Steven Singer writes about the slickest con job of our time. He calls it the “Charter School Swindle.” It is a triumph of marketing and propaganda. Would you believe that charlatans sold the idea of segregation to Black and Latino parents and got away with it? Would you believe they sold these families on the claim that entry into a charter school was a ticket to success, with no evidence?
Singer writes:
Segregation now!
Higher suspension rates for black students!
Lower quality schools for Latinos!
These may sound like the campaign cries of George Wallace or Ross Barnett. But this isn’t the 1960s and it isn’t Alabama or Mississippi.
These are the cries of modern day charter school advocates – or they could be.
School choice boosters rarely if ever couch their support in these terms, but when touting charter schools over traditional public schools, this is exactly what they’re advocating.
According to the Civil Right Project at UCLA, “The charter school movement has been a major political success, but it has been a civil rights failure.”
It’s choice over equity.
Advocates have become so blinded by the idea of choice that they can’t see the poor quality of what’s being offered.
Because charter schools DO increase segregation. They DO suspend children of color at higher rates than traditional public schools. And they DO achieve academic outcomes for their students that are generally either comparable to traditional public schools or – in many cases – much worse.
In Brown vs. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it is Unconstitutional to have “separate but equal” schools because when they’re separate, they’re rarely equal. Having two parallel systems of education makes it too easy to provide more resources to some kids and less to others.
Who would have ever thought that some minority parents would actually choose this outcome, themselves, for their own children!?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
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So TRUE!
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The story of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” comes to mind whenever I hear the 2Good2BeTrue promises by our BILLIONAIRES & Co. They promise, threaten, lie, and eventually lead our innocent children to away, somewhere…never to be recognized again, while they stash their ever-growing $B somewhere in the world.
The town of Hamelin (Hameln), Germany, has a statue to our Deformsters Pied Pipers.
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I hate to be such a “traditionalist” but wouldn’t it be important to mention that Arne Duncan is not just the former Sec of Ed but also works for this ed reform org?
http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/common-yo-yo-ma-arne-duncan-reimagining-high-school/
It’ll give the public a head’s up when he lobbies his former colleagues in DC and these “reforms” start showing up in our schools. Mysteriously. As “good ideas” backed by “data”.
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If a person were genuinely concerned about school segregation, he should attack the problem at its source—not charter schools, not the wholly discredited and debunked idea of “de facto segregation,” but rather the collective support of whites for a system that assigns children to schools solely on the basis of where they reside, and the deliberate, intentional, planned public policies that guide, enable, and sustain the enterprise.
The idea that charter schools in the hypersegregated urban centers of the northeast and midwest are drawing away black and Latino students from even minimally integrated schools is laughable. Furthermore, the nation’s worst school segregation, which can be found on Long Island, NY (https://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/ny-norflet-report-placeholder/Kucsera-New-York-Extreme-Segregation-2014.pdf), occurs in the virtual absence of charter schools—Nassau and Suffolk Counties are home to a grand total of five charter schools that educate 2,041 children, vs. a whopping 442,940 enrolled in traditional public district schools.
Singer, of course, would never in a million years send his own children to the type of traditional public school the typical northeastern/Midwestern charter-going family is zoned for. Singer thinks they are easily duped, and that they aren’t savvy enough to know what is going on inside their child’s charter school. He doesn’t allow for the fact that different people may have different opinions and ideas about how to raise children, and that not all parents, even very privileged parents like me, wish to make the same parenting decisions as Steven Singer.
Most importantly, Singer is completely wrong about charter school performance. Multiple random-assignment studies show the benefits of charters (see here: http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20104029/pdf/20104029.pdf , here: http://economics.mit.edu/files/6335 , here: http://users.nber.org/~schools/charterschoolseval/how_NYC_charter_schools_affect_achievement_sept2009.pdf , and here: http://educationnext.org/files/ednext20054_52.pdf ) ; the CREDO urban charter school study has a less robust study design, but since CREDO studies appear to be the source for Singer’s claim that many charters perform worse than traditional public schools, I’ll assume he’ll honor its conclusion that charters are getting superior results for black and Latino students (http://urbancharters.stanford.edu/summary.php).
Segregation didn’t seem to be much of a concern to most until the existence of charter schools sprung a leak in the few-other-options pipeline feeding bodies into isolated and hypersegregated traditional public schools. I’ll rethink this position the precise moment that I see many, many more educators, activists, and advocates rolling up their sleeves and sending in their OWN kids to help fix the types of schools that charter parents are opting out of.
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Tim, you can’t make an already segregated system better by further INCREASING that segregation. Either we’re for segregation or we’re not. By the way, please don’t make assumptions about my personal life. My daughter goes to an urban public school. I teach at an urban public school. I’m on the front lines everyday. Some of my students come to me after being kicked out of one of our local charter schools. I see first hand the so-called high academic achievement of the charter school industry, because it’s my job to undo the damage.
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“By the way, please don’t make assumptions about my personal life,” says the person who wrote a long blog post that makes many offensive assumptions about hundreds of thousands of poor black and Latino families.
Yeah, my kids go to urban public schools, too. But not the kind where only 10-15% of kids are performing at grade level, or the kind where 25% of the kids are chronically absent, or the kind where barely any students will eventually make it out of a four-year college. I’m willing to bet that your daughter doesn’t go to that kind of school, either.
“Tim, you can’t make an already segregated system better by further INCREASING that segregation.”
Feel free to identify the plans the traditional district public school system has had to bring the children who are leaving apartheid district schools to attend apartheid charters into well-integrated neighborhood schools . . . crickets.
The system has no intention whatsoever to integrate those kids. It hasn’t for decades. They are right where the system wants them, and the system will keep them there unless a pesky judge says otherwise.
But it is with those kids that you want the buck to stop. It’s okay for everyone else to leave, but not them. They need to stay–it’s good for them!
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Tim, I don’t understand you. You want to attack segregation by opening more segregated schools?
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Diane, if you don’t have any meaningful, actionable solutions to address school segregation, then why would you care if parents choose to move their children from one non-integrated school to another?
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Interesting that you think “the source” is assigning kids to local schools rather than residential segregation itself. Seems to me your beef is more with housing/zoning/lending laws and practices than with education.
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This is retrograde, outdated thinking; in fact, the claim that school segregation and residential segregation are somehow separate instead of inseperably related is actually part of the narrative that allows school segregation to continue unchecked. “This 98% white town in an integrated metropolitan area is just due to market forces. Anyone who can buy a house is free to live in my district/town!”
Read Kenneth Jackson’s “Crabgrass Frontier” and the indispensable “American Apartheid,” by Massey/Denton. Read the section of Elizabeth Warren’s “The Two-Income Trap” that deal with housing and schools. For sure read Ansley Erickson’s outstanding new book “Making the Unequal Metropolis,” or this shorter (and free) journal piece she coauthored about the school system in Flint, Michigan — https://www.tc.columbia.edu/faculty/ate11/faculty-profile/files/Highsmith&Erickson_AJE_2015.pdf. White citizens, working in concert with business leaders, politicians, and school board officials, planned which neighborhood schools — and which neighborhoods, period — would be white and which would be black.
It is largely the preservation of minimally integrated school systems, and the artificial (and punishingly expensive–compare the cost of a house in Hastings-on-Hudson with one in Yonkers, e.g..) housing premium associated with such districts, that motivates exclusionary zoning, mortgage discrimation, and steering and other bad behavior by realtors. Today, right now, in 2016.
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The charters in my area are FAR more segregated than the public schools. In fact, one of the main reasons that parents pick charters in my area is to “get away from THOSE kids” (read: Latino). My area is creating segregation where little existed. And I’ll bet my area isn’t’ the only area like this.
So, spare us your “hypersegregated public schools” yarn, Tim.
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If you’ll go back and re-read my post, I think you’ll find it clear I was referring to large concentrations of minorities living in segregated metropolises, a situation that doesn’t truly exist in Utah.
My first visit to your state’s clunky-looking but actually quite useful state education department’s website tells me that for the 2015-2016 school year, 75.4% of the children in traditional public schools in Utah are white and 24.6% are what the department describes as an “ethnic minority”. The corresponding numbers for charter schools? 76% white and 24.0% “ethnic minority.”
http://www.schools.utah.gov/data/Reports/Enrollment-Demographics.aspx
Of course this doesn’t tell us much about what’s happening at the individual school level. It doesn’t support the idea that charters exist solely as facilitators of white flight, though.
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Okay Tim :
Why not go all the way and solve the segregation problem and the education problem . This will not be solved in our schools .It will not be solved by Charters ,by Common Core , by testing or by teacher evaluation . The myth of our meritocracy is part of a school reform moment that is orchestrated by plutocrats to justify huge!! inequality.
Both Krugman and Summers have said as much. Krugman in “Sympathy for the Luddites ” ” Education, then, is no longer the answer to rising inequality, if it ever was (which I doubt).”
Summers at Brookings :”I think the [education] policies that Aneesh is talking about are largely whistling past the graveyard. The core problem is that there aren’t enough jobs. If you help some people, you could help them get the jobs, but then someone else won’t get the jobs. Unless you’re doing things that have things that are effecting the demand for jobs, you’re helping people win a race to get a finite number of jobs… ”
It will be solved when we manage an economy that provides decent wages for all our workers , thus increasing demand and growing the economy. . Our economic policies are controlled by the same group of economic elites and their surrogates that drives the ed reform movement,attacking teachers their unions the University system. Whether it is trade policy,deindustrialization , worker protections and rights, or immigration policy, they are moving the nation in the opposite direction, toward greater inequality and increased poverty. Then blaming education for the failure they have created.While increasing inequality as the senator from Vermont says .
Those mostly segregated neighborhoods on Long Island do not have walls around them. I live in one of them Their walls are constructed of economic inequality . Back 1965 a labor leader in NYC named Harry VanArsdale jr became the first Construction Trades leader in NYC to take in large numbers of Blacks and Hispanics into his union’s apprenticeship , He did this after participating in the March on Washington and against the desires of a good portion of his members . Today those workers now retired and younger minority workers live in middle class neighborhoods throughout NYC and its suburbs. Some in my neighborhood . Overwhelmingly their children and grand children have graduated college which still is no guarantee of prosperity, as today’s millennials are screaming .We will become a post racial society only when the economy is managed in ways that lessen inequality . Economics determine ethos not the other way around. Economics determines educational outcomes not the other way around. Laswell’s definition of politics explains economic outcomes.
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Joel,
Middle class and even affluent blacks live in neighborhoods where the average income is less than it is in poor white neighborhoods. Take blacks and whites with identical incomes and credit histories, and the whites will be far more likely to receive a mortgage, and on top of that they’ll also be extended much larger loans. This is all before you get into the blatant steering and discrimination. Money, it seems, only goes so far as an equalizer, especially on Long Island.
Did Harry Van Arsdale — or Walter Reuther or Albert Shanker — bring appreciable numbers of blacks into union leadership, into management, or into the highest paying positions? Of course not. There’s a reason why the Sanders message didn’t resonate with older people of color. They’ve been down this road before.
And the NY trade unions today are still segregated, still lily white at the top, still use a referral system that fast-tracks whites to the best jobs while placing whatever minorities who do get in into apprenticeship positions.
I guess it’s just another one of those areas where people of color need to be patient and “fix” things. Solidarity, brother!
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Tim says: “Segregation didn’t seem to be much of a concern to most until the existence of charter schools…”
You got it backwards, Tim.
“Integration” was never a concern of charter schools until people started questioning why so many at-risk minority students in the 100% minority “no excuses” charter schools were dropping out, despite their parents WANTING that charter school. Eventually, people stopped believing the charter school operators’ lies that all those parents who happily sent their kids to a charter because it was the “best” school in the district suddenly “changed their minds” and preferred their failing public school instead.
The truth is that the “no excuses” charters were grasping at every excuse in the book to hide the fact that they only wanted to educate the highest performing “strivers” and were ruthlessly ridding themselves of all the at-risk kids who might interfere with their bragging rights and desire to convince the public that they had a “secret sauce” to educate all the kids in failing public schools. People were starting to wonder at high suspension rates of 5 year olds and why so many at-risk students who won the lottery were disappearing by the testing grades.
A few schools like KIPP (in NYC, not everywhere) actually starting looking at what they were doing and deciding that getting rid of students wasn’t ethical. Their attrition rate went down, and so did their test scores.
But other charter schools, backed by billionaires happy to fund whatever was necessary to keep up the pretense that charters were working miracles for all their students, took a new approach. They were there to “promote integration” and thus they could justify questionable practices like dropping priority for at-risk kids and actively marketing to the college educated professionals whose kids they would not have to suspend and counsel out nearly as often.
Their recruiting efforts worked, except they were stuck with a dilemma. The white parents in charter schools were still concentrated in only a few low-poverty schools where they were often the majority, while other charter schools in the same network and the very same district remained nearly 99% minority. It turns out that the same charters congratulating themselves for providing “diverse” schools were no better at integrating their own schools than public schools were. But that didn’t stop them from criticizing public schools.
Only a privatizer would think a charter school where over 50% of the students are white and over 75% of the students are middle class is the solution to segregated schools in a city where only 14% of the students are white and over 70% are poor. But that is the kind of logic that is acceptable in school reform.
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Tim :
What I proposed to you is that the solution to our problems are economic rather than educational your response did not address that point . But let me cover a few points that you have raised .
“Middle class and even affluent blacks live in neighborhoods where the average income is less than it is in poor white neighborhoods.”
Some of this is by choice as Italians and Jews and other ethnic groups also tended to gravitate to communities where they would feel comfortable . Thus we have all sorts of ethic neighborhood in NY from
Forest Hills to Greenpoint, to Morris Park or forgive me Howard Beach. You would have to know NYC history for that one.
The income levels of the minority workers I am talking about would qualify them to live in most middle class neighborhoods in NY either on Long Island or in NYC but let us also admit that the inflated real estate values have made home ownership and certain neighbors in NYC astronomically out of reach for rental or ownership . The greater divider being when they were moved into or purchased than incomes .
What has been referred to as mortgage rich or poor . Or rent stabilized or not.
But to this point My friend Ian whose brother is chairman of the NLRB could certainly be out on Long Island if he chose to be. He chooses to live in Bedford Stuyvesant . I would think his income and his access to legal representation made any discrimination not an impediment.
“Take blacks and whites with identical incomes and credit histories, and the whites will be far more likely to receive a mortgage, and on top of that they’ll also be extended much larger loans. This is all before you get into the blatant steering and discrimination. Money, it seems, only goes so far as an equalizer, especially on Long Island”
Again point well taken and this is partially what the much maligned CRA was supposed to correct. But guess what this is economics.
I referred you to Laswell . I will give you his definition .
“Politics who determines who gets what when and how.” Their is nothing more fundamental to civil rights than economic access to jobs and finance . That we are not a post racial society is obvious we have a long way to go but the solutions again are inherently political and politics is who determines the distribution of goods and services, ECONOMICS.
Did Harry Van Arsdale — or Walter Reuther or Albert Shanker — bring appreciable numbers of blacks into union leadership, into management, or into the highest paying positions? Of course not.
Lets see now how to answer that . To a great degree the Union movement has had an autocratic structure . I would like to think of many unions as benevolent monarchies . The models have their ups and downs . In VanArsdale’s case it was about Legacy and the highest positions in his Union have stayed in the family with the goal of building on that legacy. Certainly not on building wealth they have all led modest life styles . HVA and son TVA lived in a 1200
family co-op built for his members with union funding and sweat equity now fully integrated. Located in a Middle Class Queens neighborhood . Controlling the Board of Directors through proxy ballots. Which has kept it Mitchell Lama and working class rather than turning into a wealthy condos. So remember that legacy thing.
Forgoing incomes from some of the paid positions they held in the broader Union movement . As a side note the one outsider to look like a rising star became an assemblyman than a stain on the labor movement in NYC. So maybe God Bless the Queen .
But lets go a little further down the chain Assistant Business Managers and Borough Business Representatives executive boards,Shop Stewards , fully Interrogated and reflective of a now integrated general membership. Which may not be totally reflective of the city but is reflective of the metropolitan area.
You see it really is quite Machiavellian a divide and conquer strategy that doles out patronage to many groups in order to maintain power.
On the other hand it has served the membership well for over half a century . Maintaining decent wages and benefits In an increasingly hostile environment for all American workers .
Now are there parts of the construction trades that are anything but progressive and are racially divided? Yes but they are becoming rare . One must keep in mind that these trades grew out of a strong father and son Guild tradition . And yes priority was placed on providing slots for sons of members. Today those positions are being passed down to sons and increasingly daughters of members with out regard to color. So progress is being made at a rather fast pace. Especially as children of workers with decent wages and benefits have more outside career mobility( I think?). Leaving more room for entrants of color . Is it a system of merit ? No but then again the whole notion of meritocracy is a fraud and the de-funding and attack on our Public Universities is designed to prevent meritocracy .
But this is interesting as in education where false prophets are proclaiming Charters ,Testing, Teacher Evaluation and Union Busting a civil rights issue . Those same basically right wing neo-liberal forces would like to portray the repeal of Davis Bacon as a Civil rights issue .
Prevailing wage may have had its roots in the political realities of the 1920’s but it has lifted tens of millions of Americans into the middle class. And every year more and more of them are minorities. Those who seek this civil right just so happen to be tied to the most despicable forces in the industry . Who seek to profit off of subsistence wages and whose safety record is abhorrent.Check out OSHA report-able injuries in NYC . Much like Campbell Brown and her husbands Vulture Hedge fund partner Paul Singer .
The Argentine government could have done the world a favor . But it seems those actions are committed mainly by right wing governments . . .
Now I will not speak in detail about the UAW or the UFT but go to there web sights and check out there officers . Far more diverse than you claim .
“There’s a reason why the Sanders message didn’t resonate with older people of color. They’ve been down this road before.”
If there is anybody that people of color should not have connected with, any road that they have been down before . It is the Clinton’s
The Clinton/Obama legacy has been devastating from Michelle Alexanders critic to a whole lot more . The pathways to economic mobility for Black ,White ,Purple, Green Americans have been closed with the de- industrialization of the Nation and the same Neo Liberal assault on American wages that is continuing to attack all American workers . “while all new income goes to the top” Thank you Bernie
Read John Angelos COO Baltimore Orioles, it is a devastating critique of America today.
http://www.rollingstone.com/sports/news/orioles-exec-delivers-powerful-statement-on-baltimore-riots-20150428
Further there is a big dark cloud in the room that no one wants to go near that really explains Sanders inability to connect . To speak in Clintoneese “That dog wont Hunt ” the explanation you gave and all the others are pretty poor explaining 90% margins in the Black community. .They are frankly demeaning of blacks and insult their intelligence . If you want an answer to that question see what Van Jones has to say about why the black vote may be more fractured than we think . He is frankly terrified and the answer is a clue to Sanders failure.
Now I hope I answered your questions point by point ,whether you agree or not . But what you never did is address my main point . How is education supposed to solve what is essentially an economic problem .Especially when a Black college graduate can only expect to earn what a white High School grad does.
Have a good day .
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Looks like the Obama Administration is pushing “Pay for Success” – no one know if it works but what the hell, it’s only peoples’ communities.
https://twitter.com/hashtag/Payforsuccess?src=hash&lang=en
Who’s behind this, I wonder? Their good friends at Goldman Sachs?
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Yes it’s true, Black and Latino parents drank and continue to drink the Kool aide of charters. In the old days we would say they have been bamboozled. What this lack of awareness regarding their children has done is to make them easy prey to profit loving charters who care less about their child’s education and at the same time, segregate them in low performing, abusive schools that have free range to discipline and provide less than qualified teaching and administrative staff. They in effect become a parallel and unequal education system, in total violation of Brown v Bd of Education. But, who cares, the state doesn’t since it puts charter rights above the rights of the community that funds them. The Feds don’t care since they don’t monitor or enforce any federal laws that are being violated. We have this system now that is purely motivated by profit, for the charter operators, for the state politicians receiving campaign contributions along with federal politicians. Everyone is getting their piece of public monies but the group that is really being bamboozled, the students. Sad.
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Paula ~ most charters have the PR for parents and the community down to a science. The PublSchls are described as Prison pipelines and charters are glitzed up with glossy brochures, photographers taking pictures of the cutest kids ever, cheat sheets of 2Good2BeTrue test scores, highly paid consultants hanging on every teet, and never ending tours & parades of wealthy white folks with check books looking at those ‘poor little black children’ who need to be protected from their poor black parents.
Discipline problems are kept quiet, a secret, records falsified, attendance problems ignored, data shared with the public school system falsified, access by the public school amininistrative team is limited, if allowed at all. Forget about SpEd & ELL. If they take them, it is only for the FTE$ they earn, and not to follow the LAW or providing services per IEPs. Many parents are told that they have to take their children ‘off the IEP’ if they want to attend that charter. Blackmail!
Sickening!
Transparent!
When parents do ask questions, the phrase “this school is a choice school” and if you don’t like it, the public school is just around the corner. Even 3yr olds are ‘interviewed’ along with their parents – like picking out a puppy with selected parentage.
Why are so many highly successful and well connected white folks interested in charters? Help poor kids? Some are motivated for the right reasons, UNTIL…they look deeper, work there, see behind the Hollywood front, see the actual data & fraud. Then, those folks are squeezed out & schmutzed for life.
Thanks Bush/Obama & Co! Their $$$$ is rolling in as we speak!
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Have you guys seen the new ed reform plan for Detroit?
No regulation at all. Teachers don’t even need credentials. Don’t kid yourself- this is the plan for the whole state of Michigan, which already has 80% for-profit charter schools and no lawmaker support for existing public schools.
The impact of ed reform on Great Lakes states is understudied. We’re the dumping ground for every half-baked experiment these people come up with in the less fashionable states. They focus on DC and Boston and NYC for a reason. It draws attention away from Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania.
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“In Brown vs. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it is Unconstitutional to have “separate but equal” schools because when they’re separate, they’re rarely equal. Having two parallel systems of education makes it too easy to provide more resources to some kids and less to others.” We know that setting up a parallel system that is separate and unequal is illegal under civil rights laws. Many charters implement discriminatory practices, and yet they are using public money to do this. Someone needs to challenge this practice in the courts.
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Not with a lot of the courts we have these days. See: Vergara judge.
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The School reform movement was birthed in response to Brown and Johnson era Civil Rights legislation . Should it be a surprise that the desire for vouches for private academies has morphed into public dollars for more segregated charters. Call it a little perk in the grand scheme of Milton Friedman playing on the Nixon Southern Strategy .
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I disagree with some of the comments here. I don’t think minority parents are being “bamboozled”.
Instead, they are given a false choice. You can send your child to an intentionally underfunded public school that has to use its limited resources to educate every single student, regardless of their behavior or needs. Or you can come to our charter and we promise you your kid won’t have to be in school with the most troubled and difficult students.
When there are good, well-funded public schools with enough resources to address the needs of the most difficult students while at the same time devoting plenty of resources to the well-behaved and easy to teach students, parents don’t choose charters.
The key to getting parents to choose charters is to first make sure the public school is undesirable. In urban areas, with high concentrations of poverty and severely at-risk students and decades of underfunding, it was very easy to make charters more appealing, especially because they were getting nearly the same funding while being able to rid themselves of any expensive kid who hurt their bottom line. In suburbs, where most students already fit the profile of the students that are “acceptable” to charters, and there was enough funding to address the needs of the few who weren’t, charter schools have had a very tough time finding “customers”. And they are drooling at the mouth to get those “customers” into their charters.
Much of the reformers’ efforts in the last few years has been toward the cause of convincing those well-educated, affluent suburban parents that their public schools aren’t as good as they think — the better to drive them into charter schools. Bad tests and cut scores designed to “prove” that even the best suburban publics are mediocre was their favorite past time. When it didn’t work, Arne Duncan tried to accuse suburban moms of caring more about their housing values than their kids’ education! The fact that it backfired only means they are doubling down on their efforts. But it is pretty disgusting that this was led by Arne Duncan who is being rewarded very nicely by his new high-paying job continuing his work of undermining public schools with every ounce of his being.
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This. And please note that it’s being done by Democrats as much as by Republicans (or more).
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Some parents, both black and white, are choosing charters because public schools have morphed into test prep factories. One of the functions of all the testing is to frustrate parents and students so they will accept a charter alternative rather than submit to endless test prep.
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Maybe charters in suburban areas have more amenities than inner city public schools but don’t get it twisted, anytime charter schools hire unqualified staff, spend public monies with no oversight, turn their noses up against children with disabilities or children with distressed backgrounds, these charters are failing schools to me. Yes some parents are complicit in this segregation and prefer it this way.My thought is that if charters are going to be the it thing for public education, I prefer to opt out- opt out of funding with my taxes anything that’s not open to all children, period. If you say parents haven’t been bamboozled then parallel, unequal education systems is what they support.
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Paula,
I agree with your sentiment. However, I also know that if you have a choice of only a decrepit public school that has to serve a hugely disproportionate share of high needs students without proper funding to address those needs, and a lousy charter school with below average teachers that serves only “good” students and gets lots of donations, and your kid is one of those “good” students, there aren’t many parents who would choose the former.
That’s what has been so unethical about what the mainstream charter school movement has morphed into. It started out with the best of intentions, not to compete, but to serve the underserved. But is now playing a zero sum game.
In order to “win” the students they want, charters need to make the other choice even worse. Parents like and support public schools, unless the public schools are so bad that any school that can weed out the most difficult students is an improvement. It used to be that Americans rejected vouchers wholeheartedly. But a decade of lobbying by “reformers” did an outstanding job of undermining public schools and making them less appealing. Budget cuts while forcing a canned curriculum where teaching the test and test scores are paramount. Spending scarce dollars on consultants and test prep materials and the indirect costs of allowing charter schools to cherry pick the cheapest students has undermined support of public schools. And the efforts to make public schools even less viable is continuing apace. Why do you think Arne Duncan was so very angry at the suburban parents leading the opt out movement? He had spent billions on a testing program designed to convince them their good public schools weren’t really good at all, and they weren’t buying in. Boy was he pissed off at those moms and it spoke volumes. I’m sure he was terrified that the billionaires pulling his strings weren’t pleased. Now they had to spend more money trying a new tactic to undermine those schools and convince parents they weren’t worth supporting anymore.
It’s similar to the way some of the same billionaires worked so hard to undermine social security. They tried for decades to convince people privatizing retirement income was better, but given a choice between social security and being thrown into the “free market”, the public vastly preferred social security. The social security “reformers” realized the only way to change the public’s mind was to do everything possible to make social security worse! Cut benefits and cost of living adjustments. Convince people it wasn’t solvent and they better not expect anything anyway. Undermine it in every way so that eventually the public would realize even something they didn’t like very much was at least a tiny bit “better” than the program that had been purposely destroyed.
Part of getting people to hate government and love privatization is to “starve the beast” so that government has no funding to do anything that the public wants. It’s a false choice that the ONLY choice is a public system starved of funds or a private system – paid for by government funds – that enriches the powerful and offers something minimally better than nothing to the public.
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The so-called “reform” movement is all about racial segregation. The first calls for “reform” in the form of vouchers arose immediately after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that separate but equal was inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then (and now) as merely giving parents free “choice.”
But the 1950’s voucher reform faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would never become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing.” With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
Too bad well-intentioned but naive people like Bill Gates and other otherwise intelligent billionaires have been unable to see the roots of the charter school movement and see the social malignancy behind the movement’s well-maintained facade.
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I think your description of how vouchers started in the 1950s is spot on but I disagree that the reform movement is still about segregation. At least not segregation by race.
I don’t think many of the people pushing privatization care about race at all. They care about educating kids who are cheap to educate and abandoning the ones who aren’t. As long as a student can perform at grade level and be taught to pass tests by low-cost teachers, they don’t care what race they are.
The problem is that in the population of students who are at-risk, there are large cohorts of students who don’t fit that bill. And they are more likely not to be white in the urban areas where charters have proliferated.
But if you are affluent, college educated, and your kid has no learning issues, most charters don’t care what race you are and will welcome you into their schools.
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Who says they don’t see it and just don’t care as much as they want to generate that charter school, unaccountable revenue.
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I don’t mean this as a knock on Singer in particular, but there is a point of diminishing returns from hearing what educated white people who do not have middle school- or high school-aged children that they send to a school that’s 80% black and hispanic have to say about segregation, especially if it doesn’t include a frank acknowledgment of what they themselves do to contribute to segregation.
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