Mayor de Blasio of NYC vastly expanded pre-kindergarten across the city. Thirteen charter schools provide pre-K programs. Twelve of them signed contracts with the city. Only one, the Success Academy charter chain, refused to sign a contract with the city on grounds that the city has no authority to supervise charters. Eva Moskowitz threatened to close her pre-K programs rather than signing a contract.
Moskowitz appealed to MaryEllen Elia, the state commissioner of education. Elia rejected Eva’s appeal.
“In her decision, Ms. Elia noted that the city’s request for proposals to run prekindergarten programs clearly stated “no payments will be made by the D.O.E. until the contract is registered with the N.Y.C. comptroller’s office.”
“She also ruled that there was nothing contrary to state education law in the city’s oversight of the program.
“Taking Success’s argument “to its logical conclusion,” Ms. Elia wrote, “would mean that D.O.E. would be required to provide charter schools’ prekindergarten programs with public funding without any mechanism to ensure” that they were meeting quality requirements, and that “public funds are being spent in accordance with the requirements.”
Eva Moskowitz promised to go to state court to appeal Elia’s decision.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
About dang time
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Well that was a nice “eff u” to Eva, but lets wait and see what her friends do for her. Eva will likely hold more news conferences about stealing possible from her scholars, umm, I mean from her bank account.
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If she does take it to court, I hope that the court throws the case out.
And if she closes her pre-k’s, maybe the parents of the young children would then be persuaded to place their kids elsewhere for pre-k, and keep them there.
Eva’s a real piece of work, isn’t she?
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Imagine —requiring accountability and oversight with public tax dollars in regards to a pre-k program. Welcome to the world of Public Education.
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I would like to know why a system that is supposed to be cheaper as well as better than the public one is costing so much for the owner’s salary and needing so many donations from celebrities? I didn’t notice any greedy teacher’s union being involved. I say we save public money and allow E. M. to donate her efforts.
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She won’t back down. Ever. Because signing the contract will make her liable for abusing the little 3 and 4 year olds when they are yelled at for not answering questions quickly enough or when she repeatedly suspends them because they won’t sit quietly with hands folded while the so-called ‘teachers’ drone on and on about test prep crap.
She needs to be brought up on charges of systemic child abuse and shut down.
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agree.
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I am not from NY but isn’t it a fact that Eva didn’t want to pay rent for her schools’ use of public space and went to Cuomo and got a reprieve? So I can understand her position of going to court and I for one will not be surprised when she wins.
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Eva has to learn no one is above the law. And I hope someday soon she will be hauled off to jail for the abuse and educational malpractice she has reeked on the innocent children who have attended the concentration camps she thinks are schools.
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Plenty of people are above the law. How many Wall Street cronies have been held accountable for crashing the US economy?
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“No one’s above the law”
“No one’s above the law’
Except the ones who are
This old convenient saw
Has upper-level bar
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What a bully Eva is.
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So she can continue running schools that treat kids like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2MHDOiT8Ak
—————
*** MORE SUCH VIDEOS MAY BE COMING ***
————————
“If we want to truly reform education in the United States, we must fundamentally reform how we train America’s teachers. INNOVATIVE APPROACHES LIKE THOSE EMPLOYED BY SMALL ORGANIZATIONS LIKE SUCCESS ACADEMY to create better teacher training programs SHOULD BE VIEWED AS A MODEL for achieving this important goal.”
— EVA MOSKOWITZ, writing for THE 74
at:
https://www.the74million.org/article/eva-moskowitz-student-performance-is-a-mirror
————–
“Innovative approaches”? Oh, you mean like THIS?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2MHDOiT8Ak
This news coverage BELOW is good because the reporter says he talked, off-camera, to the teacher’s aide who shot the the video. She told him that the reason she recorded the teacher’s behavior was that what was recorded was not, as Eva and the supportive parents claim, just “an anomaly” or a “momentary lapse.”
And that teacher’s aide has more proof to back up that claim.
( 01:18 – 1:30)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2e39Ybn2XI
( 01:18 – 1:30)
REPORTER: “The video was recorded be an assistant teacher who told Pix 11 News that she was tired of seeing it was because she was tired of seeing this kind of behavior by Ms. Dial every time there was a ‘Numbers Stories’ exercise.”
Now, here’s the mind-blowing kicker at the end of this news report. The teachers’ aide says she’s got more videos showing abusive behavior at Success Academy:
( 03:57 – 4:21)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2e39Ybn2XI
( 03:57 – 4:21)
REPORTER: “The (assistant) teacher who recorded that video surre – tiously… sur-REP-titiously has told Pix 11 that that (video) is not the ONLY video. She has OTHER videos that show that this was typical behavior in that classroom, again, with the teacher that has been touted as being ‘exemplary’ for other Success Academy teachers.”
—————————–
I guess that, if and when more videos surface, Eva will have to resort the using the plural forms of nouns, as in …
… anomaly — anomalies, lapse – lapses…
“These were just anomalies, or momentary lapses in an otherwise wonderful teacher’s career.”
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Under the NYC DOE, Pre-K teachers and assistant teachers must attend the U Pre K professional development summer sessions and sessions during the year to learn about the Universal Pre-K teaching methodology. Eva’s teachers would have to integrate Common Core standards, and entertain visits from the DOE to ensure compliance with the program. Therefore, Success Academy would have separate U Pre-K classes, and the teachers would work under the DOE time schedule, not Success Academy’s. The teachers would have vacation days based on the DOE schedule. If she wants to run her OWN Pre-K programs, why does she want this measly $750,000 funding? She has enough money from her hedge funders to run her own “secret sauce” program. It doesn’t make any sense for her. Hasn’t anyone pointed this out to her? Why doesn’t the press know about this?
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She could easily raise the funds for a Pre-K program, but she is fighting for the “principle” – and the principle is that she has to be granted a share of public funding AND be completely free of any and all oversight except from the rubber stamp of the charter authorization.
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Why is the fighting for this? Because she sees everything as a zero-sum game. It isn’t possible for her to “win” a pre-k spot unless someone else loses.
It’s typical of everything that’s wrong with her way of malpracticing education. She can’t win unless a public school loses. She didn’t really need to make sure that severely disabled kids were thrown out of their nearby public school because she had plenty of money to rent her own space as many charters do. But if she can’t undermine a public school, she doesn’t feel as if she is doing her work.
That’s why her school’s philosophy is to treat struggling children — especially the at-risk ones — exactly as we saw in the video. (The nonsense that the “model” teacher’s methods are an “anomaly” are about as believable as the nonsense that the principal who was brought into Success Academy Fort Greene to “change the culture” invented the got to go lists himself. ) She doesn’t just want to educate kids — if that was the case she would be demanding her teachers make sure the struggling kids are learning instead of being encouraged to leave. She wants to have brag worthy test results and if that means that some kids have to go, well that’s fine because her goal isn’t to educate them (a win), it is to make sure someone else loses — and that someone ends up being all the kids in public schools. There are other charter schools that aren’t like this, but they have all been co opted and the fact that they keep trying to rationalize it shows why even the “good” charters are problematic. The “good” charters want to keep her happy and they have turned their backs on so many kids in order to perpetuate the myth that she is doing something all schools should model.
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I can’t help but think that Eva Moskowitz is either a megalomaniac or a sociopath. Or both.
And, pardon me if I insult anyone’s political preference here, but I see more than a bit in common between her and Donald Trump.
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I am happy Cuomo stayed out of the picture and didn’t run interference for her. Eva needs to learn if you want to play, which is more than her preschoolers will do, she has to abide by rules. It is only reasonable that if she receives public compensation, there should be some level of oversight.
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Of course that’s true. But I doubt she will ever learn this.
She feels that the rules don’t apply to her. Which is rather ironic, since she expects every one of the students in her schools to follow every single rule, or face harsh consequences.
“Rules for thee, but not for me.”
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We don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes with Cuomo and Moskowitz over the pre-K issue. I think Cuomo’s learned that his public statements about education are political poison for him.
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Eva is playing by the charter school mantra. Take public funds, take only the best students, then say ‘we are a private school and you can’t tell us what to do.’ Isn’t this what all charters are pulling across the US? I am glad that NY is finally getting tough.
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Here’s an interesting tidbit from John Merrow.
If you calculate on a cost-per-student basis, Success Academy Eva Moskowitz makes 128-times (!!!) more than New York City Schools superintendant Carmen Farina… for carrying out the same basic functions:
Merrow also discusses another less prominent NYC charter honcho named Dr. Deborah Kenny who, on the same cost-per-student basis, makes 937.5-times (!!) more than New York City Schools Superintendent Carmen Farina… for carrying out the same basic functions. Oh… and both her schools and its performance on all relevant metrics — scores, student retention rates, etc. — totally suck.
He goes after several others as well.
Read about what happens to your tax dollars in a free market, de-regulated, privatized-all-schools paradise:
———————————
“Who’s Raking in the Big Bucks in “CharterWorld”?
“by John Merrow
“February 25, 2016 John Merrow Uncategorized
“Here’s a thought: What if school administrators were paid on a per-pupil basis? The salaries could be computed based on total enrollment, or, if you want to use VAM, a value-added measure, then the $$-per-pupil could be based on the number of students successfully completing the year.
“For fun, let’s compare the pay pulled down by public school superintendents with the money paid to the CEO’s of some charter school networks. Before you read on, write down your hunch: which school CEO/Superintendent is raking in the most on a per-student basis? And who’s the lowest paid on a per-student basis?
“Let’s begin with Chicago, where the public school enrollment (including charter schools) has dipped to 392,000 students. The Chicago school leader (called the CEO) is paid $250,000. That means he’s paid 64 cents per pupil. Factor out the 61,000 students in charter schools, and Forrest Claypool’s wages per student go up to 76 cents per kid.
One of Chicago’s leading charter networks, the nationally recognized Noble Network of Charter Schools, paid its CEO and founder Michael Milkie a salary of $209,520 and a bonus of $20,000. NNCS, which received the Broad Prize last year, enrolls 11,000 students, meaning that Mr. Milkie is paid $21.00 per student.
“Let’s turn our attention to New York City. Chancellor Carmen Fariña presides over a school system with 1,1o0,000 students and is paid $227,727 per year. That comes to $.20 per child. But she also receives her retirement annuity of $208,506, so if we factor that in, she’s pulling down a whopping .40 per child.
“New York’s most prominent charter school operator is, of course, Eva Moskowitz, the founder and CEO of Success Academies. She has received a significant pay raise and now makes $567,000 a year, as Ben Chapman reported in the New York Daily News. Success Academies enrolls 11,000 students, the same number as in Chicago’s Noble Network.
“Let’s do the math. 567,000 divided by 11,000 equals 51.35, meaning that Ms. Moskowitz is earning $51.35 per student, nearly two-and-one-half times what Mr. Milkie is paid per student.
“If Carmen Fariña were running Success Academies instead of the nation’s largest school district, at her current pay rate of 40 cents per student she’d be earning $4400 a year!
“Put another way, Eva Moskowitz is being paid about 128 times more per student than Chancellor Fariña.
“(I was at a dinner last night with her predecessor, Dennis Walcott, who made essentially the same salary when he was Chancellor. The look on his face when I told him the numbers was priceless!)
“However, Eva Moskowitz doesn’t come close to claiming the crown for “Highest Paid Charter School CEO,” because New York City is home to a charter network that enrolls only 1400 students and pays its leader in the neighborhood of $525,000 per year. (I write ‘in the neighborhood’ because the most recent salary isn’t available, so this number is based on recent years and the pattern of annual increases.)
“You’ve done the math in your head, right?
“$525,000 for 1400 students means this CEO is raking in $375 PER STUDENT. Just imagine if Chancellor Fariña had come out of retirement to take this job! At her current pay scale, she would be bringing home $560 a year, not $425,000.
“This charter network’s leader must not have a ‘pay for performance’ contract. The network is notorious for losing students, as the chart below indicates. On the left, 126 students in full-day kindergarten; on the right, only 36 students in 12th grade. Pretty clear what happens year after year. In another school, 119 kindergarteners and 33 high school seniors.
“The common argument for charter schools is that they are ‘life-changing,’ but just ONE of that year’s graduates headed off to college, while the others reported ‘plans unknown.’ In another school, one was headed for a 4-year college, three to 2-year institutions, and 28 with ‘plans unknown.’
“Like Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academies, this network loses a lot of students, but, unlike Success Academies, the remaining students here perform poorly. Here’s the percentage of students in one school who scored ‘proficient’ in English Language Arts, by grade: 5th-8%; 6th-12%; 7th-11%; and 8th-28%. In another school, 4%, 20%, 17% and 30% .
“In Math: 5th-6%; 6th-36%; 7th-52%; and 8th-48%. In another school, 27%, 37%, 39% and 34%. (And as the NAEP scores below suggest, those high-ish math scores may be illusory.)
“Scores on the NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, were unimpressive. In 4th grade, 36% scored ‘proficient’ in Reading and 35% in Math. In 8th grade, 33% scored ‘proficient’ in Reading and 31% in Math. In another of her schools the respective numbers are 36%, 35% 33% and 31%.
“This same charter network has famously high turnover rates among teachers too. In the most recent report, 38% of teachers departed, meaning that 4 out of every 10 teachers left. In another school, 31% left. One thing that students in high-poverty schools need is continuity, which they apparently do not get in this network.
“Oh, by the way, the CEO who makes all that money also has her own car and driver, according to Ben Chapman of the Daily News.
“I am referring to Dr. Deborah Kenny, the founder of Harlem Village Academies, a network of just five schools and 1400 students. Somehow, I suspect she’s happy to have Eva Moskowitz taking all the flack in the media about harsh discipline and high turnover rates, because that means her network’s performance is not being scrutinized. It clearly should be.
“In fairness, some traditional public school districts in New York State are paying their superintendents inflated amounts when computed on a per-student basis. Brookhaven-Comsewogue Union Free District has about 3900 students and pays its superintendent $462,000 or $118 per student. Mount Sinai Union Free District has about 2600 students and pays its leader $403,000, or $155 per student. And Tuckahoe Union Free District, with just 1100 students, pays its superintendent $388,000, or $353 per student.
“But that doesn’t keep Deborah Kenny from taking home the Blue Ribbon in the ‘Earns Most, Does Least’ competition.”
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The local NYC press has also picked up on the whole issue of charter school executive salaries:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/top-16-nyc-charter-school-execs-out-earn-chancellor-dennis-walcott-article-1.1497717
Edushyster caught this article, then added her two cents here:
http://edushyster.com/nice-work-if-u-can-get-it/
EDUSHYSTER: “Today’s fiercely urgent question: why do charter executives make so much money? Fortunately this question has many simple answers.
“1) You can’t put a price on excellence;
“2) You are a hater for even asking the question;
“and
“3) What don’t you understand about putting students fir$t?”
———–
Peruse this list of charter school executives and their salaries, and perhaps consider (fron the N.Y. Daily News link above, independently verified from tax documents).
These salaries were set with exactly ZERO input from the citizens whose money is paying those salaries … ahhh… the perils of school privatization:
Deborah Kenny, H. Village Academies —— $ 499,146
Eva Moskowitz, Success Academy —— $ 475,244
David Levin, KIPP Schools —— $ 395,350
Ian Rowe, Public Prep Network —— $ 325,002
Dennis McKesey, HCZ Promise Academy —— $ 285,273
Jeffrey Litt, Icahn Charter School I —— $ 280,323
Steven Wilson, Ascend Learning, Inc. —— $ 269,997
Keri Hoyt, Success Academy C.S., Inc. —— $ 262,264
David Rudall, Uncommon Schools —— $ 252,941
Christina Tettonis, Hellenic Classical, C.S. —— $ 245,535
Seth Andre, Democracy Prep P.S. —— $ 245,535
Brett Peiser, Uncommon Schools —— $ 238,384
Douglas McCurry, Achievement First, Inc. —— $ 237,782
Dacia Toll, Achievement First, Inc. —— $ 224,200
Rafiq Kalam Id-Din, Teaching Firms of Am. —— $ 219,348
(This list is a couple years old. Those salaries have most likely increased in the interim. According to Edushyster, the last guy on that list has less than 200 students in his charter school. The public money that goes to his salary — and to the salaries of all the folks on that list — is money that is not, REPEAT not going to kids in the classroom, or God forbiid, to the teachers on the front line delivering instruction to, and caring for charter school students. )
And finally, the list includes then-Chancellor of the NYC public schools, who is in charge of educating 1,100,000 students — as opposed to the several hundred or at most several thousand students whom the folks above are responsible for. He — and now it’s a “she”, Carmen Farina — makes less than everyone on that list (16 charter operators) :
Dennis Walcott, NYC Public Schools —- $212,614
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A couple more tidbits on the Charter CEO high salary thing:
The New York Daily News article doesn’t even broach the controversy of self-dealing that is rampant in the charter school industry, where charter executives are in charge of charter school orgs that are technically non-profit, but they nevertheless contract out services to for-profit companies for which those executives are the sole or partial owners. That’s a lot MORE money on top of their executive salary.
Nor does it touch upon the problem of nepotism, where multiple family members are each hired at six-figure salaries.
Even Mike Petrilli’s enthusiastically charter cheerleading Fordham Institute has written about how this troubling phenomenon — and outrageous charter school executive compensation in general — will damage the charter school’s brand with the general public, without which the charter industry will fail to survie, or at least expand.
Petrilli’s words of caution are below, and, as Petrilli relates, they were met with severe blowback from “tone-deaf” (Petrilli’s words) charter school exectives kvetching back,
“None of your business, Mike! Or anyone else’s business!!”:
http://edexcellence.net/commentary/education-gadfly-daily/ohio-gadfly-daily/2012/should-we-care-how-much-money.html
“Charter schools also need to be equally aware about what leaders receive in compensation, and how this will be perceived in the larger community, which leads me to the recent story in the Dayton Daily News. That paper ran a story on the compensation paid to a family running a charter management organization that serves about 2,000 kids in seven Ohio charters.
“The paper reported that ‘Tax records obtained by the Daily News show CEO Pammer-Satow received a base pay of $168,466 in 2010 along with a $60,000 bonus and other compensation valued at $25,573. Her husband, COO Clinton Satow, received a base pay of$126,000, bonus of $45,000 and $14,000 in other compensation.’ Other members of the family are also employed by the management company in various capacities.
“The Dayton Daily News reporter called me and asked for my reaction about ‘a couple making over $400,000 a year’ to run seven charter schools?
“I said, ‘That’s tough to defend.’ I also went on to comment, ‘at a minimum they (those high-paid charter executives) are politically tone deaf to the realities of perception out in the community.’
“My comments have upset some in Ohio’s charter community who argue that as the schools perform decently, why should I or anyone else care what the leaders are paid?
“My reaction to this question is that charter schools are only viable as long as they receive political support. As such, do stories about families paying themselves more than $400,000 a year in public tax dollars to run a handful of charters hurt support for charter schools?
“I think they do, but I’d value receiving comments back from readers. Should we care how much money charter leaders make?”
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Jack: thank you for the comments, info and links.
If I may inject a personal note…
As I have remarked on previous threads, there is a world of difference between saintly Eva Moskowitz and that venal Carmen Fariña.
For just one example, go to a posting and thread on this blog—
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/03/01/krazyta-sets-the-record-straight-on-vam-of-a-different-sort/
Oh what the heck, I’ll give in to the temptation to demonstrate my command of rheephorm math too, this blog, 11-1-2015, thread of the posting “CREDO: Going to a Virtual Charter is a Waste of Time.”
The “Saint” in the recent past made over 200 times what that venal schools chancellor did.
Which inspired me to bring my poetic license out of retirement:
[start]
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Eva Moskowitz, Queen of Greed;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
[end]
¿🙄?
[audible sigh] You got me. I stole, er, borrowed, er, “creatively disrupted” OZYMANDIAS, a famous poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
But on the other hand, if the shoe fits $tudent $ucce$$…
😎
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“The “Saint” in the recent past made over 200 times what that venal schools chancellor did.”
How much does the average assistant principal in NYC make, 1,000 times as much as the chancellor?
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FLERP!: boy, did I leave out some important qualifiers!
😱
Thank you so much—sincerely—for pointing out that I indulged in some rheeally bad rheephorm math.
To bring it back to reality: @student@year [at least as of recently].
😎
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Hope the commissioner would not give that witch any more sugar pills. She’s already had enough money to harvest her hemp field in her school yard, and plenty of staff to work as custodian(or bookkeeper) at her Slave Academy.
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Good. Crazy to expect money without the contract. If you don’t want to perform the contractual services, don’t take the money.
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There is a small tidbit at the very end of that NYTimes article:
“Ms. Elia sided with Success on two smaller issues in its appeal. She said that only the city comptroller, not the Education Department, could audit charter schools’ prekindergarten programs. And she said the city could not require Success or other charter schools to pay what is known as a prevailing wage, which is set by the comptroller and reflects the rate that unionized workers are paid for a job in a particular area.”
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That small tidbit is very important. It means that there is no effective oversight of what goes on inside the classroom by trained early childhood educators. The only oversight is financial. This means that it is not really a loss for S.A. It really is a win for them.
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I think that Eva will take this all the way to the US Supreme Court if her Hedge Fund backers keep funding her private, gulag charter school empire.
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Lloyd,
How many parents would opt to send their kids to a gulag? Every kid is there by choice.
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Uh, you say those kids are their by THEIR choice. U disagree. I say those children are there because of a choice their parent/s made? Was that parental choice an informed one—do those parents really know how their children are going to be treated?
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Yes, more accurately parent’s choice. But I believe most are quite aware of how the school works and are not as ignorant as you apparently think they are.
Consider that every student at an SA school is basically attrition from the traditional public school system.
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John said, “But I believe most are quite aware of how the school works and are not as ignorant as you apparently think they are.”
I think you are wrong. I think many of these parents have no idea how autocratic and hostile to children many corporate charter schools are, becasue the propaganda and advertising the charters spend millions on to tout themselves are repeatedly misleading and often outright lies based on cherry picked facts—meanwhile the truth is far from what the charters hype about themselves as studies, for instance, the ones funded by Bill Gates out of Stanford that have revealed that almost 75% of charters are worse or no better than the public schools they are out to destroy and replace.
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Lloyd,
Read the newer studies out of Stanford using the same methodology. There are bad states and good states, but charters keep on an improving and are better than comparable traditional schools in states with strong authorizes. They are also better at educating urban and minority students.
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John, I have read the newer studies—even where it says the improvements were probably caused more by the worst and most fraudulent charters closing along with the survivors getting better at cherry picking their students and getting rid of the most difficult to teach.
In fact, straight from the horse’s mouth, CREDO, the most recent National Charter School Study was in 2013. That is the most recent national charter school study listed in CREDO’s own site.
For instance, “Even with this decentralized degree of control, we do not see dramatic improvement among existing charter schools over time. In other words, the charter sector is getting better on average, but not because existing schools are getting dramatically better; it is largely driven by the closure of bad schools.” (Page 87)
“Our analysis suggests that in many places, the standards of performance are set too low, as evidenced by the large number of underperforming charter schools that persist. The point here is that, as with students, setting and holding high expectations is an important feature of school policies and practices. More focus is required of authorizers and charter school governing boards to set high performance and accountability standards and hold charter schools to them.” Page 88
Figure 26 on page 57:
Reading
56% No Significant Difference
19% Significantly Worse
25% Significant Better
Math
40% No Significant Difference
31% Significantly Worse
29% Significantly Better.
Click to access NCSS%202013%20Final%20Draft.pdf
25% for reading and 29% for Math are both FAILING grades.
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Time to read the most recent CREDO urban charter study, as well as the following four gold-standard random assignment studies. No random assignment study to date shows charters having a negative effect.
http://urbancharters.stanford.edu
http://economics.mit.edu/files/6335
Click to access charter_school_impacts.pdf
Click to access how_NYC_charter_schools_affect_achievement_sept2009.pdf
Click to access ednext20054_52.pdf
And coming soon? This little random-assignment study that will surely be the talk of the town!
http://www.mdrc.org/project/success-academy-charter-schools-evaluation#overview
But again, please go ahead and tell parents zoned for schools like PS 193, PS 194, and PS 207 that they need to stick it out in their neighborhood schools. It’s for their own good!
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Tim,
Just think: a child could be abused and humiliated, but so what if the scores go up.
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Well, all the available evidence so far does indeed suggest that a child in New York City will score higher if they attend a charter school. But the point I was making is that they are also a lot less likely to be assaulted by their teacher or a fellow students–the type of environment that is taken for granted at a school like PS 321.
When the Osman Couey video is released, I think you will have a better understanding of what I’m talking about.
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Tim, many charter schools in NYC have lower scores than public schools. Besides, children’s happiness matters more than their test scores.
By the way, since test scores at charters are so great, remind me why no graduate of Success Academy has ever been admitted to one of NYC’s selective high schools.
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A test prep curriculum is not what one needs to pass the SHSAT. To do well not only must a child have logical thinking skills but also have broad content knowledge to comprehend reading passages in which most of the questions are inferential. Finding text based evidence will not help you are this test. A student who has read a lot in many different areas–and that includes literature–will do well. These kids are often divergent thinkers, something that SA discourages. Training kids to be worker bees will not create the scientific and intellectual leaders of the next generation.
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To do well on the SHSAT, a child should attend one of a relatively small number of middle schools that are selective admissions (mostly) and/or a high-achieving district school located in a zone where the cost of real estate and segregationist zoning practices have eliminated most at-risk kids. These schools usually have an accelerated curriculum and a history of sending graduates to SHSAT schools; it is baked into their culture.
Then, on top of that, the vast majority of qualifying students utilize targeted SHSAT preparation at a private provider. You can Google “SHSAT prep” to get an idea of the sheer number of vendors, the range of services they offer (many kids start paid prep as early as the fifth or sixth grade), and the cost.
I think that many parents hold the view that a logical first step on their child’s path to becoming a future scientific or intellectual leader is their learning how to read and do math and stuff.
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Completely wrong. The school my sons attended was a straight working/middle class public school with a multiethnic population–many former ELLs and FELLs. These parents could not afford Kaplan or Princeton Review test prep. The school also did not have resources to develop their own test prep for these tests. And yet, last year, this school had nearly 30 students–many immigrant children–make it into either specialized high school programs or the specialized schools. The only review they had was by studying the sample tests. Why do I know this? My son is a teacher in the school–the school he went to when he was that age. And yes, my son did go to one of the specialized schools. My son also went to Cornell University, but instead of becoming a greedy corporate lawyer, he decided to devote his life to teaching. By the way, he taught for two years in a high needs school–very successfully. He left because the school lost the space for his grades when a charter was co located there. And yes, I am completely prejudiced. I hate charters. I believe in public education. I oppose all privatization because privatization is causing more and not less social as well as economic inequality in this nation. Charters are nothing but a form of social Darwinism.
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“Completely wrong.”
In an average year, about 25% of specialized high school offers come from the same 10 NYC middle schools. No, not 10%–10 *schools*, period. 50-60% of the offers go to students from just 40 or so middle schools. The DOE has 500+ intermediate and middle schools.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/well-worn-path-from-top-nyc-middle-schools-to-coveted-high-schools-1419824326
“The school my sons attended was a straight working/middle class public school with a multiethnic population–many former ELLs and FELLs.”
So this school didn’t have any honors or “special progress” sections? It was fully de-tracked and heterogeneously grouped? How many black and Latino children attended/attend? Is it 100% black and Latino, with 80%+ of its students receiving free lunch?
“These parents could not afford Kaplan or Princeton Review test prep.”
Kaplan and Princeton are just two of a seemingly infinite number of SHSAT prep providers. There are many, many others, and many “mom and pop” storefronts, especially in Queens and southern Brooklyn.
“greedy corporate lawyer”
They’re the worst.
“Charters are nothing but a form of social Darwinism.”
Charters in New York City, which collectively serve an enrollment that is 93% black or Latino and 80% FRPL-eligible, are open to any resident of New York State. Contrast that with traditional district schools, where the quality of a child’s education and the options available to her are dictated almost entirely by the color of her skin, the contents of her parents’ bank accounts, and her ability to pass entrance tests for screened and selective programs. Consider that our region’s stark residential segregation wasn’t formed by harmless market forces or people’s personal preferences, but by racism: steering, redlining, reverse-redlining, zoning regulations, acts of intimidation by private citizens and law enforcement, and a failure to enforce civil rights laws. Hard to get more Darwinian than that. Hard to get less liberal than insisting that kids who are warehoused in hypersegregated conditions have no choice other than their zoned school.
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Sure, traditional public schools with selective admissions or where the student population is screened by pricey real estate and segregationist zoning do score better than most charters. When you compare apples to apples, as this recent report from the IBO does, it is clear that NYC charters are outperforming their traditional district school counterparts: http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/new-york-state-student-achievement-test-results-new-york-city%20-public-schools-no-longer-lag-rest-of-state.pdf
(I really love this report’s findings, which also show that traditional public schools in New York City are outperforming traditional district schools in the rest of the state–score one for Opt In!)
I agree that children’s happiness is important, and I bet that the kids who are being seized and thrown to the ground by their teachers; the kids who are soiling themselves and sitting in pants full of feces and urine all day because they are forbidden to get up and use the bathroom; and the K-1 kids who are getting punched in the face and being sexually assaulted by their classmates are probably not very happy. And those are just the incidents that have somehow escaped the schoolhouse wall of silence and made it into the public eye!
I’m sure we can agree that 100% of parents don’t want their child to become a victim like these kids were. On top of the stacked deck that kids at hypersegregated district schools were already facing with regard to school culture, safety, and environment, the DOE then threw top-down mandated “restorative practices” into the mix. There is a lot to like about restorative justice if you are a victimizer. If you are a victim (a group that includes untold numbers of teachers, by the way), the benefits are perhaps so subtle as to be lost on you. It all looks a whole bunch different at the school level than it does on a power point in the conference room of an advocacy group’s office or in a graduate department of education.
What bearing the fact that not one kid out of a small group of socioeconomically at-risk black and Latino kids qualified for the SHSAT has on any of this is unclear to me.
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Tim,
Actual data is just not a currency of value in this forum, especially if it contradicts what everyone wants to believe. I literally believe that there is no data that a charter school could show that would cause any changes of mind here. This is what the status quo protecting itself looks like in practice.
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Of course, as the 2013 Credo study concluded, the charters are learning how to cherry pick students who score higher on tests so the results will improve as they get rid of the more challenging students to teach.
The original reason for charters was to find innovative ways to work with the most challenging students and that is not what the for profit, corporate charters are doing. What they are doing is skimming off the easiest and best students to teach that score well on often flawed standardized tests, and they are even invading areas where the public schools are successful and stealing students and money from public schools that do not fail even based on the flawed and fraudulent VAM tests.
All of the results of the more recent rural and state studies out of CREDO you mention rank and compare corporate charters to local public schools based on flawed, often rigged and fraudulent and faulty VAM measurements that do not take into account the fact that the for-profit schools teach fewer ESL students and fewer students who live in poverty than the local public schools so.
The for profit and non profit publicly funded private sector schools are not hampered by laws that restrict their ability to get rid of the same students that the original charter concept was meant to help. The only choice in this war is the choice of charters to mentally and physically arouse students and get rid of those they can’t break.
Overall, the public schools are still beating the publicly funded, private sector non profit and/or for profit corporate charter schools.
Then there is the fact that most of the countries that score higher than the US on the so-called international PISA test have strong teachers’ unions—for instance Finland—and those higher scores are coming out of national public schools—not publicly funded, private sector for-profit/non-profit autocratic corporate charter schools.
As the CREDO director publicly stated in 2015, the free market based economy doesn’t work in K – 12 education, and that was after she had all the data from the studies you use as a defense for your flawed and wrong headed thinking.
In December 2015, a “Scathing Stanford CREDO Report shows Ohio Traditional Public Schools Outperform Charters”
You’ll find this quote in that piece: “Margaret Raymond, Director of the Stanford Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) and a fellow at the Hoover Institution, spoke yesterday at the Cleveland City Club about CREDO’s new report on Ohio’s charter schools. You can watch the video of the event here. At approximately 50 minutes into the video, Raymond answers a question about the public policy climate for charter schools. Here is some of what Raymond says: “This is one of the big insights for me because I actually am a kind of pro-market kind of girl, but the marketplace doesn’t seem to work in a choice environment for education… I’ve studied competitive markets for much of my career… Education is the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work…”
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Lloyd,
On which page in the 2013 report can I find the conclusion that charters are cherry picking?
Here’s what you are ignoring from the report:
In contrast, students in the following subgroups received
significantly more days of learning each year in charters than their virtual twin in TPS:
♦ Students in Poverty (both reading and math)
♦ English Language Learner Students (both reading and math)
♦ Black Students (both reading and math)
♦ Black Students in poverty (both reading and math)
♦ Hispanic Students in Poverty (both reading and math)
♦ Hispanic English Language Learner Students (both reading and math)
♦ Special Education Students (math only)
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Another day, another wildly insulting claim that parents are dupes and ignoramuses.
These parents are zoned for traditional district schools where special needs seven-year-olds get picked up by their teacher and thrown to the floor four times (https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20160225/east-harlem/mom-plans-sue-city-after-7-year-old-allegedly-attacked-by-teacher); or where seven-year-olds sexually proposition and expose themselves to a female classmate (http://riverdalepress.com/stories/Culture-of-bullying-neglect-cited-at-PS-207,59207); or where a longstanding policy of not letting children use the bathroom causes a seven-year-old to have an accident and have to sit in his own feces all day; the boy’s father was arrested when he came to the school to complain about it (http://ditmasparkcorner.com/blog/news/arrest-p-s-193-spurs-calls-principals-removal/).
And that’s just what’s come to light in the last 10 days or so–a very busy 10 days for the in-house media relations division of the NYC DOE.
The charter cat is way out of the bag, Lloyd. But if you want to tell poor black and Latino New Yorkers that they are stupid and evil for not sending their kids to places like PS 194, PS 207, PS 193, and others like them, then you go for it.
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Tim, scroll up and read what I said to John’s first comment to me. The evidence from unbiased and reliable studies that aren’t coming from the corporate charters themselves repeatedly prove that most corporate charters are worse or no better than the public schools they are replacing and those that are better cherry pick the students they keep and drive out the students that are not good test takers.
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Mr. Lofthouse: please know that these vile misrepresentations of your POV discredit and dishonor those that make them—
Not you.
When dealing with rheephormsters whose first recourse is the sneer, jeer and smear, good to keep in mind the last thing that referees often tell boxers—
“Keep your hands up and remember to protect yourselves at all times.”
That’s how I see it…
😎
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Exactly so, KTA. I see it that way, as well.
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I always have my guard up. I’m a former Marine and Vietnam combat vet with PTSD. PTSD doesn’t make us vets crazy. It makes us hyper vigilant and extremely dangerous to anyone who thinks we are an easy pushover. Most of my closest friends are also former combat vets from the Marines and Special Forces.
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Tim and John express EVERYTHING that is wrong with the charter movement.
They don’t care about MOST of the children at PS 194 or PS 207. Not one whit. Their hero, Eva Moskowitz would happily allow those kids to start IF their parents sign a contract committing to do all that is asked of them. And she happily would put them on a got to go list if they can’t hack it. And if you think her schools would educate even half of the students there then you aren’t paying attention because even when she has ONLY parents who seek out better schools, her suspension and attrition rates of at-risk kids are appalling and as many as half — probably more — are drummed out in the manner that we saw — humiliate and punish the kids for low-performance until they act out and you can suspend them and counsel them out. Many kids obviously get the message before they are suspended, like the homeless mom whose struggling child was the target of the “model” teacher who shows other teachers exactly how to get those unwanted kids out of their school. I can just hear her telling other teachers what to do: “make sure those struggling kids feel really small and worthless when they don’t know the right answer — remember the Success Academy way is that making them feel “misery” is how to teach them!”
I get that Tim and John think there are maybe 20% of the “striver” kids who are worthy of charter schools in that school. I get that they purposely pretend not to see when the kids who leave Success Academy are counseled to return to those schools because Success Academy does’t want them. But I do NOT get how they think that charter schools who don’t want to educate the vast majority of those kids and are delighted to throw the rest back to those schools are a solution. They are only a way for charter school operators and their minions to make money. And since it is clear that both of their livings are made by bashing public schools and promoting the charter schools that find most of the kids in those schools unworthy, it is particularly galling to hear their hypocrisy. I guess if you are willing to sacrifice the 90% of the kids you despise for the 10% you like, you are good to go. The rest of us want to find better solutions for ALL students. Not LIE and pretend that throwing most of them back to failing schools is going to “make it better”. Only for the people who get rich from charter schools.
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NYC public school parent,
I’m ignoring your personal attacks and strawman rants. You are arguing with yourself.
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I agree, most real educators—not the fakes in the corporate educat6ion industry—want to help every child to succeed and learn what they teach but learning is up to the students. The best teachers can teach great lessons but that doesn’t mean every child will learn what is taught.
There is a lot of truth to the old story that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make the horse drink.
The same applies to students. You can force children to go to school but can’t force them to cooperate and learn no matter how many computers you buy for them—and this explains why people like Eva Moskowitz has lists of students to get rid of. Once Eva and her evil minions discover the children who are challenges to teach, she gets rid of as many as possible and sends them back to the public schools.
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Lloyd,
You make it clear that you believe teachers should take zero responsibility for children’s learning with your statements that learning is “up to the students” and that a teacher’s job is to “teach great lessons”.
I assume you then place the responsibility for this on the students themselves or their parents, depending on the age. This is followed by throwing up one’s hands and saying the problem in not solvable because the generational poverty.
That model of “delivering” education from the front of the room is what simply doesn’t work in urban schools. What’s needed is for our education system to take more responsibility for out nation’s at-risk children, whether by having community schools, wraparound services, longer school days and years, character education, etc.
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Yes, it is the teacher’s responsibly to teach students, who cooperate to learn, and to never give up on those who do not cooperate and resist learning. Every day offers challenges that most people have no idea about.
Children might be born hungry to learn but by the time to reach 3rd grade—on average eight years after birth, depending on their own family and the environment where they live and grow up, those same children might not be hungry to learn any longer by the time they reach middle school or high school, so what happens in the United States of wealth—punish high school teachers several years later when these students who become more challenging to teach walk into their classrooms?
BS !!
Most teachers do not throw up their hands and give up because 100% of the students they struggle to teach are not cooperating. Teachers solider on everyday teaching the best quality lessons possible while continuing to learn all they can about the best teaching methodologies and practices available and then implementing what works best for the students they teach, but that decision is best left up to the professional teachers just like it is done in Finland where teachers are not judged by VAM and there is no corporate public education demolition derby out to destroy and profit off of the death of public education.
In the United States about a quarter, one out of every four children, lives in poverty. In Finland less than 5% of the children live in poverty.
“Socioeconomic status forms a huge part of this equation. Children raised in poverty rarely choose to behave differently, but they are faced daily with overwhelming challenges that affluent children never have to confront, and their brains have adapted to suboptimal conditions in ways that undermine good school performance.
How Poverty Affects Behavior and Academic Performance
http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/109074/chapters/How-Poverty-Affects-Behavior-and-Academic-Performance.aspx
Teachers must NOT be punished and held responsible for students who do not cooperate to learn for whatever reason. Read my memoir to find out what I mean.
It’s called “Crazy is Normal, a classroom expose” and it is based on a daily journal that I kept for one full school year. Read that memoir and discover what it is like to teach in a school where the childhood poverty rate is 70% or higher and teachers witness drive by shooting from their classroom doorways.
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Lloyd,
I agree with just about everything you said. My local urban high school has excellent programs for the well-prepared. I don’t doubt that all of the teachers are working very hard. But, when less than 10% of the incoming students are prepared for the material, what can happen?
– expectations are lowered with the result that higher performing students move out if they have the financial means
or
– classes end up segregated by socioeconomic status
or both.
But, I’m curious about what you and others think when you read something like this from Kingston NY traditional public schools: http://www.kingstoncityschools.org/news.cfm?story=114711&school=1511
My experience is that most reformers (again not including those who want to cut education spending or are simply anti-union) applaud efforts like this, which appears to have a large amount of introspection and humility followed by action and results.
Thoughts?
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Thoughts: Not surprised. After all the NAEP, the nation’s report card, shows steady improvement for decades across the country—improvements that were taking place decades before No Child Left Behind. These improvements didn’t start with NCLB. In fact, there is evidence that the policies put in place by NCLB slowed that progress and in some cases even reversed it.
In fact, Fair Test reports that “Evidence from three new studies supports the contention that high-stakes testing narrows curricula to English and math, the subjects that count for No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The extra time spent on the tested subjects detracts from many other aspects of schooling. The impact is greatest in schools labeled “in need of improvement” by NCLB, which tend to be those serving low-income and minority students.”
http://www.fairtest.org/new-evidence-strengthens-claim-testing-narrows-cur/
And a Stanford Study of the international PISA comparisons reveals that U.S. public schools are doing a better job teaching children who live in poverty than most if not all the other countries that take the PISA test.
Stanford Report, January 15, 2013
Poor ranking on international test misleading about U.S. student performance, Stanford researcher finds
As part of the study, Carnoy and Rothstein calculated how international rankings on the most recent PISA might change if the United States had a social class composition similar to that of top-ranking nations: U.S. rankings would rise to sixth from 14th in reading and to 13th from 25th in math. The gap between U.S. students and those from the highest-achieving countries would be cut in half in reading and by at least a third in math.
The report also found:
There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students in every country; surprisingly, that gap is smaller in the United States than in similar post-industrial countries, and not much larger than in the very highest scoring countries.
Achievement of U.S. disadvantaged students has been rising rapidly over time, while achievement of disadvantaged students in countries to which the United States is frequently unfavorably compared – Canada, Finland and Korea, for example – has been falling rapidly.
U.S. PISA scores are depressed partly because of a sampling flaw resulting in a disproportionate number of students from high-poverty schools among the test-takers. About 40 percent of the PISA sample in the United States was drawn from schools where half or more of the students are eligible for the free lunch program, though only 32 percent of students nationwide attend such schools.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/january/test-scores-ranking-011513.html
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Lloyd,
Haven’t had a chance to read the study in depth yet, but I will.
The summary seems to be that PISA data is not as bad as it looks. I think there’s merit to that, but it seems pretty clear that we have room for improvement at all socioeconomic levels.
Unfortunately, I don’t see political will to change in any substantial way.
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John, you are wrong.
I know you think that just because your charter school doesn’t get rid of quite as many at-risk kids as Success Academy is happy to kick back to those failing public schools — now starved of more money thanks to you and her — you aren’t just as guilty.
If you see bad things being done in your name, and you know they are bad things, and you rationalize the fact that you support those bad things being done by the fact that well, a few kids benefit (and by the way, so do I!), then you are just as bad.
You have been on here attacking me every time I have pointed out what Eva Moskowitz has been doing for years. You have been claiming I was wrong to criticize it because the SUNY Charter Institute was all the oversight she needed and they would make sure nothing bad happened. We see what that got us. How many other children were permanently damaged that people like you were responsible for? How many parents who thought they were choosing a better school for their child at Success Academy came out from their experiencing thinking “it’s my kid — he’s just unworthy” because the people who were held up as saviors like Eva Moskowitz told them it was so, because if their child had been worthy, he could have stayed.
Somehow I suspect more will be coming out of the woodwork. Because the mainstream press has been compliant for years, those parents thought they were alone and carried their shame inside. Suddenly, they learn that there were lots of other parents being told by Success Academy that their child, too, was a terrible child unworthy of Success Academy. Now they realize it isn’t them, they were just pawns in a game that people with no interest in education except how it promotes their own public profiles.
You can rationalize the fact that your cheering on of Eva Moskowitz and constant defense that all that matters were the kids who stayed, not the ones treated like dirt who left, didn’t make a difference. But it did. It was people like you who could have done some good by speaking out who have looked the other way for years. I don’t believe for a moment you didn’t know. But if you did, then you just weren’t even trying to look. And it doesn’t make it right.
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Keep on speaking the truth, NYC public school parent. There are a whole lot of people who agree with you. 👍
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John: I find it ironic that you talk about charter kids coming by attrition from real public schools, since most students come back from charter schools, many in the middle of the year. That means that no money follows the student back to public school. Furthermore, the charter school students are often behind academically.
The attrition is coming from the charter schools.
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Threatened,
In which state do “most” kids go back to district schools, and in which state does mommy not go back if they do.?
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Threatened Out West: it’s called the “midyear dump.”
Click on the link below for a thread containing remarks re same. A small sampling:
KrazyTA: “Jack: correct me if I’m wrong, but it is my understanding that the ‘midyear dump’ described by Dr. Dewayne Davis occurs AFTER the charters collect the funding attached to the students for the school year.
So students that would and should require greater resources—the kind paid for with dollars like, say, more desperately needed classroom aides or at least more hours for those already stationed at the school—are left behind at the charter.
From the POV of the advocates for charters & privatization, a fair tradeoff: the charters get $tudent $ucce$$ and glowing reports in the MSM, the public schools get punished and pilloried for not accomplishing unrealistically under-resourced miracles.
Please clarify if you can.”
Jack: “Yes, when a charter dumps a child, the money does NOT follow that child. They have to keep the students for a week—or a month—and they get to keep the entire year’s money allocated for that child.
Put another way, there is no pro rata amount of money that goes along with the child. If the charter kicks the kid out after a month, a nine-month allocation does not go along with that child.
Whenever public school advocates try to change this, the charter folks throw up every roadblock and obstacle that they can.”
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/02/15/reader-offers-a-dose-of-common-sense-about-high-test-scores/
Charter math, where 1 month = 9 months.
$tudent $ucce$$, that is. Work, responsibility, accountability…
Not really.
😎
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KrazyTA,
At least in NY, all charter reimbursements are per diem.
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John, thank you at least for not denying the dumps of all the expensive kids who bring down the charter school test scores. I think you are right that in NYC, when the charter school dumps the expensive kids they don’t keep all the money – just the money for the time they spend destroying the child’s confidence and undermining him and calling in the parents to come to handle their terrible, undeserving child. It’s nice to know that at least that activity by the charter — along with the feeble attempts by their robotic teachers to teach them that so often fail — is all reimbursable, isn’t it? And I’m sure some schools even let the undeserving students finish the year at their charter and only threaten their parents with making their child experience the famous charter school “misery” if they are stupid enough to re-enroll them. Isn’t that why the most celebrated Harlem Success Academy principal is famous for refusing to send renewal forms home with kids on the invisible “got to go list” that the Fort Greene principal she trained was silly enough to think was something he could talk about in an e-mail? But hey, I guess we should respect her for letting those kids finish the year, right?
I know you think the SUNY Charter Institute will do as good a job monitoring pre-k as they have done monitoring the schools with the got-to-go lists and “model” teachers who specialize in following the Success Academy teaching method to the T and making sure that kids who come from poor families and can’t do the work are suitably humiliated for not knowing the answer.
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“Mid year dump” is fiction. It would be trivial for any district that was the victim of it to document it. Where is an iota of data?
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But got to go lists are NOT fiction. Neither are methods where poor performing kids are humiliated until their parents get the message and pull them. Neither are holding kids back who your inept teachers can’t teach and after they are 9 years old and still in 2nd grade (so they don’t have to go on the charter school’s test scores records), the parent finally gets the message.
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Yes, I would say that there are clearly some things going on at SA that I am glad to see are getting exposure. I feel the same way about the issues Tim raised in the neighboring traditional schools. Lack of transparency hurts everyone except the folks doing the hiding. Time will tell whether these are exceptions or the rule.
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Here’s NYC parent Jaybee Smalley telling her story about what happened after her child’s number was picked in the Success Academy lottery, effectively winning her child a seat n Eva’s wonderful charter chain organization.
Happy ending? Ehhh… not quite.
JAYBEE SMALLEY: “My name is Jaybee Smalley. I’m a parent, yes. I have two children with special needs. I have one child who I applied to the Harlem Success Academy through the lottery process to see if she could be… would be accepted.
“When she WAS accepted through the lottery, I reached out to them (Harlem Success Academy) before I attended any sort of a orientation to see if they would be able to accommodate her I.E.P. She has a 12-to-1-to-1 I.E.P. for a year-round program, with four different related services.
“They didn’t respond to me through email at all.. and finally, after the second meeting had come, I called them —- I had a very difficult time getting through to them —- Before I could get the words ’12-to-1-to-1′ out of my mouth, they immediately told me that they would absolutely not be able to accommodate that sort of child in their school.”
————————————
To John & Tim,
You guys say that this never happens, so I’m wondering. Regarding what Ms. Smalley says in the video, is Ms. Smalley:
A) lying?
B) delusional? (as she is recounting visual and auditory hallucinations that never happened, as they are nothing but her imaginary encounters with Success Academy administrators that she is describing);
C) telling the truth?
———————-
I’m voting for “C”.
Or perhaps you’ll offer the “anomaly” defense. Like Charlotte Dial, the Success Academy person who dealt with Ms. Smalley was a rogue agent who, acting on her own and against Success Academy policy, treated Ms. Smalley and her children this way.
Maybe they should have another tear-filled, highly-orchestrated press conference that degenerates into Success Academy fabricating victimhood at the hands of outside persecutors.
The problem is there are a lot of parents suing over this kind of treatment their their children received.
Here’s a story of one:
Here’s a scanned copy of that lawsuit itself:
Click to access sa_lawsuit.pdf
Here’s another such lawsuit:
Here’s a scanned copy of that lawsuit itself:
Click to access lawton-lawsuit.pdf
To John & Tim,
At the bottom of all of this, here’s the problem: to Eva and the charter school industry, Ms. Smalley’s daughter is a commodity, not a human being. Her daughter is “a thing”, if you will who is judged by the following criteria:
1) the revenue that her daughter bring in — the tax money that accompanies her attending SUCCESS ACADEMY;
2) the cost — the less the better — the funds that it will require to educate her; in this case the cost is higher than a non-Special Ed. student due to having a 12-to-1-to-1 ration (Student-to-Special Ed. teacher-to-classroom-aide), and other costs inherent in educating such a child… Hey, we ain’t paying for that!
3) Ms. Smalley’s child’s eventual ability or inability to generate high test scores (a form of profits, if you will, to these deranged charter-ites … Success Academy hiigh-up leader even bragged to New York magazine about turning these children in to “little test-taking machines” … as if this was a goal to which any school should aspire).
The message that Eva gives Ms. Smalley & her child and other parents & their child:
“Your child is nothing! You, Ms. Smalley, are nothing! Get out of our sight, you nothings!”
Everyone goes after Eva for being money-motivated, and to be sure, she is — $570,000 annual salary for only a few thousand children VS. Chancellor Farina’s $250,000 for over 1 million children (don’t have the figures hand).
However, another aspect of Ms. Moskowitz mindset:
… eugenics.
The inferior classes of children deserve no extra funding or attention should be allocated to assist them. They are a drain on tax money. They are lesser, or inferior beings. (Arne Duncan and Success Academy’s Paul Fuculoro doesn’t believe such a category as “Special Ed.” even exist … but that’s another story). Eva was quoted in New York Magazine as saying, “Success Academy is not a social services agency.”
In other words, “Inferiors, be gone!!!”
What would have happened to Ms. Smalley’s children in 1930’s Germany? The authorities would have confiscated Ms. Smalley’s children, then later put them into back of truck, then after sealing the back of the truck until it was almost airtight, would have connected a hose from the exhaust pipe of that truck until they were asphyxiated and die. Later, they would have burned the children’s bodies.
Now Eva doesn’t go that far. She just wants nothing to do with them. They are inferior, and as Eva said, she wants no inferiors’ special ed toxicity rubbing off her superior “scholars,” or again, cutting into Eva’s ability to earn a $570,000 salary.
I can tell you what happens to them at the public school where I work. When someone like Ms. Smalley’s and her child shows up at our school offices.
THE COST IS NEVER CONSIDERED
THE COSTS OF EDUCATING THOSE CHILDREN — THE BOTTOM LINE — IS NOT CONSIDERED.
THE FACT THAT THE CHILD HAS AN INNATE DISABILITY THAT PREVENTS HER FROM SCORING HIGH ON TESTS IS NOT CONSIDERED.
We will do our best to maximize the potential of every child — from the most gifted to the most disabled.
I’ll let LAUSD School Board Member Steve Zimmer add his two cents here.
From his 2013 Speech to UTLA’s August 2013 Leadership Conference:
( 13:47 – 14:35)
( 13:47 – 14:35)
STEVE ZIMMER: “What we oppose is the attack on the basic promise of public education, the basic contract of public education. That is we serve EVERY child who comes to our door—EVERY child who comes to the schoolhouse door.
“And if you don’t serve EVERY child—those who are the gifted to those who have the most special needs, and the entire spectrum in between.
“If you are not about EVERY child, then that is NOT public education, and we stand against it, and we stand against the corporatization and privatization that is embodied in the charter school takeover.”
… and earlier
( 11:16 – 13:08 )
( 11:16 – 13:08 )
STEVE ZIMMER: ““But student growth and student improvement can NEVER be measured by a single standardized test score, and what we suffer from in this district is what I like to call a ‘data addiction.’ It’s what I like to call a ‘religious addiction’ to ‘the numbers,’ and to a ‘spread sheet,’ and to a ‘bottom line,’ and we’re taught that this is ‘objective,’ that this is ‘fact,’ and that everything else is ‘soft’… that we should go into ‘The Temple of Data’ and kneel down, and that we should bow down at an ‘Altar of Objectivity.’
“But we WON’T and we CAN’T because the gods that WE believe in teach us that EVERYTHING that is wondrous and beautiful about children cannot be measured by a standardized test score!
“We know!
“The beautiful names… and stories… of our kids—we never met a kid that was named ‘Proficient,’ and we CERTAINLY never met a kid that was named ‘Basic,’ and NEVER ‘Far Below Basic!’
“Our children have names, they have stories, and if we are to fight the battles against corporatization and privatization, we must be the warriors of re-humanization of public education that is about our children, their families, our communities, and their stories!
“And that starts with humane school communities!”
———————————–
You want to know why, back in 2013, the privatization industry pumped in $5 million dollars to Steve’s privatization industry opponent to defeat him —- and Mike Bloomberg alone wrote a $1 million dollar check to Steve’s opponent?
Re-read or re-watch those clips. What’s coming out of Steve’s mouth is like waving a crucifix in front of these money-grubbing, privatization vampires. What Steve represents — democracy, democratic governance of schools, the rule citizenship versus the rule of elites, meeting the needs of all, no matter how disabled — must be stopped, so that the “betters” can take their rightful places over the lessers — the “Betterocracy.”
For more on that “Betterocracy” — the betters ruling over the lessers, read, Peter “Curmudgucation” Greene’s essay:
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/06/betterocracy.html
What’s underlying all of this is the notion that a group of self-appointed wealthy elites should be running everything, and that democracy be rendered impotent. Curmudgucation’s Peter Greene calls this the “Betterocracy”. It’s also what’s behind the remaking of universities, replacing the ideal of “citizenship” where all citizens participate in a democracy with “leadership” of elites who are in charge because, because, … well because they’re so much “better.”
I’ll let Peter play me out:
—————–
PETER GREENE: ““This thread runs through many reformster ideas and many of my responses to them. I just wanted to gather thoughts about ‘Betterocracy’ in one place.
“Many reformsters have one fundamental point in common– they don’t really believe in democracy. They believe in ‘Betterocracy.’
“Betterocracy rests on one simple fundamental belief– some people really are better than others. It’s not necessarily the possession of a particular quality, though Betters are usually smarter, wiser, and possessed of superior character. It’s that Betters are made of the right stuff. They come from good stock. They are just better than others.
“This is not a new thing.
” ,,, ”
“The bottom line is that bettercrats believe that democracy is, really, a bad idea. Some people just don’t deserve to have a say. Some people just don’t deserve to be in charge of anything. Some people just aren’t important. Some people just don’t matter. Some people just can’t have nice things.
“Bettercrats may, out of generosity and a general sense of noblesse oblige, give Lessers the nice things that they don’t deserve, but those will be nice things that the Betters have selected, and Lessers can have the nice things under terms dictated by the Betters.
“Why shouldn’t Betters have an outsized disproportionate influence on government? The fact that they have the money and power to wield influence is proof that they are right to do so.
“None of this is democracy, not even a watered-down republic-styled democracy. Bettercrats mostly would not recognize democracy (they most commonly call it ‘socialism’).
“And that’s why we’ve got the refomster programs that we have. Our Betters are trying to give the Lessers the system they deserve while rescuing Betters who have been trapped by zip codes in dens of Lesser iniquity.
“Our Betters are creating a system that disenfranchises Lessers (who, after all, do not deserve to be enfranchised in the first place because if they deserved to have power, they would have it).
“Our Betters are trying to create a system that further reinforces their own power and control, because they deserve to have them.
“Our Betters are even trying to get Lessers to understand that they are, in fact, Lessers.
“The genius of America is that of a country that makes room for all voices and treats them all as equals, tied together and forced to create systems that accommodate all our citizens. It envisions a level playing field in which all voices and ideas can compete in the grand marketplace of thought. We have never fully lived up to that genius, but Betters do not even recognize it as genius to begin with.
“Right now their lack of vision is bad for education, but in the long run, it’s bad for the entire country.”
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Jack, everything you say is spot on.
Unfortunately, John and Tim don’t really care. They know exactly where their bread is buttered and it’s in defending the charter school that the richest and most powerful people support. In John’s case, I assume that means a few crumbs are thrown toward his charter school. In Tim’s case, I think he just agrees with the eugenics ideas that are similar to Eva Moskowitz’ view that those kids SHOULD disappear because they don’t matter. After all, that’s how most of the pro-charter folks have started to defend her — it’s fine to be for the strivers and throw away unworthy kids. At least they are honest about it and not pretending there are studies (bought and paid for by Success Academy, no less!) that prove that isn’t true.
Thanks for your post.
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Have either Tim or John ever disclosed who they are affiliated with and who pays them?
I mean, in the interest of “full disclosure” and all that.
Just sayin’.
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Someone go up to Eva and slam her in the head with a dry erase board or pencil sharpener, will you?
Oh well . . . . After both items break in half and Eva picks herself up from the floor laughing, it’s back to Staples to replace the two items.
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Lloyd,
Your interpretation of CREDO is interesting. You find fault with the fact that the sector improves itself by closing bad schools as opposed to having schools improve.
This is simply consistent with the data that shows that schools don’t change much after opening, and that much of their performance seems to be a function of how they start up. This closing of bad schools is a “feature” and is what makes this work.
You acknowledge that this is an improvement, but don’t like how it is done? That sounds like being more concerned for systems than for children.
You then point out that the standards of performance for charters are set too low in many places, and I agree. As standards are raised, more bad charters close and the sector does better.
You then somehow look at data like 25% of charters doing significantly better than matched traditional schools (vs. 19% doing significantly worse) and call that a failure.
Finally, you ignore the fact that the data clearly shows big improvement vs. previous national studies, and ignore the newer urban study that shows significant and sustained gains for charter students vs. matched students in those schools.
Sorry, one more “finally” ;-). Nobody is saying that a charter school is inherently a better school. Charter=flexibility, and there are good ones and bad ones (mostly, it’s about good and bad state charter systems). As the study shows, those performing significantly better outnumber those doing significantly worse, and that ratio has been increasing over time.
What is your rationalization for ignoring better results because they are as a result of closures, ignoring growth in results, ignoring the increasing choice for charters by parents, and ignoring the urban study?
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Flexibility = only teaching the kids who will do well with your program.
Can you imagine anyone being ignorant enough to do a study of how two medicines affect children the way John thinks is ideal?. The two “control groups” start out with a random assortment of children. The first medicine’s study is “flexible” and gets rid of any child whose parents they can convince would be better served by OTHER medicine! The 2nd medicine’s study not only has to keep every child, but also gets the rejected children who were being seriously damaged by the first medicine!.
And here is the kicker: The first medicine claims it helps ALL kids because this wrongheaded study it keeps citing only looked at the kids who remained in their study and didn’t drop out and end up in the second medicine’s study when the first medicine made them worse. And the manufacturers of the first medicine claim that the second medicine doesn’t work well since they aren’t matching their results. So everyone decides only to use the first medicine, which it turns out, ends up killing many kids because the manufacturer was so dishonest in its claims. And because people who should have known better who could have pointed out this dishonesty instead kept defending the study as proving something that it certainly did not.
But since the manufacturer still walked away with billions, who cares, right? And since a small number of kids who weren’t sick at all remained healthy when they took the first medicine, the first medicine’s manufacturer keeps rationalizing that they profited from hurting kids by saying “well, we helped a few” to justify what they did. As if the huge number of children they hurt doesn’t matter.
When I see charter school studies that include schools that get rid of the kids who their inept methods don’t help, I know that the study is more interested in promoting a brand than the kids. And it is certainly scary that people like that are teaching kids – the ethics of people who are happy to be dishonest if it gives them a bit more prestige is pretty sad. Especially when young children are the people who pay the price for their dishonesty.
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John,
Eva’s charters have the best test scores so they “must” be a great charter chain, right? So why is it that not a single graduate of 8th grade from Success Academy has ever passed the selective high school exam? Many students who went to traditional public schools pass the exam. Why not even one from SA?
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Old argument. Demographics would predict that maybe 1 or 2 SA graduates to date might have made the cut for one of these schools. Will you be as vocal about this particular issue if a few of their graduates do make the cut next year?
When I looked at it last time, there were hundreds of middle schools in NYC (most of which have many more MS students than SA) that had no students eligible.
Why do you use such a racially and economically segregated measure as your choice of criticism?
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We don’t know enough about this for it to be the kind of “gotcha!” you like to think it is.
We know there were about 80 kids in the first two Success 8th grade cohorts who have gotten SHSAT results so far, all of whom were black or Latino and about 80% of whom were economically disadvantaged. Not all of those kids sat for the SHSAT; there were either 4 or 6 kids from the first class who didn’t, and for the second class the number is unknown. We know that the acceptance rate for blacks and Latinos is extremely low—about 4.8% of those who take the test (many thousands who are eligible do not) receive an offer.
We don’t know what the acceptance rate is for black and Latino children who are economically at risk—the results tables don’t provide that level of detail. We don’t know the characteristics of the middle schools that the black and Latino qualifiers attended—did they go to high-poverty schools like Success, or are they some of the lucky few who attend selective or low-poverty schools? We don’t know who had access to SHSAT prep. We don’t know anyone’s scores—what if Success students, despite not scoring well enough to get an offer, scored significantly higher than their demographically similar peers from traditional public schools? We don’t know which schools the Success children listed on their applications—the differences in scoring cut-offs are considerable, and the minority acceptance rate at the schools closest to Harlem (Stuy, HSME, Bronx Science, HSAS) is much lower than 4.8%.
I think what probably matters for parents isn’t whether Success can get poor minority kids to pass a narrowly focused admissions test; it’s whether or not they are getting a better education (and in a safer setting) than they would at their district school. Fortunately on that front we will have a lot of random-assignment study information to pore over in the hopefully not-too-distant future — http://www.mdrc.org/project/success-academy-charter-schools-evaluation#overview.
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Tim, unless the study that Success Academy has bought and paid for that you keep linking to looks at the attrition rates of all the kids who win the lottery for Kindergarten, it is meaningless.
The reason I know you and John aren’t real reformers is your desperation to hide that number. What kind of person who cares about at-risk kids would do everything they can NOT to actually demand an accounting of how many kids who win the Kindergarten lottery disappear? Why aren’t you and John demanding that kind of accounting? It would be simple and prove your point if you really think that all those parents “choosing” Success Academy are being served.
I read the NY Post editorial in which a Yale educated white dad praised how well Success Academy was accommodating his child. Funny how many rich white college educated folks defend how Success Academy treated their child and how many low-income parents of color are the people complaining how Success Academy treated their kids like they didn’t belong and pushed them out.
The fact that you and John keep pretending that is just a coincidence speaks at what kind of fake “reformers” you are and how little you actually care about most of those kids who are at that public school with the awful teacher you keep citing. That child who was abused is EXACTLY the kind of child who finds himself on the “got to go” list at Success Academy. And you and John have been cheering that kind of psychological abuse by Success Academy for years.
The dishonesty of fake (and I’m sure highly compensated) reformers like you is truly astonishing. People like RiShawn Biddle care about kids. People who attack RiShawn — like Eva Moskowitz and her minions — are the people you admire and respect. And apparently nothing Ms. Moskowitz does can ever convince you that she isn’t the savior of all those at-risk kids in those public schools that you keep pretending you care about. I have to think you are well aware she would never allow the vast majority of those kids to stay in her school.
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NYC public school parent,
You are arguing with yourself again. Neither Tim nor I said anything about ignoring attrition.
In fact, please do me a favor and search through the thread above. I said exactly 2 things about SA: I’m glad she’s getting called out on the contract and that everyone there is there by their parent’s choice.
You pretend we say things and then shoot them down. This must be entertainment for you. It certainly isn’t remotely a serious discussion of issues.
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John, speaking of someone who puts up a straw man so they can act all “righteous” and shoot it down, that would be you. You are an expert at this, and then you turn around and accuse others of doing the exact same thing you are doing.
You don’t fool most of us at all. Who are you working for? Who pays your salary?
Until you are willing to answer this, I think we can all ignore you.
And I will, henceforth.
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Zorba,you are apparently another person who doesn’t believe that someone could have a different opinion than theirs without being paid. I’ve learned in life that there is little to gained from interacting with someone who is so sure they’re right as to confidently belittle the opinion of all others.
I am employed in a field that had nothing to do education. My volunteer work has always been about social justice, most recently focused on not-for-profit public charter schools. I don’t make a nickel and in fact spend a lot on this.
I’d ask if you get paid by an education related entity, but frankly, I don’t care.
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No, John, I’m a long-retired special education teacher.
How nice that your volunteer work is involved with social justice. Ask yourself how much social justice a poor kid in a crumbling school in a crumbling neighborhood receives. Do you really think that all children will be able to be well-served by charter schools? If all schools magically turn into charter schools, then basically they will all be receiving tax-payer dollars, with little to no public accountability.
Will they all do a good job with underprivileged and special needs children?
And I don’t know about you, but I would like some accountability for where my tax dollars are going. We don’t always get that, but we should. I don’t want yet another tax-funded program that is not totally transparent.
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Zorba,
I’m guessing that you are the one that is then being paid a pension and retiree healthcare benefits, etc., true? I still believe you are entitled to your opinions.
I’m for increasing spending in urban schools, so yes, I think there are plenty of places where we shortchange kids financially.
As for accountability, the neighborhood schools in my area keep chugging along with their single digit passing rates and 50% dropout rates. No accountability there. Meanwhile, quite a few charters have been closed for poor performance.
I’m also not someone who thinks that making all charter schools is the solution. I just think they’re part of it.
As for public accountability, at least in NY, there’s more accountability and transparency for charters than for many traditional schools. I’ve tried to get a line item budget from my district without success. I suppose I could FOIL it, but who has the time for that. Budgets are set by school districts, so we’re not setting spending, and we get paid quite a bit less per student than the district spends.
We’re completely accountable to parents, who can easily take their children out of our school, in which case we get no revenue at all.
Some charters have challenges with special needs and ELL students, but all recent data shows that charters do a better job with children from low income families and children of color.
Are you in a place where charter finances are not transparent? There are some states where that is the case, but you can’t believe what you hear from the vested interests that are anti-charter, who would have you believe that every charter is a for-profit scam.
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Here’s NYC parent Jaybee Smalley telling her story about what happened after her child’s number was picked in the Success Academy lottery, effectively winning her child a seat n Eva’s wonderful charter chain organization.
Happy ending? Ehhh… not quite.
JAYBEE SMALLEY: “My name is Jaybee Smalley. I’m a parent, yes. I have two children with special needs. I have one child who I applied to the Harlem Success Academy through the lottery process to see if she could be… would be accepted.
“When she WAS accepted through the lottery, I reached out to them (Harlem Success Academy) before I attended any sort of a orientation to see if they would be able to accommodate her I.E.P. She has a 12-to-1-to-1 I.E.P. for a year-round program, with four different related services.
“They didn’t respond to me through email at all.. and finally, after the second meeting had come, I called them —- I had a very difficult time getting through to them —- Before I could get the words ’12-to-1-to-1′ out of my mouth, they immediately told me that they would absolutely not be able to accommodate that sort of child in their school.”
————————————
To John & Tim,
You guys say that this never happens, so I’m wondering. Regarding what Ms. Smalley says in the video, is Ms. Smalley:
A) lying?
B) delusional? (as she is recounting visual and auditory hallucinations that never happened, as they are nothing but her imaginary encounters with Success Academy administrators that she is describing);
C) telling the truth?
———————-
I’m voting for “C”.
Or perhaps you’ll offer the “anomaly” defense. Like Charlotte Dial, the Success Academy person who dealt with Ms. Smalley was a rogue agent who, acting on her own and against Success Academy policy, treated Ms. Smalley and her children this way.
Maybe they should have another tear-filled, highly-orchestrated press conference that degenerates into Success Academy fabricating victimhood at the hands of outside persecutors.
The problem is there are a lot of parents suing over this kind of treatment their their children received.
Here’s a story of one:
Here’s a scanned copy of that lawsuit itself:
Click to access sa_lawsuit.pdf
Here’s another such lawsuit:
Here’s a scanned copy of that lawsuit itself:
Click to access lawton-lawsuit.pdf
To John & Tim,
At the bottom of all of this, here’s the problem: to Eva and the charter school industry, Ms. Smalley’s daughter is a commodity, not a human being. Her daughter is “a thing”, if you will who is judged by the following criteria:
1) the revenue that her daughter bring in — the tax money that accompanies her attending SUCCESS ACADEMY;
2) the cost — the less the better — the funds that it will require to educate her; in this case the cost is higher than a non-Special Ed. student due to having a 12-to-1-to-1 ration (Student-to-Special Ed. teacher-to-classroom-aide), and other costs inherent in educating such a child… Hey, we ain’t paying for that!
3) Ms. Smalley’s child’s eventual ability or inability to generate high test scores (a form of profits, if you will, to these deranged charter-ites … Success Academy hiigh-up leader even bragged to New York magazine about turning these children in to “little test-taking machines” … as if this was a goal to which any school should aspire).
The message that Eva gives Ms. Smalley & her child and other parents & their child:
“Your child is nothing! You, Ms. Smalley, are nothing! Get out of our sight, you nothings!”
Everyone goes after Eva for being money-motivated, and to be sure, she is — $570,000 annual salary for only a few thousand children VS. Chancellor Farina’s $250,000 for over 1 million children (don’t have the figures hand).
However, another aspect of Ms. Moskowitz mindset:
… eugenics.
The inferior classes of children deserve no extra funding or attention should be allocated to assist them. They are a drain on tax money. They are lesser, or inferior beings. (Arne Duncan and Success Academy’s Paul Fuculoro doesn’t believe such a category as “Special Ed.” even exist … but that’s another story). Eva was quoted in New York Magazine as saying, “Success Academy is not a social services agency.”
In other words, “Inferiors, be gone!!!”
What would have happened to Ms. Smalley’s children in 1930’s Germany? The authorities would have confiscated Ms. Smalley’s children, then later put them into back of truck, then after sealing the back of the truck until it was almost airtight, would have connected a hose from the exhaust pipe of that truck until they were asphyxiated and die. Later, they would have burned the children’s bodies.
Now Eva doesn’t go that far. She just wants nothing to do with them. They are inferior, and as Eva said, she wants no inferiors’ special ed toxicity rubbing off her superior “scholars,” or again, cutting into Eva’s ability to earn a $570,000 salary.
I can tell you what happens to them at the public school where I work. When someone like Ms. Smalley’s and her child shows up at our school offices.
THE COST IS NEVER CONSIDERED
THE COSTS OF EDUCATING THOSE CHILDREN — THE BOTTOM LINE — IS NOT CONSIDERED.
THE FACT THAT THE CHILD HAS AN INNATE DISABILITY THAT PREVENTS HER FROM SCORING HIGH ON TESTS IS NOT CONSIDERED.
We will do our best to maximize the potential of every child — from the most gifted to the most disabled.
I’ll let LAUSD School Board Member Steve Zimmer add his two cents here.
From his 2013 Speech to UTLA’s August 2013 Leadership Conference:
( 13:47 – 14:35)
( 13:47 – 14:35)
STEVE ZIMMER: “What we oppose is the attack on the basic promise of public education, the basic contract of public education. That is we serve EVERY child who comes to our door—EVERY child who comes to the schoolhouse door.
“And if you don’t serve EVERY child—those who are the gifted to those who have the most special needs, and the entire spectrum in between.
“If you are not about EVERY child, then that is NOT public education, and we stand against it, and we stand against the corporatization and privatization that is embodied in the charter school takeover.”
… and earlier
( 11:16 – 13:08 )
( 11:16 – 13:08 )
STEVE ZIMMER: ““But student growth and student improvement can NEVER be measured by a single standardized test score, and what we suffer from in this district is what I like to call a ‘data addiction.’ It’s what I like to call a ‘religious addiction’ to ‘the numbers,’ and to a ‘spread sheet,’ and to a ‘bottom line,’ and we’re taught that this is ‘objective,’ that this is ‘fact,’ and that everything else is ‘soft’… that we should go into ‘The Temple of Data’ and kneel down, and that we should bow down at an ‘Altar of Objectivity.’
“But we WON’T and we CAN’T because the gods that WE believe in teach us that EVERYTHING that is wondrous and beautiful about children cannot be measured by a standardized test score!
“We know!
“The beautiful names… and stories… of our kids—we never met a kid that was named ‘Proficient,’ and we CERTAINLY never met a kid that was named ‘Basic,’ and NEVER ‘Far Below Basic!’
“Our children have names, they have stories, and if we are to fight the battles against corporatization and privatization, we must be the warriors of re-humanization of public education that is about our children, their families, our communities, and their stories!
“And that starts with humane school communities!”
———————————–
You want to know why, back in 2013, the privatization industry pumped in $5 million dollars to Steve’s privatization industry opponent to defeat him —- and Mike Bloomberg alone wrote a $1 million dollar check to Steve’s opponent?
Re-read or re-watch those clips. What’s coming out of Steve’s mouth is like waving a crucifix in front of these money-grubbing, privatization vampires. What Steve represents — democracy, democratic governance of schools, the rule citizenship versus the rule of elites, meeting the needs of all, no matter how disabled — must be stopped, so that the “betters” can take their rightful places over the lessers — the “Betterocracy.”
For more on that “Betterocracy” — the betters ruling over the lessers, read, Peter “Curmudgucation” Greene’s essay:
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/06/betterocracy.html
What’s underlying all of this is the notion that a group of self-appointed wealthy elites should be running everything, and that democracy be rendered impotent. Curmudgucation’s Peter Greene calls this the “Betterocracy”. It’s also what’s behind the remaking of universities, replacing the ideal of “citizenship” where all citizens participate in a democracy with “leadership” of elites who are in charge because, because, … well because they’re so much “better.”
I’ll let Peter play me out:
—————–
PETER GREENE: ““This thread runs through many reformster ideas and many of my responses to them. I just wanted to gather thoughts about ‘Betterocracy’ in one place.
“Many reformsters have one fundamental point in common– they don’t really believe in democracy. They believe in ‘Betterocracy.’
“Betterocracy rests on one simple fundamental belief– some people really are better than others. It’s not necessarily the possession of a particular quality, though Betters are usually smarter, wiser, and possessed of superior character. It’s that Betters are made of the right stuff. They come from good stock. They are just better than others.
“This is not a new thing.
” ,,, ”
“The bottom line is that bettercrats believe that democracy is, really, a bad idea. Some people just don’t deserve to have a say. Some people just don’t deserve to be in charge of anything. Some people just aren’t important. Some people just don’t matter. Some people just can’t have nice things.
“Bettercrats may, out of generosity and a general sense of noblesse oblige, give Lessers the nice things that they don’t deserve, but those will be nice things that the Betters have selected, and Lessers can have the nice things under terms dictated by the Betters.
“Why shouldn’t Betters have an outsized disproportionate influence on government? The fact that they have the money and power to wield influence is proof that they are right to do so.
“None of this is democracy, not even a watered-down republic-styled democracy. Bettercrats mostly would not recognize democracy (they most commonly call it ‘socialism’).
“And that’s why we’ve got the refomster programs that we have. Our Betters are trying to give the Lessers the system they deserve while rescuing Betters who have been trapped by zip codes in dens of Lesser iniquity.
“Our Betters are creating a system that disenfranchises Lessers (who, after all, do not deserve to be enfranchised in the first place because if they deserved to have power, they would have it).
“Our Betters are trying to create a system that further reinforces their own power and control, because they deserve to have them.
“Our Betters are even trying to get Lessers to understand that they are, in fact, Lessers.
“The genius of America is that of a country that makes room for all voices and treats them all as equals, tied together and forced to create systems that accommodate all our citizens. It envisions a level playing field in which all voices and ideas can compete in the grand marketplace of thought. We have never fully lived up to that genius, but Betters do not even recognize it as genius to begin with.
“Right now their lack of vision is bad for education, but in the long run, it’s bad for the entire country.”
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To Tim & John:
I think we’re getting to where the rubber meets the road here. This is a good opportunity to clarify where various people on this board stand.
BELOW (scroll down to the relevant video clips) is what LAUSD School Board President Steve Zimmer believes in regarding the obligation that public education has to educate EVERY child.
Watch it. Listen to it.
That’s what I believe. That’s what almost everyone who regularly posts here believes.
However, Tim & John, YOU DON’T BELIEVE WHAT STEVE SAYS TO BE THE CASE.
So why don’t you two guys just admit it?
HERE’S WHAT YOU TWO GUYS BELIEVE: (please correct me if I’m wrong)
“A) There are ‘superior’ children who deserve the opportunity ___ provided through a newly-privatized, formerly-public education system — to reach their full potential (‘Charters uber alles.’); this group is made up of the kids of the wealthy, plus some token representative “strivers” (Mike Petrilli’s term) of the middle and working classes that you deign to provide such a privilege.
and
“B) there are ‘inferior’ children (due to inferior parents, circumstances, innate deficiencies, etc) that do not deserve that same opportunity, or to have the necessary money spent on them, but instead should only be provided with a low-cost, crap-can version of something that barely resembles education, and that will be provided a massively defunded remnant of what used to be our traditional public school system.”
Tim & John, that dehumanizing belief that you share is diametrically opposed by what Zimmer says here:
From his 2013 Speech to UTLA’s August 2013 Leadership Conference:
( 13:47 – 14:35)
( 13:47 – 14:35)
STEVE ZIMMER: “What we oppose is the attack on the basic promise of public education, the basic contract of public education. That is we serve EVERY child who comes to our door—EVERY child who comes to the schoolhouse door.
“And if you don’t serve EVERY child—those who are the gifted to those who have the most special needs, and the entire spectrum in between.
“If you are not about EVERY child, then that is NOT public education, and we stand against it, and we stand against the corporatization and privatization that is embodied in the charter school takeover.”
… and earlier
( 11:16 – 13:08 )
( 11:16 – 13:08 )
STEVE ZIMMER: ““But student growth and student improvement can NEVER be measured by a single standardized test score, and what we suffer from in this district is what I like to call a ‘data addiction.’ It’s what I like to call a ‘religious addiction’ to ‘the numbers,’ and to a ‘spread sheet,’ and to a ‘bottom line,’ and we’re taught that this is ‘objective,’ that this is ‘fact,’ and that everything else is ‘soft’… that we should go into ‘The Temple of Data’ and kneel down, and that we should bow down at an ‘Altar of Objectivity.’
“But we WON’T! And we CAN’T!
“Because the gods that WE believe in teach us that EVERYTHING that is wondrous and beautiful about children CANNOT be measured by a standardized test score!
“We know!
“The beautiful names… and stories… of our kids—we never met a kid that was named ‘Proficient,’ and we CERTAINLY never met a kid that was named ‘Basic,’ and NEVER ‘Far Below Basic!’
“Our children have names. They have stories. And if we are to fight the battles against corporatization and privatization, we must be the warriors of re-humanization of public education that is about our children, their families, our communities, and their stories!
“And that starts with humane school communities!”
———————————–
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It looks like you and Steve Zimmer have a little bit of egg on your face.
http://achieve.lausd.net/Page/3379
So much for EVERY kid — LAUSD is spending a cool $175.1 MILLION to send LOTS of KIDS to someone ELSE’s SCHOOLHOUSE DOOR.
Your offensive characterization of my position on this is not just a little inaccurate, it is wildly inaccurate.
You, Steve Zimmer, Diane Ravitch, and many commenters like to hold charter schools to an unrealistic and unreasonable standard that entire districts, never mind individual district schools, fail to meet almost 100% of the time:
–Like LAUSD, the NYC DOE pays a considerable sum of money to private special education providers–$1.1 BILLION in 2015-2016, which is roughly the same amount as the entire budget for Memphis City Schools. Look at any suburban New York district’s budget and you’ll invariably find a multi-million-dollar entry covering private school tuition for special education students–Ossining, Montclair, Hastings-on-Hudson, etc.
–Approximately 40% of NYC DOE elementary schools do not have seats for students who require self-contained 12:1:1 settings, including many of its highest-performing and most popular schools, like PS 321 in Brooklyn.
–As many as 66% of NYC DOE elementary schools are not accessible to children with physical disabilities, including PS 321 in Brooklyn.
I believe that the public should fund a free and appropriate education for every child who wants one. Sometimes the best setting will be a privately managed special education school. Sometimes the best setting will be a traditional public school, be it a lottery school, a magnet school, a selective admissions school, or a zoned school. Sometimes the best setting will be a charter school.
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John says: ” I’m glad she’s getting called out on the contract and that everyone there is there by their parent’s choice.”
“everyone there is there by their parent’s choice…” as if that is all that is necessary.
That’s what the segregationists in the South said about their schools. All the white people chose their segregated white school. The fact that those schools made it clear that non-whites were unwelcome was apparently irrelevant.
And John uses the exact same argument! As long as some parents who “choose” the school are happy — like the affluent white Yale parent whose kid is treated so kindly there — we are supposed to think it is okay. Because as long as “some” parents “choose” the school and are served, it is irrelevant whether some of the most vulnerable at-risk kids are treated like the way they treated the girl whose single mom lived in a homeless shelter.
Spoken like a real faux reformer. Thank you for showing your true colors, even though I’m sure it was completely unintended. But it’s clear that as long as “some parents” get to stay because their children are treated nicely, what happens to the kids who aren’t treated nicely is completely irrelevant.
Too bad there are no real reformers willing to stand up and say that what is important is NOT whether the affluent middle class kids are served. It isn’t whether the “strivers” among the at-risk kids — as judged by charter school operators who can decide whether they are worthy or not — are served. What should be important is how charter schools are teaching the at-risk kids who are being failed by public schools. The fact that reformers are more than happy to throw most of them under a bus as long as they can find a few worthy kids to educate is wrong. But John reflects the typical faux reformers’ attitude that caring about the most at-risk kids isn’t really important anymore.
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Tim and John, thank you for your thoughtful comments!
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Where does Tim teach or administer a school? I am finding while working within the charter system in a large urban district that the charter provides an option for parents who do not want to send their children to a school where gang violence is prevalent. That is their primary reason for choosing the charter at which I assist. Change federal laws regarding discipline rights and fund schools by raising taxes to the levels of the 50’s, and the public schools will look just like or better than a lot of top charters. The public school would be safe, high school kids could be educated in a self-selected career or college preparation program; students would have multiple options to peak their interests; and one might even have a redistribution of income by paying for the services.
I also note that the working-class parents I meet have little information about why their child does not score as highly on a standardized test as a child from a middle-class family, white, black, Mexican, or Asian. I offer my own working-class background and three to five hours of reading books from my college-educated aunt’s collection as one way that made it possible for me to compete score- wise on the PSAT and ACT.
The charter at which I assist also accepts students with IEP’s, most recently one that had left a KIPP school because of the out-of-control behavior of the students. He seems to be happy with us and hopefully will begin making progress. Of course we will now have his very low scores as we have only a month in which to work with him. And KIPP will have lost at least one student who will not be a high scorer.
An education is not about job training. An education is about becoming one’s best self. An education is about learning how to learn anything one chooses.
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West Coast Teacher,
I’m not a teacher. My children either currently attend or formerly attended a variety of high-needs neighborhood NYC DOE traditional public schools. My partner and I work in fields entirely unrelated to any aspect of education or education reform, or the financial industry. All thoughts and comments are my own.
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Tim,
No one would defend Eva and Success Academy as tenaciously as you do with no link to the organization. Forgive my skepticism. You ate transparent.
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Yes, you’ve made your thoughts on this clear before; almost every single time I’ve described my bona fides for commenters who’ve asked for them, in fact.
And as I’ve said on some of those previous occasions, if you honestly don’t think it is possible that someone could hold the views I have without being paid for it or in the absence of an affiliation with a charter school, it might be a sign that you are existing in a echo chamber. No offense.
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Tim,
You write with contempt about public schools. You have an excuse for anything that charters do. You have tons of research about the glories of charters and the abysmal failure of public schools. i support public schools because I know from my nearly 50 years of scholarship that public schools are essential to our democracy. What is your reason for constantly putting down public education and defending private management?
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diane,
Is Tim putting down public schools? I don’t see it. In fact, his posts are about big gains in NYC in both traditional and charter schools.
He “wrote with contempt” about how they are funded using property taxes and how that leads to a very inequitable system and I agree. You have too, true?
I surmise that Tim supports public charter schools because the data clearly shows that they are doing better at educating students in NYC than traditional schools, and that in his view (and mine), the most important public good of public education is education.
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John, you and Tim are a tag team, filled with excuses for no-excuses charters
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Tim, if your aren’t in the pay of the corporate public education demolition derby, I think there is only one other explanation for why you support this often fraudulent and flawed movement to destroy community based, democratic, non-profit and transparent public education in the Untied States and replace it with autocratic, abusive, opaque, for profit corporate charter schools based on the the results of high stakes tests that rank and punish teachers and children.
The following quote explains what I mean: “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time,” and I think your are among the few who are being fooled all the time. Will you wake up or not. That is the unanswered question.
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dianeravitch: [Tim, no one would defend Eva and Success Academy as tenaciously as you do with no link to the organization.]
Diane, you recently suggested, that I also might work for Eva Moskowitz, and, when others here attacked me personally, you have defended and rationalized their behavior.
As I wrote then, be careful not to end up with an intellectually vacuous echo-chamber of folks, who don’t go through the regular exercise of checking their narratives against the facts on the ground.
dianeravitch: [John, you and Tim are a tag team, filled with excuses for no-excuses charters] Is this your best argument?
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My best argument, Yuri, is that the privatization of public education is shameful and indefensible.
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Diane, I agree with you. I also find that the term “privatization of education” doesn’t apply to charter schools in New York State, which are by law non-profits. It is a big stretch to take a publicly funded non-profit school and characterize it as profit-generating enterprise.
That is the problem with emotionally charged over-simplifications like this – people who make them often lack the ability or the desire to check their narrative against facts on the ground.
For example, Success Academy may not be perfect, but they spend so much money on 2 teachers per class, a field trip every 3 weeks, a well stocked take-home library in every classroom, constant investment in teacher training – the suggestion that SA puts profit above education of kids just doesn’t pass the most basic smell test.
Now, Success Academy has room for improvement, and I would rather talk about real ways in which they can get better, than on rebutting these ridiculous, counterfactual red herrings.
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“It is a big stretch to take a publicly funded non-profit school and characterize it as profit-generating enterprise.”
Yuri, I don’t think you have done enough of your own homework on this issue. The so-called private sector non-profit corporate charters schools make their money by having a parent, for profit company own the property and charge high rents often way above the average for the area where the schools are located. These alleged non-profits also often pay their managers six figure incomes and farm out custodial and food services to private-sector, for profit companies that have links to the alleged non-profit arm of the many headed corporate hydra.
In fact Bill Moyers & Company revealed “Charter School Power Broker Turns Public Education Into Private Profits.
For instance, “Every year, millions of public education dollars flow through Mitchell’s chain of four nonprofit charter schools to for-profit companies he controls. The schools buy or lease nearly everything from companies owned by Mitchell. Their desks. Their computers. The training they provide to teachers. Most of the land and buildings. Unlike with traditional school districts, at Mitchell’s charter schools there’s no competitive bidding. No evidence of haggling over rent or contracts.”
http://billmoyers.com/2014/10/16/charter-school-power-broker-turns-public-education-private-profits/
In addition: Nonprofit Taxes: When Non-profits Make a Profit
http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/incorporation-and-legal-structures/non-profit-taxes-when-non-profits-make-a-profit.html
When Charter Schools Are Nonprofit in Name Only
“Some charters pass along nearly all their money to for-profit companies hired to manage the schools. It’s an arrangement that’s raising eyebrow”
https://www.propublica.org/article/when-charter-schools-are-nonprofit-in-name-only
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Charters are a nonprofit form of privatization. They take public money, choose the students they want, push out those they don’t want, and pay exorbitant salaries. Do you think it is right that a charter CEO is paid over $500,000 for running a tiny school district
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By Diane’s definition, public libraries, the NYS Thruway, the Boys & Girls Clubs, etc. are all “privatization” since they all “take” public money and don’t have elected boards.
She also likes to say that charters “choose the students they want” with zero evidence that they do that and despite the fact that it is illegal. One would think that Teacher’s Unions, which spend an awful lot of money trying to kill charters, would have found and funded a lawsuit if this were anything other than convenient fiction or rare exception.
Finally, logical fallacies rule the board here as long as serve the mission. Today’s “special” is apparently “anecdotal fallacy”, in which an isolated example can be used to counter compelling evidence or sound reasoning.
Diane is perfectly welcome to have an anti-reform blog. If it were subtitled “a place to commiserate and reject all education reforms”, I’d probably read but wouldn’t post. But, as long as it says “A site to discuss better education for all” at the top, it invites opposing opinions.
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John,
This is not an “anti-reform” blog. It is a blog dedicated to better education for all. Charters skim off the students they want and harm the majority of students. They do not promote a better education for all.
How about a salary cap for charter leaders?
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[Charters skim off the students they want and harm the majority of students. They do not promote a better education for all.]
This is another emotionally potent oversimplification, that, in my opinion, is not borne out by the facts, at least when it comes to Success Academy, where I have a child.
Does this apply to others charters and other states, not sure, it might, I don’t like to generalize.
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Diane,
I haven’t seen support for any reforms here at all, hence my observation. Did I miss a place where you or the majority of commenters are *for* some changes other than rolling things back or simply spending more money doing the same things?
As I’ve said before, I don’t consider cutting education spending to be a “reform” in any way, so I don’t include people who are doing that as reformers, even though you lump them in.
I disagree that “[charters] harm the majority of students”. In most cases, charter students leave more money for the majority of students because the districts pay less to the charters than they take in per student. Do you refute that?
The data also generally does not support your contention that charters skim off the students that they want. There are anecdotes, and I’m sure that it happens in some places, but studies don’t support it, nor does the dearth of lawsuits or prosecutions one would expect if this was common practice.
If this truly were about better education for all, you would acknowledge charter successes. You use the 2009 CREDO study to bolster your contention that most charters are the same or worse than comparable public schools, but won’t acknowledge the 2015 urban study that uses the exact same methodology and finds (for example):
1. urban charter schools in the aggregate provide significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading compared to their matched TPS peers.
2. regions with larger learning gains in charter schools outnumber those with
smaller learning gains two-to-one.
3. Learning gains for charter school students are larger by significant amounts for Black,
Hispanic, low-income, and special education students in both math and reading. Students who are both low-income and Black or Hispanic, or who are both Hispanic and English Language Learners, especially benefit from charter schools, Gains for these subpopulations amount to months of additional learning per year.
4. Positive results for charter school students increased on average over the period of the study. In the 2008-09 school year, charter attendance on average produced 29 additional days of learning for students in math and 24 additional days of learning in reading. By the 2011-12 school year, charter students received 58 additional learning days in math and 41 additional days in reading relative to their TPS peers.
Click to access Urban%20Charter%20School%20Study%20Report%20on%2041%20Regions.pdf
Here, from The Shanker Institute, is what I think “better education for all” implies:
“…many people are focused intensely on the question of whether charter schools “work,” even though everyone already agrees on the best answer – some do, some do not. Shifting the focus from “whether” to “why” may be the best way to find some productive common ground. And it has the additional virtue of encouraging good education research and policymaking.”
Instead, your reaction to this data is invariably to change the subject or rationalize it away, but never to address it in any way:
“Just think: a child could be abused and humiliated, but so what if the scores go up.”
“many charter schools in NYC have lower scores than public schools. Besides, children’s happiness matters more than their test scores.”
“since test scores at charters are so great, remind me why no graduate of Success Academy has ever been admitted to one of NYC’s selective high schools.”
“My best argument…is that the privatization of public education is shameful and indefensible.”
So, I have to say that the criteria isn’t about “better education for all”, it’s about denigrating things you disagree with.
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Regarding “push out those they don’t want”, that is also not supported by the data. For the NYC charters (which you are a frequent critic of), the NYC Independent Budget Office report below says:
– On average, students at charter schools stay at their schools at a higher rate than students at nearby traditional public schools.
– Students at charter schools left the city’s public school system at the same rate as students in nearby traditional public schools.
– When we consider any student identified as having a disability in kindergarten as a special needs student, these students remained at their charter schools through the 2012-2013 school year at a higher rate than similar students at nearby traditional public schools.
http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/2015charter_schools_public_schools_attrition.html
How do you reconcile this actual data with your statement that the exact opposite is true?
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Lloyd wrote:[ Bill Moyers & Company revealed “Charter School Power Broker Turns Public Education Into Private Profits.] Lloyd, Bill Moyers happens to be one of my favorite journalists, together with Robert Scheer and a few others. Both are known for strong Progressive beliefs, but also for their open mind and fair treatment of honest people, with whom they disagree.
I remember watching Diane Ravitch on Bill Moyers a couple of years back, and I agreed with most of what Diane said, because it was mostly directed at the charter schools in those states, where they operate on a for-profit basis.
I think that painting Success Academy with the same broad brush of privatization is simply inaccurate on the facts.
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“I would rather talk about real ways in which they can get better, than on rebutting these ridiculous, counterfactual red herrings.”
Yurt,
Unfortunately, I can confidently say that you’ve come to the wrong place.
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Lloyd, there are some states where you are correct that not-for-profit charters contract with for-profit operators and/or aren’t prohibited from conflicts of interest or self-dealing. That definitely needs to change.
In New York, charters must be not-for-profit and are prohibited from contracting with for-profit operators, conflicts of interest, and self-dealing.
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How many states? How much is the cost of this fraud?
Here are a few examples:
“A new report released on Tuesday details fraud and waste totaling more than $200 million of uncovered fraud and waste of taxpayer funds in the charter school sector, but says the total is impossible to know because there is not sufficient oversight over these schools. It calls on Congress to include safeguards in legislation being considered to succeed the federal No Child Left Behind law.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/28/report-millions-of-dollars-in-fraud-waste-found-in-charter-school-sector/
Release: “A new report released today reveals that fraudulent charter operators in 15 states are responsible for losing, misusing or wasting over $100 million in taxpayer money.”
Summary: “Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud And Abuse,” authored by the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education, echoes a warning from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General. The report draws upon news reports, criminal complaints and more to detail how, in just 15 of the 42 states that have charter schools, charter operators have used school funds illegally to buy personal luxuries for themselves, support their other businesses, and more. The report also includes recommendations for policymakers on how they can address the problem of rampant fraud, waste and abuse in the charter school industry. Both organizations recommend pausing charter expansion until these problems are addressed.
http://integrityineducation.org/
If all 42 states were studied, how much would this fraud cost taxpayers. It is arguable that we could triple the amount of fraud already discovered from $200 million to $600 million from the Washing Post piece, and from $100 million to $300 million from the Integrity in Education piece.
And since it is so difficult to get even this much information out of the corporate education industry that is autocratic, opaque and secretive to the extreme. the cost of fraud could reach into the billions of dollars.
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Lloyd,
I don’t doubt that there are a lot of cases as some states have very lax rules. They certainly serve to make charters nationally look bad and any credible charters should support laws and policies to minimize this.
The WaPo article isn’t reporting, it’s a puff piece on a union funded study. I don’t find it in any way surprising that they could find one example from each of 15 out of 42 states. Because of the source and no word on methodology, I assume the other states didn’t have such examples or would have been included.
That said, I agree with the policy prescriptions in the report. While there are plenty of policy proposals put forward by charter critics that are designed simply to be punitive, nobody should stand in the way of fiscal and educational transparency and policies against fraud and abuse.
Finally, while any fraud is too much, that $200M nationally was found in charters can’t be considered surpising when more than $11M was found in a single public school district (Roslyn, NY). Unfortunately, there are plenty of fishy goings on related to construction deals, hiring consultants, etc. in traditional public school districts.
It’s important to note that almost all public education fraud happens in central offices, not in schools.
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I find it interesting and disingenuous how you subtly and slyly shifted the topic away from the issue of widespread fraud in the autocratic and for profit, opaque corporate charter schools and turned the fraud spotlight on the community based, transparent, democratic, non-profit, traditional public schools—but offered no links to reputable studies and reports to defend your allegations.
In fact, fraud and corruption exists in almost every country, every department of government—for instance the Department of Defense—in addition to private sector corporations like the greed, fraud and corruption that caused the 2007-08 global financial crises leading to trillions in losses and tens of millions of jobs lost around the globe.
The FBI reports:
Corporate fraud continues to be one of the FBI’s highest criminal priorities. As the lead agency investigating corporate fraud, we focus our efforts on cases that involve accounting schemes, self-dealing by corporate executives, and obstruction of justice.
The majority of corporate fraud cases pursued by the FBI involve accounting schemes designed to deceive investors, auditors, and analysts about the true financial condition of a corporation or business entity. Through the manipulation of financial data, the share price, or other valuation measurements of a corporation, financial performance may remain artificially inflated based on fictitious performance indicators provided to the investing public.
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/white_collar/corporate-fraud
For instance, when I was still teaching a few years before I retired in 2005, thanks to the fact that the books were transparent in the public school district where I taught, a book keeper who worked at one of the three high schools was caught skimming from the schools elected student council. She had been skimming pennies here and there for years before she was caught and had managed to steel about $75k.
How much did Bernie Madoff rip off with his Ponzi Scheme? The answer is at last $65 billion.
There is a big difference between $75k and $75 billion or even the trillions that were lost in 2007-08 costing 9 million Americans their jobs and millions to then lose their homes.
Becasue of transparency in the public schools, it is much more difficult to skim off public money because someone who knows what they are doing can ask for the books and crunch the numbers to catch thieves.
But Corporate Charters are doing everything they can to remain opaque creating an atmosphere for theft. There is no reason to want your books opaque unless you are a crook. Every school that received public funds must be transparent in every penny spent.
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Lloyd,
I don’t think I shifted the argument. I acknowledge that charters in states with poor laws and authorizers, which not surprisingly are also the homes of for-profit charters, are pretty susceptible to fraud. I support laws that make fraud harder and make it easier to detect.
I just pointed out that the report was biased and didn’t find much. I only mentioned one district example, but it’s a doozy at >11M. As you point out, fraud is everywhere. Any organization taking public money has an obligation to avoid and detect it.
IMO, the only people not interested in policies that combat fraud would be those committing it.
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How many corporate charter school in the United States are transparent with their spending compared to traditional public schools? The answer is not many unless the law in a state required it.
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Lloyd,
Rereading what you wrote, I only wish that most here wouldn’t refer to *all* except mom & pop charters as “corporate”. That makes the term near meaningless, when it could be useful when talking about fraud, profit, privatization, etc.
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Any charter that is a chain is corporate. Any charter whose board consists of hedge fund managers is corporate.
Those qualities distinguish it from a mom and pop charter connected to the local community.
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Diane,
“Any charter that is a chain is corporate. Any charter whose board consists of hedge fund managers is corporate.
If you were applying objective criteria, the word “charter” wouldn’t have to be in your sentences.
I’m sure you don’t consider other national 501c3s with local affiliates (like Boys and Girls Clubs, YMCA, Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, ASPCA, Public Interest Research Group, etc.) “corporate”. I’m equally sure that you don’t consider the New York Public Library “corporate” because it has a hedge fund manager on its board.
No, your criteria are not objective at all. You are simply anti-charter and rationalizing or obfuscating your position with fake objectivity.
Then this: “Those qualities distinguish it from a mom and pop charter connected to the local community.”
Once again, you have demonstrated your inability to see students as the most important part (or even worthy of consideration) of public education. The fact that these schools are filled with the community’s children doesn’t, in your view, connect them to the community. IMO, indefensible. My guess is that you really prefer mom & pops because they are less of a threat. CMO schools have higher percentages of black and hispanic and low income students and get better results than mom & pops and are obviously replicating faster. (Hmmm, “better education for all” should support CMOs over mom & pops; maybe this isn’t about better education or the “all” doesn’t include students)
it’s perfectly fine for you to dislike charters and perfectly fine for you to have an anti-charter blog. It’s the pretension that this is about better education for all or remotely objective that I object to.
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There are three sectors for charters.
1. Charters based on the original concept that have teachers’ unions and operate inside of a community based, democratic, non-profit, transparent public school district. In fact, the district where i taught for thirty years had a school that fit that definitive but it was called an alternative high school. These schools are run by the teachers and not by mandates from district administration.
2. Corporate Charter schools that are mostly autocratic and opaque in what they do and how they spend money.
3. Your alleged mom and pop charters that exist in the private sector and also benefit from the opaqueness created by corporate charter lobbyists making these mom and pop charters ripe for con artists and frauds to leap on the public gravy train. How many are there compared to the corporate chains?
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Lloyd (and Diane)
KIPP, Achievement First, YES Prep, Uncommon Schools, Mastery, Aspire, etc. don’t fit into your 3 categories.
I suppose you think they are in category 2. So, would you consider the YMCA, Boys Club & Girls Club, Big Brothers Big Sisters, the VFW, Knights Club, Rotary, Doctors without Borders, the Sierra Club, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, 4-H, Ronald McDonald House, Planned Parenthood, the Humane Society, ASPCA, Public Interest Research Group, etc. “corporate chains” too? These are all national 501c3s with local 501c3 affiliates just as the national charters are.
Your “criteria” are clearly not objective.
FYI, I think “mom & pop” charters are more susceptible to fraud than those affiliated with national non-profit CMOs.
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John,
Every group you mention makes a positive contribution to the commonweal. The charters you list do not
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Diane,
“Every group you mention makes a positive contribution to the commonweal. The charters you list do not”
So, better results and college attainment for black and brown students and those from low income families are not, in your opinion, “a positive contribution to the commonweal”? What really matters is whether their boards are publicly elected?
Really?
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I don’t understand why opt-out and Bernie Sanders are failing so resoundingly in communities of color; I really don’t.
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There you go again. Making statements as if they are facts without any valid, reputable unbiased sources to support your allegations. And please don’t respond with links to more opinions that do the same thing you do so often or links that are funded by the corporate public education demolition derby—the privatizers for profit of everything that is in the public sector.
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Lloyd,
If you’re referring to “better results”, you didn’t really read the CREDO 2015 study and the NY IBO study regarding attrition, or you just refuse to believe data that you disagree with.
Which part of “Learning gains for charter school students are larger by significant amounts for Black, Hispanic, low-income, and special education students in both math and reading.” are you having trouble understanding?
When asked, you and Diane both change the subject.
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John,
If the price of higher test scores is humiliation and abuse of children, no thank you. When we know that not one graduate of Success Academy has passed the entry exam for NYC’s top high schools, we can see that test prep does not mean more knowledge, more understanding, or better education. Your obsession with test scores is revolting. I didn’t change the subject, John. You represent a fraudulent situationinwhich children are turned into “little test-taking machines.” Sorry, but that is not my idea of education.
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Diane,
That is exactly changing the subject.
When it suits you, you say charters perform worse.
When confronted with data that says otherwise, you change the subject to implicitly acknowledge they perform better but say they are unhappy, mistreated, or just good at test-taking, all of which are subjective and not supported by data.
As for my “revolting obsession” about test scores, I consider them an indicator, as do you when they support your premise.
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John,
I dismiss the importance of test scores because I don’t trust the measure. When paid charter advocates like you say that charters are better than public schools because they get higher test scores, I oblige by pointing out that claim is usually false and even when they do get higher scores, they do it by cheating: by excluding the hardest to educate, by humiliating children, and by intensive test prep that subverts real learning. Sorry if you don’t follow. You would be more credible if once in a while, you recognized the value of public schools
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Diane,
As I’ve mentioned many times, both of my kids go to great traditional public schools and I have lots of good things to say about many. For example, in the last week, I commented positively about Kingston, NY public schools. Did I miss someplace where you commented positively about *any* charter school?
You know (unless you think I’m lying) that I’m not a “paid charter advocate”. Besides, I’m not the one saying charters get better results for minority and low income students, CREDO is. On a site for “better education for all”, you would think this would be welcome news.
The rest of what you said regarding charter school “cheating” is anecdote, innuendo, and exaggeration. not fact. I’m sure it’s true in a small number of places, but please provide data that supports any of your contentions.
“real learning” is not the exclusive domain of traditional public schools, and when you imply that it is, you discredit a large number of very hard working teachers and kids.
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John, your sycophantic advocacy for no-excuses charter schools are not the words of a satisfied public school parent. No, it is not welcome to learn that a school that abuses its children, excludes those with disabilities and those who can’t speak English gets higher test scores. That is not “a better education for all.” It isn’t even education.
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John,
I have not kept count of the charter teachers–current and former–who contacted me to tell me how miserable they are/were. They don’t like working in fear.
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Diane wrote:[I have not kept count of the charter teachers–current and former–who contacted me to tell me how miserable they are/were.] Diane, do you honestly think, that teachers who like working at Success Academy would feel comfortable reaching out to you, and that you would hear them out?
Let me guess, you probably don’t meet many teachers, who are unhappy with traditional public schools, right?
When you engage in one-sided advocacy and make yourself deaf to counter-arguments, you attracts “like” thinkers, which is fine, but then you have built a bubble and can’t claim objectivity.
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Yuri,
Go away
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Diane wrote: [Yuri, Go away]. Diane, as I wrote previously, I have a child at Success Academy, I am very involved with the school, and I don’t intend to leave factually inaccurate information about my child’s school unanswered, as a matter of basic civic duty.
You are welcome to announce, that charter advocates are not welcome on this blog, and I will move on.
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Yuri,
I am glad you have a child at Success Academy. At least you admit it, unlike the other Evaphiles who write here.
I remind you that this is a blog dedicated to improving educational for all, not for lottery winners.
Please tell me how the selection and exclusion methods at SA contribute to “a better education for all,” since the kids who are unwanted by SA get pushed into public schools. If the public schools pushed those kids out, where should they go? Answer that question first.
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Diane,
Charters in NY have lower attrition than traditional public schools according to the NYC Independent Budget Office. SA maintains they have lower attrition than neighboring schools. On what data do you base your contention that they select, exclude, or push out kids? And if it’s by the cohort size (e.g. due to not backfilling), please provide comparable attrition data for NYC schools (e.g. a kid who leaves and one who comes in aren’t zero attrition).
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John,
Here is an article you may have not read, although I posted it. http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/student-attrition-and-backfilling-success-academy-charter-schools-what-student-enrollment
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Yes, I’ve read that. Leo Casey makes a good argument for charter schools admitting in all grades. There are good arguments to be against it as well.
Not “backfilling” can skew grades higher if one assumes that “replacement” students would be lower performing than the students that left. That can happen if surrounding schools aren’t doing a good job, or if they socially promote kids who aren’t prepared for next grade. It could also happen if the kids who leave are disproportionately lower performers (which could be the case and could explain a portion of SA’s higher relative scores).
So, I guess your basis for saying they select, exclude, or push out kids is that they don’t admit in all grades? I agree that this can be considered excluding some students who want to attend the school, but it’s hardly the nefarious plot you make it out to be. It’s a policy that one can legitimately find fault with but which is currently OK according to NY charter law.
Ironically, it is the children in the highest performing charters in the lowest performing neighborhoods that would be most negatively affected by admitting in higher grades.
As I’ve said before, anyone who compares charter scores to TPS scores without any context is misinformed. For the most part, this means comparing demographics to ensure comparable students and looking at attrition rates. Issues like backfilling likely affect scores to some extent also, but the affect is likely minimal and certainly doesn’t explain SA’s performance vs. comparable schools.
The Mathmatica study on KIPP attributes a very small part of student gains to backfilling policies and peer effects. As a reminder, they considered any student who attended KIPP for even a single day as part of the “treatment” group that was compared to the comparable students who didn’t go to KIPP and still found substantial gains in the KIPP schools.
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John wrote:[anyone who compares charter scores to TPS scores without any context is misinformed.] I am re-posting this technical data analysis of the test score impact of the difference in opt-in, student attrition, ELL and Special Needs rules or populations between traditional zoned schools and Success Academy. http://gradingatlanta.tumblr.com/post/95042173270/is-success-academy-the-climate-change-of-k-12 .
Author’s conclusion: “a portion of Success Academy’s over-achievement may be explained by factors related to the student population served. However, a majority of Success Academy’s over-achievement remains unexplained by these factors; therefore, it seems the schools’ curriculum and operations are responsible for much of their success”
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Yuri,
I hadn’t seen this. Thanks.
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[Diane: I am glad you have a child at Success Academy. At least you admit it, unlike the other Evaphiles who write here.] Diane, I wrote a number of times on this blog, that I have a child at SA, and you still suggested that I work for Success Academy – there is no way to win with you.
[this is a blog dedicated to improving educational for all, not for lottery winners.] As you well know, any magnet school that has more applications than seats, uses a lottery system. There is a lottery for Gifted and Talented programs, lottery for good un-zoned schools, lottery for more popular zoned schools and lottery for popular charter schools. If you don’t like the lottery system, then you should advocate for the creation of more schools that parents want.
It’s flawed arguments like this that frustrate me. As a prominent education historian, you know that this argument doesn’t hold water, and yet you throw it up yet again like spaghetti on the wall.
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A lottery system accepts the children who win the lottery. It doesn’t exclude children with disabilities and ELLs. Success is a richly endowed private school that used political means to get public funding. It’s existence is an embarrassment to the charter sector.
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[Success is a richly endowed private school that used political means to get public funding. It’s existence is an embarrassment to the charter sector.]
Diane, as I wrote before, these emotionally potent oversimplifications are unhelpful and an indication of a lazy writing style.
It’s much easier to memorize and throw around a bunch of cliches again and again, and it’s much harder to analyze the facts, look at the latest research and make data driven, factual judgments.
If you spend more effort on factual analyses, your critique will become more authoritative and helpful.
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Diane wrote:[how the selection and exclusion methods at SA contribute to “a better education for all,” since the kids who are unwanted by SA get pushed into public schools. If the public schools pushed those kids out, where should they go?]
Diane, there are 3 answers.
– First, you incorrectly imply that traditional public schools never select or push out students, which is inaccurate. Many well educated parents put their kids into Gifted programs, and many better schools in wealthy districts find way to place difficult kids elsewhere.
– Secondly, as I wrote before, student attrition at SA is around 10%, lower than in traditional public schools, and a good number of those kids leave the school because the family moves or other reasons, unrelated to academics. So this is where the anecdotes are true, but represent a small percentage of the kids. And yes, for some families, Success Academy is not a good fit, often because of the strict discipline and demands for active parent involvement.
If a parent doesn’t like what’s in the parent contract, or feels that SA’s culture is not a good fit for their child, they don’t have to send the child to Success Academy
– Most importantly, Success Academy is successful at educating a large percentage of kids from economically impoverished neighborhoods, that often have the worst traditional public schools. If you live next door to a zoned school, where 10% of the kids read at grade level, your chances of a good education at a nearby Success Academy are substantially better. So even if the most behaviorally disruptive local kids first join but eventually quit Success Academy, the great majority of the kids will stay and get a good education, and that moves the educational needle forward.
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The daughter-in-law of a good friend was a SA teacher. She left after one year because she could not take the pressure and work. And yes, she did tell me about their staff development. She told me that their philosophy is to change the black culture of immediate gratification to one of discipline. The developer said that in black culture does not have intrinsic motivation. To me, those statements are racist. That is why I was not completely shocked when I saw the video. She is presently working in a South Bronx public middle school made up of high needs students and she also also is working very hard, but she loves it.
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Ha, you are the one who changes the subject and when someone doesn’t fall for your ploy and ignores you, you accuse them of changing the subject that you had already changed from the original—something you do repeatedly.
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Lloyd wrote: [The so-called private sector non-profit corporate charters schools make their money by having a parent, for profit company own the property..] Lloyd, as John wrote, this is true in some states, and I think it is bad and should change. New York State charters, as well as any of their CMO’s, are non-profits by law.
As I wrote earlier, all you need to do in to visit Success Academy classrooms, to realize how disconnected from reality the profit argument is. If they are trying to “squeeze every last public dollar from the system”, why have 2 teachers in every class, expensive field trips every 3 weeks, invest in custom (expensive) curriculum, daily science with a dedicated science teacher in every grade.
As I said, Success Academy has room to improve, but the “profit” argument is just a distraction, designed for the less informed.
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Diane wrote [John,I dismiss the importance of test scores because I don’t trust the measure.] Diane, when you find yourself dismissing an ever growing amount of evidence, suggesting bad motives from anyone who likes a charter school, perhaps it’s time to re-calibrate your message.
I would love for you and your blog to have an accurate and pointed critique of the charter schools in New York, because thoughtful feedback can lead to improvement in the charter sector. But, instead, charter bashing became an object of faith to you, and you use all kinds of overly broad, overreaching arguments, either counter-factual or based on flimsy, anecdotal evidence.
You start with a political narrative and then ignore the facts the don’t fit your framing.
By contrast, I may not like the selective focus of the New York Times’ coverage of Success Academy, but it is very solid on the facts, which I can’t say about your writing.
If you examine new factual evidence, as it comes out, and then re-calibrate your message according to the new findings, your charter school critique will be sharper and more influential, and everyone will benefit.
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Yuri “would love for you and your blog to have an accurate and pointed critique of the charter schools in New York, because thoughtful feedback can lead to improvement in the charter sector.”
Difficult or impossible to do when the corporate character industry works mostly behind closed doors in an opaque and secretive environment built on a foundation of fear for those they teach and those who depend on a pay check to survive.
If the corporate charter industry opened their doors and their books to anyone who wants to know everything about how they operate and spend the public’s money, what would be your challenge then.
Yuri, what will your defense of the autocrats be when the audits are finished for all the publicly funded, private sector charters in New York City?
For instance, two days ago: “For the first time, the city comptroller has begun auditing charter schools, and his initial report finds a school in the South Bronx could not account for more than $100,000 in spending. NY1’s Lindsey Christ filed the following report.
$6,000 for ice cream. $16,000 for unlimited MetroCards. $7,000 so the principal could travel to Boston, Albany and Las Vegas.
“If you’re going to go to Vegas, you better document it,” said City Comptroller Scott Stringer.
Over a two-year period, officials at the South Bronx Charter School for International Cultures and the Arts spent more than $135,000 without the proper authorization or documentation, according to city auditors.
Monday’s report is the first in a series of charter school audits by City Comptroller Scott Stringer. Charter school operators had challenged whether Stringer had the right to audit their schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, but the comptroller said they all ended up cooperating.
“It’s all part of doing business with the city and helping our children,” Stringer said. “There has to be accountability. There has to be somebody watching the store. That’s the job I’m supposed to do.” …
Stringer says he’s still auditing Success Academy Charter Schools, the city’s highest-performing, most controversial and largest charter school network, with 11,000 students and 34 schools. Founder Eva Moskowitz makes more than $500,000 and is a former political rival of both Stringer and Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“The network successfully sued in 2014 to stop the state comptroller from conducting audits. Albany lawmakers later gave the city comptroller the power to examine charters’ finances. Stringer says he expects to release that audit later this year.”
If Eva had nothing to hide, why did she go to court to stop the last attempt to audit her books?
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Lloyd,
I think it’s good that NYC schools will be audited, but I also think it was reasonable for them to fight it. They all submit audited financials and publish 990s, and are subject to FOIL. Audits are time consuming (the last one my school had took 4 months of hosting the auditor and found nothing). We used count the cumulative number of audits that we’d had from various agencies, but I lost count at over 40 just a few years into it.
Audited financials for SUNY charters (including SA) are at http://www.newyorkcharters.org/progress/school-performance-reports/?report_type=Audited%20Financial%20Statements&when=All%20Years&district=All%20Districts&school=All%20Schools. 990s for SA, like all 501c3 charities, can be found at https://www.guidestar.org/profile/20-5298861.
It’s not unusual for audits to find something such as the examples you posted. Done by state or city government offices, they frequently are influenced by politics to find things that otherwise might not be considered significant. But, giving the Comptroller’s office the benefit of the doubt, they still will typically find some things in any public school.
For my local traditional public school, the major issue was lack of controls on assets that resulted in a huge number of laptops, snowblowers, etc. that could not be accounted for. I imagine the audit caused them to tighten this up, which is a good thing.
The NYS Comptroller’s office has been auditing charters now for about 5 years with some useful findings, some nitpicking, but no bombshells.
Want to know the real reason why I suspect SA would prefer not to be audited? You, and others who have made up your minds already, will give them zero credit for getting a clean audit, so there is no upside.
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John,
You make a strong case for not auditing charters. There is a sole way to avoid a public audit: don’t take public money. With so many billionaires on her board, Eva doesn’t really need public money.
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Dine wrote: [With so many billionaires on her board, Eva doesn’t really need public money] Diane, Success Academy is building a financially sustainable model, that does not depend on private donations for running schools. Private donations to SA are not used to operate existing schools, they are used to run the central SA offices, as well as as startup costs for opening new schools.
As it stands today, NYC charter schools already get less funding, compared to traditional public schools. Their per-student funding formula is less or comparable to traditional public schools (depending on which estimate you use), but charter schools don’t get additional moneys like funding for district offices etc…, that traditional schools enjoy.
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Yuri, it is not financially sustainable to rely on billionaires, unless you are Success Academy. What public school raises $8 million at a benefit dinner. This is a model for private schools. What public school pays its headmistress $500,000+? That’s not sustainable as a model.
What do you suggest we do with the SPED and ELL kids that don’t get accepted or retained in this model?
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Diane wrote:[What do you suggest we do with the SPED and ELL kids that don’t get accepted or retained in this model?]
Diane, first, there is a good number of SPED and ELL students at SA (my particular SA school has 13% of SPED and 18% of ELL students, and we are lucky to have a full time school psychologist plus a special ed teacher on staff). Network-wide, SPED and ELL kids perform comparably with general ed kids, which is an important accomplishment.
But only a few SA schools can provide a 12:1:1 setting, just like many traditional public schools can’t accommodate 12:1:1 – it’s a matter of funding.
But, of course, not every SPED or general ed child will benefit from the Success Academy’s strict discipline model, although many do. For some the answer may be a progressive school with no homework and minimal rules, or a NEST type program etc…
Again, Success Academy provides a better education for a good percentage of SPED and ELL kids, compared to the alternative. That in and of itself is valuable, even if it doesn’t work for all kids.
Remember, we have to grade on the curve. The worse the local zoned school, the better Success Academy looks in comparison, and most (not all) kids who get into SA will do better than their peers in a poor zoned school. That is important.
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And again, NYC IBO report says more SPED and ELL kids stay at their NYC charter school than those that stay at traditional public schools in NYC.
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“You, and others who have made up your minds already, will give them zero credit for getting a clean audit, so there is no upside.”
John, thank you for putting thoughts into our heads so we don’t have to think because you want to do our thinking for us.
Public schools are audited on a regular basis. That’s why the humans who are not perfect and fall victim to theft end up getting caught but the thefts are seldom anywhere close to whet is being uncovered in the autocratic, for-profit anyway you look at it, opaque corporate charter schools where the opaqueness attracts thieves like vultures and flies to a dead carcass.
Back to why so many of us in the resistance to safe the community based, democratic, transparent (a transparency that catches most if not all of the crooks before they can take the steal the big money), non profit public education. Most of us are aware of the facts that about 75% of private sector charters are worse or the same as the public schools they compete with for the same public dollars. The longer we stay aware and keep reading, the more we know.
As for your audits (the last one my school had took 4 months of hosting the auditor and found nothing), get used to it. Until the autocratic, opaque corporate charter school industry opens its doors and stops fighting transparency and audit laws with corporate lobbyists in the halls of government and lawyers paid for by hedge funds to challenge audits in the courts, every private sector charter will be under a shadow of doubt that will continue to grow no matter how many audits get a clean bill of health because management can chance and with change thieves can slip through the door and destroy that school.
If your little so-called mom-pop charter school is so great, why not become a private school and charge $25k to $45k annually and stop accepting public funds? Maybe billionaires will line up to enroll their children in your school and you won’t have to deal with those pesky audits caused by taking public money.
The same rules of transparency that apply to the public schools must apply to any private sector charter school that also operates with the same money. The original concept of charter schools was to have more freedom to try different approaches to teach the most at risk children but that didn’t apply to the transparency and audits. How many private sector charters work with only the most difficult to teach high risk children?
I have no sympathy for anyone in the private sector who takes public money to educate children and then steals children from public schools. Has your school been studied by CREDO yet and compared to the local public schools? How about the ratio of at risk children your school works with compared to the local public schools? How does your school compare?
Is it one of the few private sector, publicly funded charters that actually does better or one of the majority that does worse or no better?
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Lloyd,
You say “Public schools are audited on a regular basis. That’s why the humans who are not perfect and fall victim to theft end up getting caught but the thefts are seldom anywhere close to whet is being uncovered in [charters]”
Look, I agree that charters are more susceptible to fraud and should be audited, and I’ve said as much. But, I showed you an example of an $11 million fraud in *one* school district to compare to the $200 million in “fraud” (as determined by an anti-charter group) nationwide that you posted about.
“Most of us are aware of the facts that about 75% of private sector charters are worse or the same as the public schools they compete with for the same public dollars.”
Lloyd, this is old data and you refuse to look at the new data.
“I have no sympathy for anyone in the private sector who takes public money to educate children and then steals children from public schools.”
It’s sad to see that you think public charter schools are taking public money and “stealing” children. This presupposes ownership of these children by the traditional school unless a parent can afford to move to another school district or send their kid to private school.
As I’ve said before, I’m not going to discuss my specific school because I see no benefit to my students in that and try to make every decision based on what’s in their best interests. Suffice to say that it would close or be closed if it wasn’t able to demonstrate better performance than comparable neighborhood schools as that is a requirement of its charter. Plenty of charters in NY have been closed for that reason.
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You allege that I refuse to look at the new data.
Wrong again, John—as usual. You sure like to put words in other people’s mouths making repeated allegations that are hollow.
I went to the CREDO site and looked at their most recent national study that was from 2013. When the next NATIONAL study comes out from CREDO and they list it on their site, I’ll be looking at that one too. I don’t pay attention to the smaller studies that focus on limited areas or a limited number of schools because that approach is at risk of cherry picking schools and cities that will make the autocratic, for profit, corporate charters look good.
I’m more interested in the national studies —from reputable sources I hope—and so far there hasn’t been a real study of the entire charter industry in every state where they operate. Even the national studies have been limited in scope.
Why is there a movement to get rid of the community based, transparent, non profit democratic public schools and replace them with autocratic, opaque, for profit corporate charters?
Through the community based democratic process, schools labeled failing can be turned around when new school boards are elected if the old one wasn’t doing its job. The democratic process is the best method for change—much better, I think, then an autocratic, for profit process where the unexpected board and CEO is more interested in profits than the what goes on in the classroom to teach children to learn.
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Lloyd,
Sorry, I wrote my response clarifying calling CREDO “old” and then saw your response.
It’s fair to look at the nationwide data, but as CREDO points out, looking by region is way more useful because of the huge variations. National data is useful, but charters in NY and NJ (for example) are very different than those in Ohio and Florida.
I share your concerns about states with poor charter laws, for-profit operators, etc. I don’t think they should exist.
On the other hand, I don’t share your view that the democratic process always works for the betterment of education. Reliance on property taxes makes for huge disparities in spending. Public school boards also have mixed track records on adequately resourcing students and programs for the underserved because the more affluent parents are more vocal. Making education political (which publicly elected school boards do) results in lots of problems as well, including overmeddling by polilticians, overspending, etc.
Parental choice as implemented in most places puts control of the spending amount in the hands of the publicly elected school board, but control of school selection in the hands of the parents. I realize it’s an approach you disagree with, but I think it serves low income families and minorities better than the school board approach.
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I disagree with your claims of choice and that the autocratic, private sector, for profit free market works better than community based democracy.
In fact, it seems I’m not alone, because Stanford’s CREDO director stated publicly that the free market doesn’t work in education.
“I actually am kind of a pro-market kinda girl. But it doesn’t seem to work in a choice environment for education. I’ve studied competitive markets for much of my career. That’s my academic focus for my work. And (education) is the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work. I think it’s not helpful to expect parents to be the agents of quality assurance throughout the state. I think there are other supports that are needed… The policy environment really needs to focus on creating much more information and transparency about performance than we’ve had for the 20 years of the charter school movement. We need to have a greater degree of oversight of charter schools. But I also think we have to have some oversight of the overseers.”
And this comes from Dr. Raymond who works at the Hoover Institution at Stanford — a free market bastion.
In addition, Dr Andreas Schleicher, the Programme Director of the PISA international assessments, had this to say about the “choice” model, as the market model is commonly called overseas:
“My organisation [the OECD] is very strong on choice, enabling citizens to make choices, and you would expect that systems with greater choice would come out better. You expect competition to raise performance of the high performers and with low performers put them out of the market. But in fact you don’t see that correlation… Competition alone is not a predictor for better outcomes.”
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Lloyd,
Raymond says that parents can’t be the quality metric and I agree. She says we need more oversight and better authorizers and I agree with that too, especially in the weakest states.
Schleicher says “Competition alone is not a predictor of better outcomes” and I agree with that too.
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Lloyd wrote:[Why is there a movement to get rid of the community based, transparent, non profit democratic public schools and replace them with autocratic, opaque, for profit corporate charters?]
I agree with you – we don’t need for-profit charters. And I personally oppose poor quality charters and poor quality charter laws in many states. It’s important to recognize, that you and I are on the same side there.
Now, in areas of NYC, where some zoned schools have only 10%-15% of kids read or add at grade level, the situation is critical. Success Academy is popular there, partly because the status quo is such a disaster and, with all its criticisms, SA is moving an educational needle forward quite a bit for those kids, enjoying 10 applications for every open spot.
Take P.S. 123 Mahalia Jackson elementary in Harlem, where just 9% of the 3rd graders passed the math test. If you lived there, you would look at the nearby Success Academy Harlem 5 with quite a different eye. SA Harlem 5 has 2 teachers per class, a field trip every 3 weeks, a rich in-class take-home book library, daily science class, rich math and reading curriculum, and it is a very safe school.
You see, your outlook on a school depend on your available options, and if your child is zoned for an amazing school or passed a Gifted and Talented test, your school options look a lot different to you, than to a kid zoned to Harlem’s PS123.
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Lloyd,
I shouldn’t have referred to your charter school data as “old”, though it is older than the more recent CREDO and the data has been consistently improving over time.
The main point is that the data you and Diane always quote is national and includes a lot of states with lousy authorizers and lousy charter schools. It’s good to bring attention to those, and I wish they’d go away.
But, using the national data dilutes and hides how the best authorizers and schools perform and also does the same to subgroup performance.
That’s why I keep mentioning the CREDO urban charter study. It looks at charters in all 41 urban regions for which CREDO has data. It also looks at performance by subgroup.
This would be “cherry picking” data if I were saying that charters are better nationally. I only really care about urban charters and those that serve minority and low-SES subgroups. Also, the report is still looking at the majority of charter schools and children, and the only criteria for inclusion is “urbanity”.
As CREDO puts it:
“The charter sector is regularly treated as a monolithic set of schools, but recent research has made clear that across the U.S. there are in fact distinct charter markets with dramatically different student profiles, governance and oversight structures, and academic quality . Previous CREDO state level studies, in addition to other recent analyses of charter school performance, have identified individual charter markets substantially outperforming their TPS peers, particularly those serving students in urban areas. “
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John wrote, “Previous CREDO state level studies, in addition to other recent analyses of charter school performance, have identified individual charter markets substantially outperforming their TPS peers, particularly those serving students in urban areas.“
What you left out is how do these individual charter markets compare to TPS through student demographics and is this comparison only based on the highly questionably results of high stakes tests and, if so, what tests?
For instance, NAPCS Claim: “There is no significant difference in the percentage of English Learners served by traditional or public charter schools.”
This claim by NAPCS is unsubstantiated and demonstrably false. In 2013 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that it was unable to compare English-Language Learners (ELL) enrollment in charter schools and traditional public schools because “Education’s only available data on school-level ELL enrollment were unreliable and incomplete. Specifically, for over one-third of charter schools, the field for reporting the counts of ELLs enrolled in ELL programs was left blank.”
NAPCS claim: “According to the most recent publicly available data, 10 percent of charter school students are students with disabilities, compared to 12 percent of students in traditional public schools.”
Once again, the response from NAPCS is intentionally misleading and false. It is true that the proportion of children with disabilities in charter schools has increased, although the proportion of children with severe and moderate disabilities still remains very low. There are close to 60 charter schools in the country that focus on or almost exclusively serve students with disabilities. Most charter schools, however, continue to enroll between 0% and 7% students with disabilities, and these are largely children with mild disabilities, while the districts are still responsible for children with moderate and severe disabilities. The national average for district schools was 13% in 2011.
There’s a lot more from this February 28, 2015 piece from The Washington Post: Separating fact from fiction in 21 claims about charter schools.
Findings and Conclusions of the Report
Although the NAPCS report claims to “set the record straight on the truth about charter “schools,” its main purpose appears to be the repetition or “spinning” of claims voiced by advocacy groups and think tanks that promote privatization and school choice. Given the extensive research literature related to charter schools, it is surprising that the NAPCS report relies on such a small and selective set of sources. This review examines the claims made in the NAPCS report and summarizes the empirical evidence related to all 21 criticisms.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/02/28/separating-fact-from-fiction-in-21-claims-about-charter-schools/
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I didn’t attempt to explain the CREDO methodology because I know you read the studies. The urban study uses the same methodology as the national study that you consider a good reference.
The study uses “matched virtual peers”, a student from a nearby traditional public school in the same grade level, with the same gender, race/ethnicity, free or reduced price lunch status, English language leaner status, special education status, and prior test score on state achievement tests.
And yes, the studies are based on state test results. Whether those are a valid measure and what of is a different topic. If you have some better measurable outcome to look at, I’m all ears.
This method doesn’t distinguish between school effects and peer effects, but still seems to be the best type of study that we have for comparing schools.
The DOE National Center for Education Statistics says 11.7% of traditional public schools students have an IEP designation, vs 9.9% in charters, and 9.8% of charter schools students are English learners, compared to 9.1% in traditional public schools.
The GAO critique that you quote from below says “These blank fields cannot reliably be interpreted to mean that the charter schools did not have ELLs enrolled.”, so the errors would result in underreporting ELLs, not overrreporting them.
As you point out, looking at national data on sped populations can be misleading. That is my very point about looking at national data on charter schools as well. Averages can be very misleading since 5 and 5 average to the same number as 10 and 0.
To say that the anti-charter piece is “from The Washington Post” is very misleading. It was posted on the Washington Post blog and is not from their news department. It is a puff piece on a study done by the National Education Policy Center, which is funded in part by union interests and doesn’t even claim to be impartial.
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And yes, the studies are based on state test results. Whether those are a valid measure and what of is a different topic. If you have some better measurable outcome to look at, I’m all ears.
NAEP, the nations report card since 1969.
The NAEP shows steady improvement in the public schools for all racial groups over a period of more than 40 years—that is until 2001 and the privatization movement based on flawed high stakes tests that end up profiting a few corporations forced their way into the equation.
Since you seem to like diverting the topic of a post and thread here with your endless questions, that when ignored you claim change the subject, I have a question or two.
First question: Is your school one of the 60 mentioned in The Washington Post piece you allege is misleading—a piece that alleges, with links to reputable sources, that the reports out of the charter school movement are misleading?
“There are close to 60 charter schools in the country that focus on or almost exclusively serve students with disabilities. Most charter schools, however, continue to enroll between 0% and 7% students with disabilities, and these are largely children with mild disabilities, while the districts are still responsible for children with moderate and severe disabilities. The national average for district schools was 13% in 2011.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/02/28/separating-fact-from-fiction-in-21-claims-about-charter-schools/
The study you allege is misleading was published by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, and which you can find in full, complete with extensive footnotes on the NEPC website. (I have removed the footnotes and end notes from the text in this post but you can see them, as well other parts of the report, here.)
http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-separating-fact-and-fiction
If your answer to my first question is yes, that means your school belongs to less than 1% of the total 6500 + or – charter schools and you are defending the other 99.1% that are not doing the original job intended for charters.
If you answer no or decline to answer, then that pretty much sums it up that you are totally on the side of the autocratic, for-profit, opaque, corporate charter school movement and against community based democracy in action.
Second question: In your school, do your teachers teach creationism or evolution or a mixture of both? If you don’t answer, then I will conclude your teachers teach creationism.
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Lloyd,
Are you really asking if my school is one of the 60 or so charters that almost exclusively educate students with IEPs? If so, no. We have an open entollment/lottery process that is not restricted to students with EPs.
If you are saying that is the criteria for a good charter school, you truly don’t understand the scope of the problem for minorities and kids from economically disadvantaged families, who make up the vast majority of our students.
No, we don’t teach creationism. It isn’t science. I doubt there are any public schools (traditional or charter) in NY that do, but I could be wrong. I know for sure that there are traditional public schools elsewhere in the country that teach it, and I imagine there are charters too in the same areas.
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Yuri,
I base my critique of charters on documentation and the very many SA teachers and central office staff who have reached out to me.
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It is interesting that in those states that Republicans control, there is no interest at all in combating charter school fraud.
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There definitely seems to be a correlation there and I suspect it’s about campaign contributions by for-profit charters.
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Diane,
I’m curious. How many charter schools have you visited?
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