As the charter industry grows, many observers have wondered how their expansion affects the public schools in the same district. A new study published by the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, addresses that question.
Policymakers have assumed that the charter sector would provide healthy competition for district public schools. The promise originally was that they would spur innovation and efficiency, and at the same time would be accountable for results. We know from the example of Milwaukee, which has had charters and vouchers for 25 years, that none of these promises were true. Nonetheless, the claims still are repeated and all too often believed by a gullible media and public, which seldom if ever hears critical views.
The present study should be distributed to every news outlet, so they understand the collateral damage that charters inflict on public schools.
“Little scholarship has been devoted to the impact of charter schools on, one, how much revenue school districts collect through local property taxes and, two, how school districts budget that revenue.
“With “The Effect of Charter Competition on Unionized District Revenues and Resource Allocation,” Jason B. Cook fills this void. Cook, a doctoral student in economics at Cornell University, focuses on Ohio, home to a high concentration of both online and brick-and-mortar charter schools, and examines school budget data in the state from 1982 through 2013. In addition to confirming in detail that charter competition has reduced federal, state, and local support for district schools, Cook finds that charter competition has driven down local funding by depressing valuations of residential property and has led school districts to redirect revenue from instructional expenditures (in particular, teacher salaries) to facility improvements. Cook complements these two important findings with thorough explanations.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Great, thank you, I’ll read it.
This all by itself is amazing though:
“Little scholarship has been devoted to the impact of charter schools on, one, how much revenue school districts collect through local property taxes and, two, how school districts budget that revenue.”
“Little scholarship”. Mind-blowing. So how did that happen, Diane? How could there be an an entire ed reform “movement” filled with politicians and elected officials and lobbyists and academics and yet no one bothered to look at any possible downside to privatization when 95% of kids attend the public schools that were ignored?
How does that happen? A “movement” supposedly about improving public schools simply neglected to study how public schools do with the introduction of charters and vouchers? Why were public schools not valued enough to study them?
That seems REMARKABLY insular to me, especially from people who lay claim to being”systems thinkers”. I think the word is “captured” but that’s my opinion.
Simple explanation: $$$$$.
It runs all thru ed reform. This is the Senate leader on education in Ohio:
“Proud to promote charter schools today during National Charter Schools Week at the student rally”
Replace “charter schools” with “public schools” and try to imagine any ed reform politician making that statement. It would never happen.
She’s the legislative leader of a state where 93% of children attend public schools and you will be hard-pressed to find a mention of public schools on her Twitter feed.
It’s remarkable that it’s happening but the craziest part is, they’re so far in the bubble they don’t even notice! How do you omit and/or disappear 93% of students and not notice?
LeftCoastTeacher
May 19, 2016 at 9:18 am
Simple explanation: $$$$$.
Okay, but academics? What explains that?
Imagine if they privatized part of Social Security. “Choice”. You could take your payroll deduction and put it in a 401K.
Would there be NO thought or analysis given to those who remained in the public program- the effects of the privatized portion ON the public program? Of course there would be. Politicians try to privatize SS all the time. The analysis looks at BOTH the privatized portion and the public program. They don’t just pretend the public program doesn’t exist. It’s a SYSTEM.
That seems crazy enough where an explanation is required.
I think it is more like privatizing Medicare. I am sure that is next on the list.
Private insurers are given “public” tax dollars to insure patients. The private insurers are allowed to drop patients as soon as they get sick or are otherwise too expensive. But if you are healthy, they treat you very well — until you get sick, of course. But many people remain healthy until they drop dead and those people are very pleased they can see their “chosen” doctor for an annual check-up.
If you want to roll the dice and bet you (or your child) will never get sick enough to be one of the dropped patients who is then left to die in a hospital where you only receive minimal pain relief and one nurse for every 40 patients, you can “choose” this. People who support charters and privatization are rolling the dice that their children won’t get in a car accident and be brain damaged and then sent to a place where 10 teachers take care of 500 kids with no aides, as the privatizers think is perfectly fine.
Privatize the profits so the administrators of charters can get rich and donate handsomely to politicians. Socialize the costs so the public schools get to raise taxes on parents because billionaires shouldn’t pay that much.
President Obama understood why that didn’t work when it came to health care reform. But when it came to education reform, he seemed to forget that lesson. I’m sure the billionaires in the financial industry he counts as his besties helped him conveniently forget that if you privatize the profits and socialize the costs of a public good, you are basically enabling total corruption paid for by our tax dollars. Thanks, Obama. We appreciate you allowing your pals to profit on our tax dollars. I expected that from Gov. Kasich. But you truly surprised me with your embrace of letting the rich profit at the expense of the poor.
http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/tn/2016/05/18/state-board-showdown-highlights-feud-between-shelby-county-and-charter-operators-over-closure-rules/#.Vz2-gIQrLct
Takes you to an article on the discussion over charters in Memphis. The article references the Commercial Appeal.
Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the effect of competition in general.Sports success is often cited as a system that has gotten better through competition. I can see that. When I was a boy, little schools in dying agricultural communities fielded basketball teams. These teams generally were full of kids that were fresh off the hay wagon. Their athletic skills were unpolished, but often they were successful. Many little hamlets had a sign that celebrated a championship of some sort. As schools have gotten bigger, consolidated in the bigger is better era, basketball teams are more schooled in the fundamentals. Basketball is better. But are more kids able to play? If sports are good for kids, is it not better when more kids play sports?
But I am not talking about sports. I am talking about competition and its effect on schools. If competition means that a charter or a magnet pulls all the highly motivated children from a neighborhood school, leaving those who do not really understand the commitment needed for a true education, who will teach them? And who will teach those highly motivated kids what it is like to be around people who are different from you? What experiences will teach the children about each other, one learning what it must be like to come from a loving, caring family, the other what it might be to be destitute emotionally or financially?
Perhaps competition does not really produce the best results in education, be it basketball or biology.
Reposted this article in comments section of this morning’s op-ed article on Charter Schools in the Eli Broad LA Times. Posted a few other links too. 🙂 Did the same last week to Howard Blume’s article criticizing a union funded expose on charters. 🙂
The conclusion is that charters harm public schools, but some of the damage is not immediately evident. It is clear that teachers salaries are lowered in public schools as school put more resources into facilities in order to compete with charters. The study recommends that states create countervailing aid or a subsidy to boost operating budgets of districts whose budgets have been creamed by widespread charter expansion. If so many of our policymakers were ethical and not bought paid for by the charter industry, this would be a possibility, and it may be a possibility for some states, but not for others.
Charters cause more than just economic harm to public schools. High stakes testing is directly connected to market based ideology. The fact that tests have rigged cut scores attests to the fact that government is working with corporations to provide a steady stream of potential students available for charter expansion. Furthermore, the fact that government has made only token attempts to regulate this industry when it would be in the best interests of students and taxpayers to do so, attests to the federal government’s charter partiality. The reform movement has attempted to silence opposition and turn public schools into test factories, and this trend shows no evidence of slowing down as billionaires are given free access to use students as guinea pigs. Students, teachers, families and communities are all victims of so called reform. “Reform” has a great human cost as well as economic.
Andy Smarick described what I call the “Master Plan” in 2008. http://educationnext.org/wave-of-the-future/ Excerpt:
“… two camps have organically emerged. The first sees chartering as an education system operating alongside traditional districts. This camp contends that the movement can provide more options and improved opportunities, particularly to disadvantaged students, by simply continuing to grow and serve more families.
“The second group sees chartering as a tool to help the traditional sector improve. Chartering, the argument goes, can spur district improvement through a blend of gentle competitive nudging and neighborly information sharing.
“Both camps are deeply mistaken. For numerous policy and political reasons, without a radical change in tactics the movement won’t be able to sustain even its current growth rate. And neither decades of sharing best practices nor the introduction of charter competition has caused districts to markedly improve their performance.
“Both camps have accepted an exceptionally limited view of what this sector might accomplish. Chartering’s potential extends far beyond the role of stepchild or assistant to districts. The only course that is sustainable, for both chartering and urban education, embraces a third, more expansive view of the movement’s future: replace the district-based system in America’s large cities with fluid, self-improving systems of charter schools…”
###
As a supporter of public education and 18-year veteran urban public school parent, I find the chronic passivity of the national teachers unions’ leadership — in the face of the year-by-year ongoing dismantling of public ed — to be appalling and absolutely unforgivable.
I actually respect the privatizers more than the “agnostics”
The problem is politicians are putting this in without revealing that that’s what they’re doing.
If we had a real debate on privatizing all US public schools and there was broad agreement on that, I suppose I’d have to live with it. I think it’s a hugely tragic error and there will be lots of lots of negative consequences for ordinary people that The Best and Brightest haven’t contemplated, but I could live with the results of a national referendum on privatizing public schools.
None of them run on that. They’re misleading people. John Kasich never ran on privatizing public schools, and either did President Obama.
If this is the Master Plan they need to admit that. Then we can have a debate instead of this slippery nonsense about “agnostics” when CLEARLY they prefer privatized systems.
Arne Duncan once said “10%” of US public schools would be privatized.
They have absolutely no way to predict what will happen when they create and subsidize a privatized sector inside a universal public system.
It’s deceptive. Duncan can’t predict 10%.
The absolute arrogance it takes to blow up a system when they have NO IDEA how their grand plans will shake out is stunning. They’re insulated from the results of their actions. If they dismantle your local public system none of them will be around to suffer the blowback of their experiment.
The charter movement we see today is not a free market; it is a rigged system of government and corporation collusion, like high stakes tests. The fact is good public schools provide more choice and options for families than most one size fits all charters. They help build communities, not destroy them. Charters have failed to deliver on any positive innovation or outstanding academic gains. Most of the positive results come from fake “studies” from special interest groups. We may have a few academic gains for a few students from charters with high attrition rates and cherry picking. These results are more from social engineering than any real achievement, and the model falls apart on a large scale. The fact is charters are costing us more, duplicating fixed costs, destroying middle class jobs and careers in order to provide investors with ROI. The social and political impact is community destruction, increased segregation and loss of local democratic voice and control of schools.
Chiara-Charter expansion is like a dirty little political secret that prefers to operate under the table, in dark rooms, away from voters, who for the most part if they had a say, would reject more charters.
retired teacher you are absolutely correct
That is why charters got away from their original purpose of showing public schools new ways they can adopt. The only “successful” ones are adopting means — getting rid of students — that public schools can’t adopt. Or they serve the same middle class students that the good public schools do.
Granting all that’s been said, the question still remains as to WHY public schools get so little defense against this charter school chipping away at revenue?
Because the people who SHOULD be defending public schools are making money off charters, HU. In my own state, several members of the state legislature and state school board own, or are employed by, charter management groups.
The conclusions on pages 30- 31should be widely circulated, including to every school board in Ohio, the new chief state officer and so on. The charter industry is shown to be a destructive force, not only in reducing property values but also diverting money from instructional resources.
The bulk of the study is too complicated for readers who do not have advanced studies in statistics. This is an amazing feat of complicated but persuasive scholarship.
Ohio ed reform made the front pages again:
Nothing changes and the train keeps rolling right along on the privatization track.
You know they’re pushing IQInnovations into public schools now, right?
Lager wasn’t making enough money. Now he wants a cut of every public school dollar. Meanwhile the ed reform “movement” continue blithely on their way, giving each other awards.
Chiara, that article demonstrates exactly what the privatizers delight in!
The kids who will be treated like criminals and purposely made to feel some of that patented “misery” that charters like to deliver to unwanted kids will have on-line schools. They will become the new dumping ground for every high needs child the charters decide are too expensive to bother with. On-line schools are destined not to get most of them to meet the faux “standards” anyway, but why not allow their operators to make millions in the 2 years they operate until they are closed for poor performance and another connected group gets the new “charter” dumping ground. As long as those charter operators can make a lifetime of wealth in just a few years, they will be more than happy to be closed.
The author (as per the charts on page 44) points to a decline in housing values in the districts he studied between 2004 and 2009 and suggests this may be due to a perception that the quality of the traditional public schools declined as charter schools expanded, explaining:
“There are several reasons to believe that the negative pressures could plausibly dominate in Ohio. First, if charter quality is low, then opening new charters may not generate positive housing capitalization. The Ohio Department of Education places relatively few restrictions on the eligibility of charter school authorizers and implements limited restrictions to ensure quality control.(37) As a result, the quality of the average Ohio charter school may be lower than in other states and may be negatively capitalized into housing values.”
The paper certainly leaves open the possibility that the impact of charter schools on traditional schools (and effects on property values/tax revenues) could be in either direction.
W. Bentley MacLeod and Miguel Urquiola in their paper “Anti-Lemons: School Reputation and Educational Quality” flesh out some potentially key factors writing that “if the reputation model holds for a school market:
• Parents will have a clear preference for schools with higher absolute achievement—this will not necessarily translate into a preference for schools with greater value added.
• If schools can select students based upon ability then:
– School choice will result in stratification, with the highest ability/income children going to the most desirable and productive schools.
– School choice will result in lower student effort, and in lower incomes for students who do not gain admission to selective schools. (Note that if peer effects exist, then changes in the distribution of students will have additional effects on the level and distribution of achievement.)
• If schools cannot select on ability, the introduction of school choice will unambiguously raise school performance and student outcomes.”
Click to access MacLeod-Urquiola(2009).pdf
Anyone have other research to recommend on the subject?
You are right. In addition to harming traditional public schools, charters create an anti-democratic stratified system of haves and have nots. Many civil rights groups have been duped or bribed to support charters because, in reality, the harshest negative impact is being felt in communities of color.
An op-ed in today’s LATIMES explains how this posting and this thread got it all wrong—
Link: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-roza-charter-fiscal-impact-public-20160519-snap-story.html
The title is a teaser: “Do charters really ‘drain’ money from public school students?”
The answer, of course, is no, because (among many other things) a student is a student is a student.
Now that that’s cleared up…
😎
Exactly! And the reason that students are placed on got to go lists in the best performing charters is because all students are equal. The students placed on got to go lists are exactly like the ones who aren’t. The charters are just randomly making room for the new kids who they test before allowing them to fill a seat! It’s random!
2/3 of ALL Medicare payables take place in the last year of a person’s life, without regard to improvement of quality or longevity…just to make an effort as their families watch them die. Now, imagine diverting a portion of those funds to education instead (enriching the lives of young people) and see what that would produce?
Imagine allowing a human to make her/his own choice to die and not SPEND that money…
Exactly!
Imagine if you were told that if you didn’t “choose” to die your family would be hit with a $500,000 hospital bill that they could not forego and would follow each of your children or grandchildren for the rest of their lives? What if you were a young mom with ovarian cancer discovered at stage 4 and told her life wasn’t worth it to treat, but as long as you don’t mind your children carrying your debts, you can actually go to this nice “charter” hospital that will only treat diseases that can be cured with a dose of antibiotics, although they are happy to treat cancer patients who pay privately because they believe the extra year or two or life is worth the high debt they are giving their children. Or, if they are lucky enough to be one of the billionaires, they might find it a bit of a nuisance that their kids will have to live on an inheritance of only $499 million instead of $500 million.
That’s the kind of “choice” the privatizers can get behind! You can “choose” whatever treatment you want, as long as you are very healthy! Otherwise, the hospital will “choose” not to treat you and you should just accept death.
NYC Public School Parent,
You are so far off base from my commentary, I don’t know if I have the capacity to bring you in line? Medicare spends ALL that $$ on elderly people dying!!!!! All those other scenarios you identified aren’t part of what’s at the core of my comments?
“Medicare spends ALL that $$ on elderly people dying!!!!!”
No, what you mean is that it is spent at the end of life, when people are sickest. Of course most of the money will be spent on the sickest people. That’s what insurance is all about! You are buying into the right wing rhetoric.
Now I have no problem with people making educated decisions as to whether they want to prolong life or not. But that is exactly what we are doing. There is no shortage of counseling and information about hospice when you are dying these days. However, I have also seen perfectly competent elderly people (and Stage 4 cancer patients) getting undertreated and left in so much pain that they feel they have no choice but to hasten death as fast as possible. If you have a system where hospitals are incentivized to get rid of the dying patients because they are too expensive…..well, we all know where that leads. It is exactly the same incentives that are at work in charter schools.
I do understand that you aren’t saying to let people die or abandon them. But why did you have to use Medicare to demonstrate extra money? Why not say the money spent on wars, military contractors, building tunnels to bring oil from Canada, etc? The comparison to Medicare just hit a nerve with me – I apologize if it was off base from your commentary.
Soylent School Aid.
SMH…
“Soylent school aid” – Are you talking about the rich charters getting richer by “disappearing” the poorest and hardest to teach kids so as to better feed the middle class (and “striving” poor ones) without having to spend too much of their money?
SMH — I am such an old fogey I had to look up what that means. But now that I know – right back at ya!
Not my words…comment on my comment
plectrumm — yes, I am sorry. I meant to address the first sentence to the comment above yours, and the SMH to you. But I wrote it badly.
Our issues are social in nature, arising from the transition of generational attitudes and needs…
I think the billionaires who tell the reformers what kind of reform is “acceptable” would be only too delighted to make this about the old generation taking funding from the young. The right wing has been very successful in turning working poor people against working middle class people whose decent salary is because of a union. So why not turn it to young people turning against the senior citizens who never got rich enough to be able to pay insurance premiums of $8,000/month (which would be what the free market charged people very likely to need medicine).
After all, that’s much better than looking at these issues in a way that might actually mean that the billionaires had to pay a penny more in taxes or that defense contractors don’t get their billion dollar contracts.
In the right wing playbook, always pit one group of barely middle class people against another group of barely middle class people so that neither group realizes that the .001% is laughing as they walk away with the spoils.
A few questions- Will NCSPE’s report be published in the same places, that the John Arnold/ Walton-funded, December paper (written by a different Columbia Teachers College professor), was featured? What accounts for the difference, in where university research appears? Are all periodicals and websites, worthy of staking the Colleges’ reputation, by identifying it, with the employee-writers’ names? Collegiate policy, on the subject, seems warranted in today’s climate. The justification for UnKochMyCampus.org focuses the point.
Does a college or university have a policy about use of business strategies, like “embargoing” for papers? The December college paper was, oddly, subject to, “embargoing”.
What criteria should the public use to distinguish institutional research from industry trade or oligarch-funded think tank work product? Is there a collegiate obligation to have standards that assure that the institution lives up to the public’s perception of higher learning’? Is anything lost, or should there be protections to prevent loss, when and if professors or administrators try to convert education into industry?
If accrediting means nothing, universities will have to step up or, cease to have any meaningful difference, from profit-driven industry.
(Having a college president as subject of an article, “Students Urge President to Cut Ties with Pearson”, is profoundly disturbing.
Reblogged this on rjknudsen.