought choice as a way of defeating government regulation. Neoliberals and liberals joined in and teamed with “entrepreneurial liberals, some with roots in Silicon Valley, [who] specifically believe charter schools should replace, not supplement, failing urban school systems with a new differentiated system of public schools that prepares all children for college.”

“Had there been a spontaneous generation of parents seeking better options, coincidently timed with the rise of conservative and liberal social policy experimentation, and they all fortuitously sought to amputate different parts of the education elephant, that still would not have been a mortal threat to public schooling. When high stakes testing became the weapon by with each agenda was advanced, the danger became much more profound.
“The final damage was done when the Gates Foundation and the rest of the Billionaires Boys Club, as well as the Duncan administration, funded and united each type of choice supporter into a single, well-choreographed campaign.

“Richmond praises the mass charterization of schools in Denver, New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, Newark, Washington D.C. and New York. He tries to make it sound like they were each the product of different evolutionary processes, as separate as the different appendages of an elephant. He makes it seem like diverse reformers are still struggling to see the whole picture, as opposed to being teammates, who were brought together by the Billionaires Boys Club, for a winner-take-all competition. Break the teachers unions in such a critical mass of cities, and thus their states, and who will be left to resist corporate reform and ultimately the privatization of public schools?
“And that brings us back to Dynarski’s defense of charters. Clearly, there is no reason to believe that systems of charters can better serve neighborhoods with intense concentration of children from generational poverty who have endured extreme trauma. Neither she, Richmond, or any other charter advocate provide a reason to think that high-performing charters can be scaled up. Market-driven reformers have primarily focused on job #1, blowing up the systems that exist. Edu-philanthropy and the Duncan administration have given them everything they need to launch and all-out assault on traditional public schools.

“Richmond is right about one point, however. Corporate reformers still haven’t given much thought to how they could scale up school improvement after they defeated unions and local school boards. After all, reformers supposedly are blind individuals, supposedly not a part of a well-organized edu-political campaign. They are still pretending that their job is to do no more than chop off the ear, trunk, leg, tail, or whatever they are touching. They’ve barely had a chance to think about replacing the body part they supposedly stumbled across, much less participate as a member of a surgical team trying to put the elephant back together.”