Alan Singer writes here that John Paulson, whose worth is in the neighborhood of $11 billion, is raising funds for the Trump campaign. Paulson gave $8.5 million to Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain last July.
Trump is a strong supporter of charter schools. Singer says he also endorses vouchers. Trump said during one of the debates “I love charter schools.” Of course, he does.
It is clear that very rightwing Republicans and very wealthy individuals love privatization. On this blog, we often hear from charter school supporters about school choice as “the civil rights issue of our time.” They never explain why every single rightwing governor also favors charters. They never explain why they are in the same chorus with Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and the rest of the Republican glitterati.
The great deception of our time is the propaganda campaign waged by billionaires to persuade the public that privatization advances civil rights.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Only one presidential candidate categorically opposes privatization of schools via charters and vouchers. She is also on record as strongly opposing high-stakes standardized tests. This November, rather than choosing between indistinguishable shades of red, consider GREEN! Dr. Jill Stein is the best choice for people that support *PUBLIC* education. She’s also great on a host of other issues.
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Trump also says he loves Mexican people even though he thinks they are all rapists and thieves.
It is obvious from his own history that Trump will say and do anything to make money and win at anything he does. He has probably already offered to license his name to be used for corporate charters (for a price).
Trump Charter School.
Maybe he has already called Eva and attempted to convince her if she changed the name of her charter chain to Trump Success Charter School, she wouldn’t be the target of the muckrakers who chase truth through facts.
Why not, after all, Trump already says he will name the wall he wants to build between the U.S. and Mexico after him.
Trump’s Great Wall
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An article, “The Vulture’s Vulture; How a New Hedge Fund Strategy is Corrupting Washington…The billionaire hedge fund managers are working the halls of Congress with civil rights groups” (Ryan Grim and Paul Blumenthal at Huffpo), spells out the betrayal happening in D.C.
IMO, the venture philanthropic grants, on the c.v. of harvard’s Roland Fryer, should face review, if his work influences policy. (Deutsch 29 blog)
As the research of Princeton Prof. Martin Gilens showed, Congress doesn’t listen to 90% of Americans. Legislators pass laws, or make budget decisions, to benefit the richest 0.1%, i.e. the 400 families governing the US oligarchy. Then, the legislators find cover from groups with the right names and malleable or self-serving leaders.
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“…we often hear from charter school supporters about school choice as “the civil rights issue of our time.” They never explain why every single rightwing governor also favors charters…”
I’ll explain it. Indiscriminate opposition to all charters is a view held by a very narrow group of people; many acting in their own self-interests,
If you’re the fringe on any given issue, I suppose it’s hard to understand how even members of the party you align most closely with don’t hold your position and instead hold the same one the other party does.
FWIW, I don’t think Dems and Republicans support charters and ed reform for the same reasons; another reason why it can be both the civil rights issue of our time and something that rightwing governors support.
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John,
Perhaps you might explain to me what my self-interest is in opposing charters. I would be enlightened to know.
I thought it was because I grew up in the segregated South and believe that it is wrong to create a dual school system.
I thought it was because I was educated in public schools and believe that they are a cornerstone of our democracy.
I thought it was because every high-performing school system in the world has a strong public system, with no vouchers or charters.
Please tell me if you have learned of a self-interest that I am not aware of in opposing the privatization of public education.
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Or maybe its a view held by a group of people who don’t take kindly in a time of declining funding for public education and increasing inequality, to the waste of billions of taxpayer dollars that should be going to educate children, on a sector that is rife with fraud because of the lack of transparency and oversight? https://populardemocracy.org/sites/default/files/FraudandMismgmt5-3-14%28FINALx3.0%29REV.pdf
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“. . . the civil rights issue of our time. . . ”
Thanks for the laugh, John!
Do you really want to know what the civil rights issue of our time is?
It is public schools (and charters funded by public monies”) that discriminate against students due to characteristics that are heritable and beyond the control of the individual. Some of those characteristics such as handicaps, skin color and gender in which students have been discriminated against before have been adjudicated to be unconstitutional, illegal (not to mention unethical, unjust and immoral).
The civil rights issue of our time is that students are discriminated against through/in mental capabilities/abilities. While there is debate about how much genetic vs environment has to do with mental capabilities/abilities there is no doubt that the child has no control over either before being mandated to be in school. And yet through grading, standardized testing and labeling of students we discriminate against some while rewarding others.
Just as slavery was seen by most at one point in time to be “natural, the way things just are” or that those with dark skin were mentally inferior to the light skinned, so it is now that discrimination occurs on a daily basis, sorting and separating students and labeling them, especially through grades and standardized testing. You know “That’s how it’s always been!”.
The civil rights issue of our time is the built in discrimination against individuals in characteristics completely out of control of the individual–mental capabilities and/or abilities.
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John
Undoubtedly public school teachers have a self interest in preserving public schools, their own jobs and a decent standard of living. That does not make them wrong nor does it make the issue of charters a civil rights issue .
Republicans have a very broad self interest in destroying a public good, portraying anything that government does as failing from public anything to regulation and taxation. .Destroying America’s largest union in a race to the bottom that they have reaped tremendous gain out of. As inequality soars at the same time and all wealth goes to ….. …. . Than as an added benefit
they can reap profits off of privatization.
The fact that democrats have joined them is a despicable turn of events. In part explainable by the revolving door between who ever is in government at the time and greed.
The civil rights twist is not new, the same nefarious forces have sought to portray prevailing wage laws as a civil rights issue. It is a civil right to pay people subsistence wages .Instead of decent wages. Its a civil right to hire inexperience low paid teachers and fight unionization tooth and nail . A civil right for whom?.
Certainly not a civil right for those minority teachers in cities like Chicago or New Orleans who have seen the minority work force cut by half or more, To be replaced by TFA’s slumming it for a season or two on the way to the corner office. .
Not a civil right at all when the preponderance of evidence shows no significant advantage to a charter schools, when apples to apples comparisons are made . And certainly not a civil right for those left behind with less resources in public schools .
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Joel,
Of course you wouldn’t know it by reading it here, but the urban credo study shows significant gains for students from charter schools. Charters aren’t “the answer”, but if you oppose all of them, regardless of performance, it’s pretty easy to see that you are making decisions based on the interests of the adults who benefit from the existing system.
Yes, I think many republicans are pro charter because of the privatization and anti-union angles. But, the Dems who are pro charter don’t support them for that reason; they just weigh the interests of their students, families, and constituents more than those of the union lobbyists.
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John,
Why do you keep leaving off facts from your claims? The CREDO study did point out there had been improvements — and they were not significant — but also said that the improvements did not indicate an actual improvement because so many failing charters had closed their doors causing the charters still in business to boost their scores by removing the bottom feeders, and even then about 75% of publicly funded private sector charters were the same or worse than the public schools.
Stop cherry picking your facts.
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For anyone reading, here are every one of the major findings from the report, unedited. I think it’s very obvious who is cherry picking facts here.
1. Our findings show urban charter schools in the aggregate provide significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading compared to their TPS peers.
2. When learning gains for urban charter students are presented for individual urban regions, 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.
5. Compared to the charter school landscape as a whole, (see CREDO’s National Charter School Study 2013), the 41 urban charter regions have improved results at both ends of the quality spectrum: they have larger shares of schools that are better than TPS alternatives and smaller shares of under-performing schools.
6. Despite the overall positive learning impacts, there are urban communities in which the majority of the charter schools lag the learning gains of their TPS counterparts, some to distressingly large degrees.
Click to access Urban%20Charter%20School%20Study%20Report%20on%2041%20Regions.pdf
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There you go, John, Cherry picking again. Didn’t I ask you not to cherry pick, but you did it anyway. That’s not surprising since the corporate charter school movement does it all the time. They even outright lie like Trump.
For instance, how about the entire quote instead of just what you cherry picked:
“Specifically, 43 percent of urban charter schools deliver larger learning gains in math than the local TPS alternative, with 33 percent showing equivalent results and 24 percent posting smaller learning gains. In reading, 38 percent of urban charter schools outpace their TPS peers, 46 percent fare the same, and only 16 percent of urban charter schools have smaller gains each year.”
To be clear: 54 percent of public schools were the same or better than the urban Charters they were compared to while only 43 percent of urban charter schools delivered larger learning gains in math.
John, for reading, something you left out, 72 percent of public schools are equal to or better than the urban charters they were compared to.
Then there is this, John: “Despite the overall positive learning impacts, there are urban communities in which the majority of the charter schools lag the learning gains of their TPS counterparts, some to distressingly large degrees. In some urban areas, cities have no schools that post better gains than their TPS alternatives and more than half the schools are significantly worse.”
And I have to laugh, John, at the bogus claim that the gains were “significant” as the CREDO report alleged, but then they have to make their funding source, Bill Gates, happy with the proper adjective to use in their propaganda just like you did.
“Our findings show urban charter schools in the aggregate provide significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading compared to their TPS peers.”
“Specifically, students enrolled in urban charter schools experience 0.055 standard deviations (s.d.’s) greater growth in math and 0.039 s.d.’s greater growth in reading per year than their matched peers in TPS.
John, 2hat does that mean? To find out you have to scroll down to Table 1 on page 5 where you will discover that 0.055 is equal to a gain of 37 days of learning (20 percent of an average public school year) and 0.039 is equal to 28 days (15.5 percent of an average public school year). Wait until you discover where those gains really came from?
Click to access Urban%20Charter%20School%20Study%20Report%20on%2041%20Regions.pdf
John, Let’s look at this from a different perspective to get a better idea of where those gains came from. The number of charters providing a longer school day grew from 23 percent in 2009 to 48 percent in 2012.
“Extended school days, or extended learning time, have become ubiquitous among charter schools and lower-performing schools looking to improve academic achievement. The average school day in the United States varies from state to state, but most stays require approximately 180 days for the school year to be complete. Each state’s Department of Education determines its own minimum school day length and stipulations for fulfilling the 180 days. The way states add this time up can get complicated, but typically if schools or districts choose to add time to the legal minimum school day, the day would be considered extended. For most states, 180 days of school adds up to somewhere between approximately 900 and 1200 hours of instruction per year, which is actually relatively high on a global scale. Even Finland, whose test scores consistently top international rankings, doesn’t have compulsory schooling until age seven, and their school day is shorter than a typical American day.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/05/extended-school-days/371896/
John, how much longer are almost half of the corporate charters extending the 6.7 hour average public school day?
John, The New York Times reported that Success Academy’s school days ran 8 hours 45 minutes in 2015 and would be shortened to 8 hours in 2016.
John, in case you point out that Eva’s Success Gulag doesn’t represent the entire corporate charter industry, here’s one more corporate charter chain to look at. KIPP.
“What does set KIPP apart is the amount of time students are in school. A regular school day is from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., plus extra weeks in the summer. Some schools even offer Saturday programs. that’s up to 600 more hours a year in school than children who attend traditional public middle schools.”
John, the average school year for public schools runs 1,207 hours. KIPP has increased the school year by almost 50% by adding 600 more hours.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/19/AR2010071904357.html
John, In addition, Education Next reports that: “About 64 percent of students attend a charter school with a school year of 190 days or longer and 20 percent attend a school with a school year of 200 days or longer.”
http://educationnext.org/new-york-city-charter-schools/
John, It is obvious that any gains corporate charters made came from longer school days and, back to the CREDO study, Table 2 on page 6 & 7, where readers will discover that in most cases the corporate charters are teaching fewer special ed students, fewer English language learners and fewer students living in poverty.
John, the evidence of those gains that CREDO reported didn’t come from doing a better job but being selective and cherry picking students in addition to increasing the school day by about 23% and the school year for more instructional time by 5.5 to 11.1 percent.
John, imagine that, cherry picking students and all those extra days and hours in school and still 54 percent of charters couldn’t beat the public schools in math and 72 percent couldn’t beat the pubic schools in reading.
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Um John,
You didn’t explain anything, you asked a similar question about people who were anti-charter. They, unlike you, actually explained why.
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I thought John was the self-interested one here. Doesn’t he run a charter school?
But it is fitting that John would accuse Diane Ravich of doing exactly what he himself is doing. How likely is it that his own school benefits from the largesse of those billionaires he insists are only working on behalf of the poorest students?
John’s reply seems to prove that Diane was right.
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Diane,
I’m not accusing you of acting in your self-interest. I don’t think it’s appropriate to impugn the motives of someone just because I disagree with them. I just said that the majority of opponents have a vested interest in protecting the existing system, and I think that’s objective information supported by polling.
FYI, I can come up with a similar list for why I support charters as an option:
– I attended public schools in a city where they were reasonable until upper grades. My parents had the wherewithal to move to a better school district, thereby exercising the school choice that I bet most of your readers or their families have used.
– The families who attend the charter I volunteer for should have the ability to make the same choice for an excellent education for their children, but poverty has made that not possible for them.
– It is among the greatest of hypocrisies to want poor African American and Hispanic families to suffer through substandard education that suburban parents would never accept for their children.
– My children attend traditional public schools that are great. Everyone should be able to say the same.
– I agree that public schools are the cornerstone of our democracy, not because they demonstrate it using publicly elected school boards, but because they have a mission to create an educated populace. Where they deliver on that promise, great. Where they don’t, they need interventions. Schools are first and foremost the method we choose to educate our children; their role as employer has to be secondary to that.
As for other countries in the world, no country has the dysfunctional management/labor relationship in public education that we have here. Do you disagree?
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Duane, we agree that every child has a right to an excellent education. I think we probably differ on the degree to which that is happening and what should be done about it.
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John,
What are your thoughts on the discriminatory practices that are grading and standardized tests. Should the government through its public schools discriminate against some and reward other students, especially in light of the fact that grades and standardized test results are completely invalid means of assessing student learning?
Duane
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If you want to privatize public education, then you like charters. The End.
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paz, that’s probably true, but the reverse is not.
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Duane, we’ve discussed this before as well. What is the method of evaluating students that you propose is valid?
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Some people don’t want their tax dollars going to organizations that the public has little or no control over.
That may be selfish, but it is also eminently sensible and perfectly reasonable.
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SomeDAM Poet,
I don’t disagree. Most people feel they have very little control over what happens in traditional public schools.
I’d include superintendents and school Board members in that statement, let alone voters.
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John,
Whose sending you?
Spending public dollars on Charters and starving our public schools is plain WRONG
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John says: “Duane, we agree that every child has a right to an excellent education….”
Actually, John, you DON’T think every child has a right to that education. You are often on here defending charters with incredibly high suspension and attrition rates for Kindergarten children — the claim being, of course, that those 5 year olds don’t have a right to an excellent education because they can’t “behave” properly. Of course, it is the charter who may choose what constitutes “can’t behave” and if it happens to correspond with “kids we find too hard to teach and delight in making the feel misery until they act out”, I never hear you say a word.
For John, some kids have a right to excellent educations, and some kids don’t, and charters should be free to decide which are which.
John says: “It is among the greatest of hypocrisies to want poor African American and Hispanic families to suffer through substandard education….”
Since the charters with the good results are suspending high numbers of poor African-American and Hispanic children because they find them not worthy of their education (that means the charter has failed to teach them, John), it is YOU who are the hypocrite, since you happily embrace those charters who want them to suffer when they put them on “got to go lists”.
John, you want to enable charter schools who can pick and choose who to educate. That is “choice” only for the lucky ones. But it is the unlucky ones who are the ones who cause failing schools and low test scores. You not only don’t want to give them choice, you just don’t want to give them schools at all beyond the most minimal rot. You should be ashamed. Not just of your own dishonesty that enables more of those practices that you adore to continue like got to go lists and at-risk kids with disabilities treated like dirt. But the fact that your interests is not in the few chosen kids who are helped, but in the people who are getting rich by pretending to care about ALL the kids. Just like you, they seem to think that the kids who disappear from charter schools who can’t wait to get them out should simply disappear. What kind of person would cheer that on?
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Good points.
Community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit public schools offer an excellent education to every child and doesn’t reject any of them — even the ones that don’t take advantage of the excellent education that is offered to them. And it is excellent because out of about 200 countries, the U.S. is ranked as the 4th most educated country in the world regardless of what the lying edu-baggers say in their propaganda
How do I know that public schools offer an excellent education, because our daughter attended public schools k-12 in five different school districts, went to Stanford and graduated — she took advantage of the offer traditional public schools make to every child. She learned what her teachers taught her.
But the autocratic, opaque, abusive, and often fraudulent/inferior and lying, for profit corporate charters only keep the children that are easy to bully, abuse and crush. The children that can’t be broken and don’t deliver high test scores get dumped or driven out.
And what happens to them. In New Orleans where there are no more traditional public schools, the children that are dumped from the corporate charters end up on the streets for their education. That is the future for children in the United States if the corporate frauds that worship at the alter of avarice win.
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John :
Please ,Democrats who support charters are not in it for the children.
That they would do in-depth research on anything is a laughable proposition.
,Back to Linda’s point they are prostituting themselves to the donor class. Unions can not even come close to competing with Wall Street /corporate money .
If you are insinuating that our political class with rare exceptions!!! cares about anything other than their own hides and future wealth ,I have a beautiful bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell. The Princeton study portrays a clear picture of the the American political system.
Thomas Franks “Listen Liberal ” paints a picture where the smartest guys in the room on any issue , but staying with education ,would not be teachers or education experts . But rather through the false narrative of meritocracy be plutocrats of enormous wealth,who likely would have an Ivy league degree as well. Or in some cases left the Ivy league in their sophomore year. Of course in the pay to play nature of much of American research they can then hire who ever they want to produce what ever the desired research, be it in economics or education.
Moyers just so happened to address this issue yesterday as we were discussing this .
http://billmoyers.com/story/long-can-big-money-keep-democrats-charter-school-camp/. .
“Taibbi sees many convincing signs that “[p]eople are sick of being thought of as faraway annoyances who only get whatever policy scraps are left over after pols have finished servicing the donors they hang out with.”
I see it too and unless the Democrats wake up quickly the next President could very well be a bloviating bigoted talk show host.
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John,
Obama’s presidential campaign received 4 times the amount, from money guys, that it rec’d from worker collectives, which explains why Dems are betraying the American people, so that Wall Street and Silicon Valley can enrich themselves, from local community money intended for education. Deductive proof was provided, by the excision of DFER and Gates, from Media Matters’, privatized education expose (April 27). Gates’ advocacy for charter schools was explained by the founder of New Schools Venture Fund, which rec’d $22 mil. from Gates. Kim Smith said her “marching orders (were)…to develop charter management organizations that produce a diverse supply of different brands on a large scale.” Charter schools are the intermediate step necessary for public support of privatization, before implementation of the Silicon Valley, for-profit model.Gates has shared ownership in the for-profit retailer of schools-in-a-box. The success of the rare, good charter school, is attributable to plutocratic venture philanthropy. As an example, Fordham, funded by the Waltons, reportedly runs one of a handful of charter schools that perform well in Ohio. The pool of “philanthropic” money will dry up once public schools are eliminated. Indeed, citizens want control of their schools. One of the fastest growing charter chains is associated with Turkish nationals. Marc Andreeson remains on Z-berg’s Facebook board, despite his praise for colonialism. (Z-berg is a co-owner of the schools-in-a-box.) As one international aid official said, “It is disturbing that the ideal of quality of public education, for all, is under greater threat today than it has ever been.” My vested interest is two fold, (1) the decency of democracy (2) a productive America, for future generations. (Charter school debt returns 10-18% to Wall Street. The financial sector drags down GDP by an estimated 2%. The multiplier effect of community education money spent in communities enables the survival of the American people.)
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The Aspen Institute education programs include “Senior Congressional Education Staff Network”. (The former co-chair of the Aspen education programs subsequently oversaw “development of PARCC”)
Kim Smith founded the Pahara Aspen institute. She is also co-founder of Bellwether and New Schools Venture Fund. She was a founding team member of TFA. All of these organizations received Gates funding. The Aspen Institute Board includes David Koch and Madelyn Albright. Reportedly, Albright’s firm, has charter school fan and hedge funder, Paul Singer as a client.
This information elucidates the research that found Congress does not listen to 90% of Americans.
As further evidence that politicians (and, their campaign funders) are the key factor against public education, there is the Fordham co-written paper that lists “political support” as the first criteria for charter school success and lists “quality”. last.
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John,
I trying this again since you didn’t answer it before except this time I’ve added a little bit to the question:
Should the government through its public schools discriminate against some and reward other students, especially in light of the fact that grades and standardized test results are completely invalid means of assessing student learning? If so, please explain why! If not, why not?
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Duane,
That’s quite off topic. You and I have discussed Wilson before. I’m not a fan of standardized tests for those purposes, and I think comparing students that are in the same range of scores is useless.
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My question doesn’t have anything to do with Wilson’s work. It has to do with the government discriminating against some citizens, so no, it’s not off topic. You roughly stated that something was the “civil rights issue” of our time. I challenged that claim and stated that the civil rights issue of our time is government discrimination. That being as it may, what is your answer to the question?
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Duane,
I didn’t make the claim about it being “the civil rights issue of our time”, though I attempted to explain why people say that. I do believe that everyone has the right to a quality education and that many, especially children of color and those from low income families, aren’t getting it.
I apologize, but I don’t think I understand your question enough to respond to it.
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John,
Hopefully this will help. Since standardized test results are used to sort and separate students supposedly by innate knowledge capabilities and the results of the said tests used to either reward some (maybe they get a scholarship or they get to move on to the next level) and punish others (some might be denied entrance into programs that they desire or they may be denied promotion to the next grade level), how can that be different than denying some by skin color, gender, etc. . . or rewarding some by skin color, gender etc. . . which are innate, heritable conditions as are mental capabilities/abilities. It’s not okay to discriminate/reward on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, race, etc. . . why should it be okay to discriminate/reward on the basis of the heritable/innate characteristic of intelligence capabilities/abilities and out of control by the individual the environment in which they find themselves before coming to school? How can we justify, not only constitutionally but also ethically and morally discrimination by/through mental capabilities?
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Duane,
Frankly, I haven’t spent much time thinking about that question. My first thought is that there is a lot of room for abuse when making decisions like tracking and promotion.
But, I don’t consider it discrimination to not promote someone who is not prepared for the next grade (for example), or to have objective criteria for entrance into an honors class.
I guess one can argue about the tools used, but the general idea of using competency to determine access to programs isn’t a problem for me as long as the decision is made as objectively as possible and based on actual knowledge or ability, not a future projection that could too easily be biased.
To answer your question about “how is that different?”, I guess I would say that doing something based on ability (as long as it’s objective) is very different than doing something based on skin color, etc., which have zero relevance.
For example, I don’t have a problem with a test to see how far a person can carry a heavy backpack or a wounded soldier to determine access to a combat position or an elite corps, but I do have a problem with not allowing women to pass or fail without regard to their gender.
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John,
“. . . or to have objective criteria . . . ”
You have hit on the problem. There are no “objective” criteria as all testing is subjective (contrary to what psychometricians would have us believe). Even granted that do all students have the inherent capabilities to score the highest level?
No! And since most consider “intelligence” to be genetically and environmentally influenced do all children come to the schooling environment on equal footing that would allow all to score the highest level and get the rewards and not fall under the discriminatory effects of that sorting and separating??
Exactly because those factors shouldn’t have any relevance should “intelligence” that very much genetically and environmentally influenced concept like gender and/or race should have relevance in order for the state to discriminate against some???
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Hope that helped!
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Mr. Singer wrote: “I was asked to make clear that Columbia Prep is not affiliated with Columbia University and has not been for many years. Their relationship was in the historical past. It also has no relationship with Teachers College – Columbia University.”
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Assuming that Columbia University has brand name protection, It would be a court’s decision if Columbia Prep violates the brand protection. Has Columbia University acted to protect its brand? An explanation as to why the University wants its name on Teachers College, whose president was the subject of “Students Urge President to Cut Ties with Pearson”, would be interesting. I’m puzzled why Teachers College faculty are comfortable with “embargoed” academic papers, co-written with oligarch-funded organizations and the selective listing of plutocratic funders, for papers, in Teacher College PR publications.
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They’re all ga-ga over charter schools. Trump is just joining the crowd
Can you imagine the outcry from ed reformers if a politician said “I love district schools”?
He would have to retract. They’d all be screaming.
Has Trump ever entered a public school? Why are we listening to this person?
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John . Listen to Lloyd and do some homework. CREDO studies are not peer reviewed, but they have great PR people and will go through dubious statistical hoops to make exaggered claims.
https://andreagabor.com/2015/04/28/new-credo-study-new-credibility-problems-from-new-orleans-to-boston/
http://nepc.colorado.edu/%20thinktank/review-urban-charter-school
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Laura,
I have laugh at this. Earlier CREDO studies, which use the exact same methodology, are the basis for everyone’s claims here that “charters perform no better than traditional public schools”.
Supporting studies and methodology until they reach a conclusion you disagree with is a sure sign that you are making your mind up first and then looking for supporting facts.
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John, the CREDO studies do not mention the increased longer school days and longer school years as an important factor that explains most if not all of any gains by a “significant” minority of corporate charter schools. Before you challenge me by saying I didn’t leave a link to a source to back up what I said in this comment, yes I did, in another longer, detailed comment just a few minutes ago.
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Laura, here’s a quote for you:
“The relative strength and comprehensiveness of the data set used for this study, as well as the solid analytic approaches of the researchers, makes this report a useful contribution to the charter school research base.”
Credo PR person? Pro-charter advocate?
No, that’s the NEPC talking about the same methodology back when they liked the findings.
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John, maybe it is because the charter’s ethics drastically changed and yet CREDO didn’t acknowledge it in their methodology.
It’s obvious that the charters got wise after that first CREDO study and realized the way to up their results was to dump the kids who brought them down. The expansion in urban charters is with the charters that dump the lowest scoring kids. But the new CREDO study didn’t care since you can’t track improvement on a kid who disappears.
Five years ago a study showed that one drug worked better than another drug. But the second drug decided to start dumping the study patients who didn’t improve. The researchers studying the effects had no way to track what happened to patients who simply disappeared, and suddenly the 2nd drug’s “results” improved markedly! Most people would think the researchers were very stupid or very corrupt for not noticing the disappearing students.
In the case of CREDO, which is it? Stupidity or corruption?
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There’s more than just cherry picking children.
After the first CREDO study, many of the corporate charters also increased the length of their school days and school year. For instance, KIPP added 600 hours to the traditional school year. Instead of 800 to 1200 hours, children that end up in KIPP’s test-prep gulag spend 1400 to 1800 hours in school annually.
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John,
KnowYourCharter.com provides evidence, for the 7th largest state, of the cost of charters to local communities and, their abysmal academic performance.
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Lloyd, that’s true the days are longer.
But because of CREDO’s methodology, we have no idea whether the longer days are really helping, or whether charters simply realized that they were the best and cheapest method to get rid of the kids who won’t work extra hard — the non-strivers.
What CREDO really proved is that if you have a school of strivers that is ruthless is making the non-strivers feel misery until they leave, and a school that takes all kids – including the ones dumped from school #1 – the school that only teaches strivers will have better results, even if the kids come from the same socioeconomic background. Is there anyone who would argue with that? Did CREDO need to spend money to discover the obvious?
The way that REAL studies are done is to make sure that an unusual number of students aren’t leaving and why. That is why scholars are VERY careful when drug companies are touting “100% success” to make sure that that doesn’t mean “100% success with the patients who remained in our study and if that happens to be only 40% of them, who cares whether the other 60% were harmed?”
But CREDO is embarrassing themselves because they lack those kind of basic standards. Attrition doesn’t matter! As long as we can find a failing public school educating the most transient at-risk kids who loses more students than this charter school, no questions need to be asked.
CREDO wants us to believe that when it comes to education, the at-risk families just “choose” to pull their students from the best charter schools far more than they pull them from mediocre ones. And we shouldn’t question that because those parents are low-income and minority so they are doing what is illogical because they are just ignorant. He has no explanation for why a charter school that is the best in the state would lose twice as many at-risk kids whose parents have no good choices when those same parents are keeping their kids far more often in the mediocre charters. According to John, we should accept that many low-income minority parents don’t really like good schools and not question it.
Meanwhile, if there was a public school touting the best results in the city and vast numbers of middle class kids were leaving the school for much worse schools, you better believe someone would start asking questions. But charters have gotten away with it because of racism that people like John know will allow them to say outrageous things and have rich white people believe it. Low income parents are just ignorant, according to John, so no need to find out if there is a reason that they’d leave this “best” charter and why so many of them are.
When it comes to educating the poor, John and CREDO want us to believe that as long as a school is 100% effective with the kids who remain, the number that leave is completely irrelevant! Is it 20%? 30? 70%? It doesn’t matter to CREDO. Can you imagine a drug company testing a new drug and claiming whether 40%, 50% or 70% of the patients dropped out doesn’t matter? Can you imagine a drug company saying “this drug where lots more patients dropped out of the study is far more effective than this drug where no patients dropped out of the study, so let’s use the drug where far more patients left because it’s definitely better”. I feel certain John wouldn’t give that questionable drug to his own child based on such an outrageous study where he had no idea whether 50% of the children who took it were seriously harmed by it. Or maybe he would because he believed the hype and marketing and didn’t actually think about it. Or he trusted that someone would make sure that this kind of false advertising couldn’t happen. Lucky for charter schools, there is no regulation against false advertising as there are for drug companies.
The fact that John desperately wants us to ignore is that the better the urban charter school, the more it loses students! CREDO needs those unethical “high test score” charters — which are growing in number — because their good results are averaged in with the diminishing number of ethical charters who get mediocre and bad results because they don’t get rid of all the kids who give them the bad results.
Those “ethical” charters think the dishonesty is okay because it allows them so stay open. They are happy to have all the at-risk kids thrown out of those “good charters” pay the price for their own greed.
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If a corporate charter school like KIPP (or Eva’s Success Academies), that both have been heavily documented keeping only the strivers and kicking the others out, only needed the strivers to outperform traditional public schools there would have been no need to increase the school year by about 50% from 800 – 1200 hours of instruction to 1400 – 1800 hours.
If anything, the cherry picking of students that fall into line and do well on tests in addition to adding the equivalent of 89.5 school days (600 hours) to the traditional school year of 180 days (6.7 hours a day on average) reveals that the autocratic, scripted, corporate gulag style test-prep factories fail when they attempt to compete with traditional public schools that often encourage teachers to be innovative and take chances while focusing on developing critical thinking, problem solving, and a love of reading of children in a more positive atmosphere that does not bully students to conform to the autocratic,undemocratic atmosphere in most if not all corporate charters.
Think about it. KIPP added almost three months to the traditional school year with the 600 added hours and the results were about a month gain in math and even less in reading. And even with that, traditional public schools still match or outperform 57% of charters in math and 72% in reading.
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Lloyd, I think we mostly agree.
I don’t think those extra long days or school year have been proven meaningful because there hasn’t been a good controlled study. They DO work to weed out the non-strivers, as do other methods. And of course having a school that provides a safe place until 5pm with tutoring, homework help, etc., is likely to help scores.
But, fyi, Success Academy is dropping its long days. They say they are doing it for the teachers, but more likely they are doing it because it has made it very hard to recruit the affluent college-educated parents whose kids they are desperate to get in their schools. They already keep those parents clustered in schools where they are the majority and the discipline is much more forgiving. No doubt they considered whether they could get away with simply changing the school day and hours for those low-poverty schools, since the parents they covet don’t want to come back early from vacations or give up their after school activities. But since that might raise questions, suddenly all the schools have shorter days.
It’s ironic. A charter school touts its extra long days as part of its “special sauce” but promptly drops them as soon as they realize it will prevent them from recruiting the kids they really want to teach whose parents don’t want the extra long days. So now the charter school chain that long claimed that everything they did was “for the at-risk kids” shortens its days “for the teachers”. It goes against their entire philosophy, if you believe their philosophy is to educate at-risk kids the best way they know how and not allow those lazy teachers to have their way.
But if you accept that their guiding philosophy has always been to do whatever necessary to recruit the easy to teach kids and get rid of the hardest to teach ones, then this change in school day length makes perfect sense.
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John, I made a mistake. Instead of 54 percent, 57% of the public school were better or the same in math.
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Lets solve all this debate it is getting tiresome . Lets just restore the tax structure of the 1950’s ,Local State ,and Federal ,make America Great again by giving the Billionaires less money to spend on buying politicians of both parties . While at the same time funding education and wrap around services from k -University . With enough money left over to rebuild our infrastructure. … … … ‘transformational vs incremental change”. Of course you need a revolution to do that, preferably political .
The problems of our education system are economic problems . We will not solve these problems in our schools . The worker participation rate paints a picture of an economy that is still at recession levels, gutted by economic policy decision orchestrated by the same wealthy elites now attacking American Public education . The effort to portray education as the solution for our economic problems is a distraction by those most responsible for creating the problems we are facing. Today’s more educated millennials in NYC earn 20% less than the previous generation . With out even touching the dismal prospects of America’s poor. Who have seen the traditional means of escaping poverty shipped overseas to the largest slave labor markets in the world ,replete with suicide nets.
The notion that we are going to just educate a whole lot of people and there are all these jobs waiting for them is nonsense . I guess I should not take credit for that line thank you Larry Summers and I thought you were a neo liberal.
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Wow, this right-wing “John” troll is really something. Question “John”, are you John Podesta, chair of a high profile political campaign that despises public schools as much as Milton Freidman did? Are you that John?
Anonymous John, you’ve had several people refute your nonsense here, but you persist in pushing your reactionary privatization agenda here. I’ll concede you one point, not every one pushing charter-voucher agenda is in it for profits and privatization. Some of you push the agenda because you are fundamentally racist (although there’s a great deal of overlap between the privatization and racist camps).
My university has consistently found that privately managed charter schools have exacerbated both re-segregation, and systemic racism as a whole. The most recent report being: “Charter Schools, Civil Rights and School Discipline: A Comprehensive Review” ( https://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/press-releases/featured-research-2016/study-finds-many-charter-schools-feeding-school-to-prison-pipeline ).
So, Anonymous John, you are right in a round-about-way about charter-voucher schools being the “civil rights issue of our time”, it’s just that you and your fellow poverty pimps and privatization pushers are the ones violating civil rights. How vile. So which one are you “John”? The kind that pushes charters and vouchers because you adhere to Hayek’s reactionary economics, or because you identify with the genteel, insidious racism that uses policy to preserve white supremacy?
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Robert,
How do you reconcile your position with the fact that more and more African American and Hispanic families are choosing charters every year? You know better than they what’s best for their children? Or perhaps you know what’s best, but want to deny it from them while exercising school choice of your own by moving?
Hypocrisy. You want to save a concept and don’t care how many kids continue to be damaged by it.
Th school to prison pipeline isn’t about suspensions as much is it is about failing out of high school and being unemployed. What’s your solution for the 50% high school drop out rate in the city I volunteer in?
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John,
In response to your question about why minority parents choose charters:
Here is an explanation: they have subject to a massive marketing campaign, that promises that their children will go right to college if they enroll in a charter; their children will be safe from the brawlers and trouble-makers, who will not be enrolled; and their children will get better facilities, better everything. The first claim is a lie; the second is true, since charters kick out the kids they don’t want (including the very children whose parents believed the promises); and they will have better facilities and resources because they not only get public funds but extra funding from billionaires who want to destroy public education.
As the charters drain the public schools of resources and motivated students, the public schools must enlarge class sizes, lay off teachers, and close programs.
It is a win-win for charters, and a lose-lose for public schools.
Who pays your salary?
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Robert,
Two other thoughts.
Lloyd clinging to scraps of information while ignoring the main conclusions of CREDO is not “refuting” my argument, it’s damage control and myopia. He, like so many others here, are in this debate to defend the interests of adults who benefit from the existing system. He looks at great results for African American kids and says uh-oh, how can we squash that
And using the word segregation to describe parents choosing better schools for their children disgusts me. How can you equate this with the forced segregation of our past? And to do it while working to deny them that right and support a system that determines the quality of the education you get by your zip code, and therefore by your income is over the top.
I don’t need your validation or anyone else’s other than the families that choose to trust th school that I volunteer for with their children.
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John,
I know that you think that teachers are in education out of self interest, which is an insult. What is your self interest? The last time you made the offensive claim that most people on this blog were looking out for themselves, I invited you to tell me what my self interest is. I am waiting.
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I didn’t say that teachers are in it for self interests, I said that more teachers are against charters than the general public by about 2x. Do you think that has nothing to do with job security and self interest? It’s also true that teachers are twice as likely to vote in school Board and budget votes for their town if they are also an employee of that same district. All of this is fine, but let’s not pretend that teachers and their unions are 100% selfless and make all decisions in the best interests of children.
You, and most people on this blog, want to shutter charters and take schools away from parents who very much want them. I guess your other post explains that is because you think they are being duped, which I find condescending. In either case, you are substituting your judgment for theirs. I have no way of knowing why you do this.
I have no self-interest re the charter I’m affiliated with. I’m a volunteer and I also spend a lot of my own money on it. I do this to provide an opportunity to students that they otherwise don’t have. I do it because I find a 50% dropout rate from high school abysmal and the sheer waste of young lives reprehensible. My families *need* better than what they are getting otherwise.
Please tell me what you would say to the parent of an African American 8th grader headed into a high school where more than half of the students of color never graduate? You like to talk about charter school attrition, but never talk about that.
You want to take away their choice to go to the school that they believe is the best they can afford for their child. What do you say to them while you’re doing that?
I’d really like the answer to that question, because rhetoric is too easily divorced from the real world, and the policy decisions you support affect real people one at a time.
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John,
Teachers know more about charters than the general public. The general public thinks that charters are self-funding. I continually have to explain to people that charters get taxpayers’ money.
Here is what I would say to the parent of a child who wants them to succeed. Your local public high school has a high dropout rate, but it is a good school that will meet the needs of your child. If you go to the charter, 50% or more of the children will “disappear” before high school graduation, and you will have no constitutional right to demand the special services that your child may need. Also, the charter may abruptly close if its leaders choose to close it or its authorizers revoke its charter. Do you want to help improve your public high school or take your chances with a charter school where your child may be pushed out, and where he or she has no rights?
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Diane,
Thanks for your frank reply. The fact that you can call a high school with a 50% dropout rate a “good school that will meet the needs of your child”, site unseen, presumably solely because it is a traditional public school, pretty much says it all.
There is no doubt that the results at the school in question are utterly destroying a community. We can have different opinions about whether they are doing all they possibly can to improve the outcomes, but to not acknowledge the damage that a 50% dropout rate causes to thousands of lives just reiterates to me that you place the needs of the adults in public education over those of the children and families, and value a school as an employer and institution more than as the place we entrust our children to for a large part of their education.
In that world, the school has zero responsibility for results, regardless of what they are doing or not doing. I view our school (and all schools given the privilege) as being responsible for the best possible outcomes for our students given our resources.
IMO, schools need to take ownership of outcomes. Of course, they can say “we can’t get where we want because we can’t do x, y, and z for financial reasons”, but in that way, they are presenting the case to voters of whether to fund their plans for better results. It seems that, in your view, schools are just responsible for delivery of services.
I guess that is a fundamental difference in our views.
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John, once again, you cherry pick the evidence you want to use to support your views while dismissing any valid and overwhelming evidence that proves you are wrong by ignoring it and attempting to dismiss it with flippant comments.
Anyone who reads my previous comments can click on the links and discover for themselves how the autocratic, opaque, often fraudulent and inferior corporate charters are frantically struggling to overcome the fact that they can’t compete on a level and equal playing field with traditional public schools.
In an attempt to compete, the corporate carters have increased the school year by adding days and hours, they demand that teachers work loners hours but pay them less, and they still come up short when 57 percent of corporal Charters perform the same or worse in math and 72 percent perform the same or worse in reading while teaching fewer special ed children, fewer meteorites, and fewer children that live in poverty.
For instance, “Boston’s MATCH Charter Public School in which teachers commonly put in 60 to 80 hours of work each week. Charter schools in their first year of operation can prove particularly demanding in this respect. …
“charter school teachers tend to earn 10 to 15 percent less than they might get welsher, regardless of their experience level.”
http://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/educator-tips/pros-and-cons-of-teaching-at-a-charter-school/
As as I said before with links, KIPP increased the annual school year by 600 hours or almost 90 days (the average traditional school year is only 180 days long). That means if a child that survives KIPP’s cherry picking process, that child spends an extra 90 days in school for an equivalent of 270 days a year.
And what were the gains CREDO reported for a dramatic minority of charters, about one month on average.
And if you challenge me again by pointing out that I didn’t include any links in this comment, then scroll back and find the comments where I posted all those links. I’m not going to keep doing it again as you cherry pick your way out of the mountain of evidence you are struggling not to drown in. You can’t dismiss away the facts you don’t like that prove behond a shadow of a doubt that you and your overloads are liars and corrupt.
This is what the corporate charters are doing to profit off the public dime.
They are forcing teachers to work longer hours for less.
They are forcing children to spend longer days and weeks in class with less time to develop as children. In Finland, children do not start school until they are 7 and then the school days are shorter than in the U.S. when only compared to the traditional public schools in America.
They are forcing children to behave using abusive, bully tactics.
And when the children don’t fall into line and become obedient drones, they are removed often using abusive, bully tactics.
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Lloyd, I never said you didn’t post links. I just said that your “findings” from CREDO don’t match the authors’. As you said, anyone can read their summary, and I’m confident that any objective reader will get the message they intended: “Urban charter schools in the aggregate provide significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading compared to their TPS peers”
I’ve got to ignore the rest of what you said as it just your obviously very biased opinion without anything to back it up, and I find your sweeping generalizations pretty useless.
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If anyone is biased, it is you John. I think that if you aren’t a fool, then you have sold yourself to an autocratic overlord.
Corporate charters, no matter what the flawed and unreliable test results indicate, can not be compared to traditional public schools when charters do not teach the same student populations or teach the same number of hours daily or the same number of days each school year.
It is a fact that is backed by data (that I linked to in previous comments in this thread and others on this site) that most autocratic, for profit, opaque Charter schools teach longer days and longer school years to a cherry-picked population of students that conform to the harsh and demanding atmosphere that doesn’t exist in a community based, humane, democratic, transparent, non-profit public school where most parents would protest if they discovered how their children were being bullied, embarrassed and abused to increase test scores that mean little to nothing to indicate what a child actually learns.
But if parents protest to the autocratic Charter school management, they are often if not always invited to take their child and leave.
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Lloyd,
Your overuse of adjectives is giving me a headache, and you’re obviously more interested in seeing your printed words than in having a conversation. If you believe that all traditional public schools are humane, transparent, etc. and that all charter schools beat all of the kids they don’t kick out, you are just delusional.
How many charter schools have you visited? On what are you basing your statement that they have harsh and demanding atmospheres? Why would parents send their children to such a school?
Where is your data about cherry-picked populations? Why are charter schools enrolling more and more students? There is obviously something that you don’t or won’t understand about why parents choose them.
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John,
There you go again, ignoring all the reputable facts that I supplied with links that discredit the autocratic, anti-democratic, opaque and often fraudulent and inferior corporate charter school industry that bases its entire argument on flawed profit driven tests cloaked in secrecy that leads to useless results that do not show the quality of teaching and what children actually learn.
Instead, you make false accusation about me or others that disagree with you and attempt to discredit us, because there is nothing else you can do without valid and reputable evidence of your own to support your allegations.
When you do attempt to provide evidence you share only the cherry picked facts that support your agenda. In one of my previous comments I pointed out how you only focused on the 43% of charter schools that gained about a month in math compared to the public schools they are robbing of children and public money. You didn’t even mention or acknowledge that 57% of corporate charters, after 10 to 20 years or more, are still performing the same or worse and you left out totally the fact that 72% of corporate charters were equal to or worse than the public schools when it comes to reading.
You also have never acknowledge the facts — proven with links to reputable sources — that after the first CREDO studies made corporate charters look horrible, many of the surviving charters increased the school year dramatically for the students they kept after kicking out the hardest ones to teach who do not score well on those flawed and invalid tests. For instance, KIPP added 600 instructional hours on top of the 1,200 that is average for the nation — enough to have added a third semester to the two semester school year and yet even then the gains were an unimpressive month in math and even less in reading for the minority of corporate charters that managed to eek out gains over the public schools but only after getting rid of most if not all of the students that would have dragged down the corporate charter schools bogus scores from secretive test that private sector corporations like Pearson profit from.
You see, in math, 43% (corporate charters) is a minority and 57% (public schools) is a majority.
The same applies to reading where 28% (corporate charters) is a minority and 72% (public schools) is a majority.
The biggest difference between the traditional public schools is the fact that public school teachers, as a rule, are highly educated and professional and are willing to sacrifice time and money for the education of the children they teach. Not so much in the corporate charters where the turn over rate is astronomica, because the corporations pay their teachers less and demand long 12 and 14 hour days where there is no choice. You either put in the hours assigned or face the threat of being fired.
In addition, the autocratic, for profit, opaque and often fraudulent corporate charters suspend students in much higher numbers than the public schools do after they abuse and shame them in front of their peers for making a human mistake like the New York Times revealed about how Eva’s Success Gulags treats students.
Links to all my claims can be easily found on this site where I have left other comments or anyone can turn to Google and find these facts on their own just like I did.
John, you can keep insulting me and spouting off about those questionable test scores gains based on for profit secretive tests, and I can keep throwing the other facts back at you that discredit everything your corporate agenda claims.
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Lloyd,
Don’t waste your time on me. I didn’t read past your first sentence and won’t. It made it clear that you’re a zealot and not interested in any objective conversation and therefore not worth my time.
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John, John, John, it takes one to know one and you are the zealot who has decided to remain blind to the facts and ignore that the corporate public education reform movement is a failure, abuses children and is fraudulent and inferior. Call me all the names you can think of, and that will not change the facts. One person calling another names doesn’t mean it is true. It just means one person is calling someone else names.
Until now I never thought of calling you a zealot, but now you have verified it when you labeled me a zealot.
I find it interesting that you use one of the oldest tricks in the book when you can’t win a debate. You ignore the facts that prove you wrong, start to call others names, and change the topic with the same old tired questions that Diane has already answered repeatedly
John asks, “Where is your data about cherry-picked populations? Why are charter schools enrolling more and more students? There is obviously something that you don’t or won’t understand about why parents choose them.”
Why should I answer these questions when Diane already has answered them several times with the same overwhelming evidence?
Do you think asking someone else the same questions is going to change the fact that they have already been answered and revealed for the falsehoods that they are.
Of course the corporate charter schools are enrolling more students, because the billionaire oligarchs are spending a steady stream of money to buy votes and spread lying propaganda that misleads and fool people.
For instance, “Twenty-five years into our nation’s experiment with independently operated, publicly funded charter schools, the news didn’t look good: In May, a new report revealed more than $100 million in fraud, waste and abuse in just 15 of the 43 states that allow charters. (A year later, the report was updated, and the figure rose to $200 million.) Some of the stories defy belief: a school in Philadelphia that was doubling as a nightclub after hours; school operators embezzling millions to pay for high-flying lifestyles; real estate developers cashing in by using public funds to leverage sweet deals on millions of dollars’ worth of property. …
“When it comes to public education, the Walton Family Foundation is the largest philanthropic donor in the U.S. after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates also supports charter schools, but the Walton Family Foundation ($164 million in education grants in 2013) stands out because of its uncompromisingly ideological approach to public education and its strong support for policy advocacy in line with that approach. And as the tower of cards began to shake, it is the Walton Family Foundation that—more than any other—should take the blame.”
http://cashinginonkids.com/brought-to-you-by-wal-mart-how-the-walton-family-foundations-ideological-pursuit-is-damaging-charter-schooling/
In Connecticut, the state Department of Education announced new policies to go
Propaganda full of lies to mislead and fool consumers to spend their money is business as usual in the private sector. That is nothing new and certainly not an honest reason why these children are being seduced into the dark sides for profit, inferior and child abusive schools.
If the autocratic, for profit, often fraudulent and inferior corporate charter schools were better, billionaires wouldn’t have to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on bribes and misleading propaganda to achieve their agenda to destroy the highly successful community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit public schools.
Once again, the last CREDO report John cherry picked facts from to support his claims that charter schools were outperforming traditional public schools also reported that 57% of charters were the same or worse in improving math scores on those secretive, flawed for profit tests and 72% were the same or worse when it came to improve reading scores.
If the corporate charters were better, why have the oligarchs spent so much money lobbying legislatures and Congress for legislation that allows them to have all this secrecy and opaqueness? What is there to hide?
For instance, if a corporate charter claims they graduate 100% of their students but never reveals that graduation number is half or less than half of the number of students they started with, that is misleading parents. Where did all those children go that joined the charter school and then left before graduation? Diane’s answered that one too.
“Charter Schools Continue to Suspend Students At Higher Rates”
http://www.courant.com/education/hc-suspensions-expulsions-report-0406-20160405-story.html
“Separating fact from fiction in 21 claims about charter schools”
Criticism: “Charter schools cream or cherry-pick the best students from traditional public schools.”
“A variety of practices and abuses are used by charter schools to shape their enrollment.”
Click the link and scroll down to find the evidence that shows how the corporate charters cherry pick students and get rid of those they don’t want.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/02/28/separating-fact-from-fiction-in-21-claims-about-charter-schools/
Once again, KIPP increased its school year by 600 hours. That is equal to three semesters of instruction with only a one month gain in math and less than one month in reading.
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Lloyd, it’s surreal to have you pulling tiny bits of information out of a study and ignoring 5 out of 6 of it’s major conclusions. Then you say this blog is your source of information regarding cherry picking? This truly is a Fox News-like echo chamber.
You have such a warped view of the majority of charters and the teachers and students in them. You believe the purpose of charters is privatization and you think the families who choose them are being duped. Would you deliver the same message in person to the families at my school, or is this reserved for blog rants? I can tell you right now that you would be laughed and/or booed out of the room and would roundly deserve it given your utter disrespect for them and lack of empathy for their situation.
Diane summed things up nicely earlier in this thread when she said, sight unseen, that the public high school in my city with its 50%+ dropout rate is “a good school that will meet the needs of your child”. On what planet?
I can’t say that you’re all here to protect adult interests in our education bureaucracy; unlike many of you, I won’t ascribe personal motives. I’ll just say that you haven’t shown me any way to distinguish your positions from someone who is doing just that.
How can you tell that I’m not doing this for privatization? My statements that I don’t think there should be any for-profit charters, that self-dealing and other conflict of interest laws should be strictly enforced, that we have to be careful that charters are never created to subvert the separation of church and state, etc. I also support open enrollment policies like those in New Orleans and Camden. Throw in that I’m a Dem and voted for Bernie if that helps.
Now tell me, what would you change at the high school in my city with its 50% graduation rate or any of the other 2,000+ high schools in this country that graduate less than 60% of their students? Since you want to close my school and force our families back there, what will you do to avoid half of them becoming unemployed? And if you choose to answer, please pretend you are addressing one of them; an actual person instead of some privatizing bogeyman you’ve made up.
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John, none of the links I have provided to the sources I mentioned were to Diane’s blog and most of Diane’s posts link to other reputable sources.
John, your entire defense is based on test score gains in 43% of corporate charters in math and 28% in reading. The other side of that is that 57% are the same or worse in math and 72% are the same or worse in reading, and this meager gain based on flawed and secretive for-profit tests is the only data supporters of the autocratic, opaque, often worse and fraudulent privatization movement of education have.
As I stated in a previous comment with links, the CREDO study you refer to also had data showing that corporate charters enroll fewer children with learning disability, fewer ESL students and fewer students living in poverty, but you never admit those facts in your comments. Instead you sling insults and accusations in an flimsy attempt to discredit anyone that disagrees with your dubious, nonexistent argument.
And as I have said before, corporate charter schools, besides cherry picking students using sneaky questionable methods to end up with children who conform and test well, also increased the length of the corporate charter school year by adding more hours to each school day, more days to each school year and in KIPPs case, even Saturday to gain what — about a month in math and less in reading.
Test scores do not predict if a child will go to college. Test scores do not predict that a child will grow up and become successful. Test scores will not end poverty. The only thing these tests do is boost profits for private sector corporations that produce them.
And that is why one of the top 5 universities in the world does not rely on only test scores to decide who they will accept. Test scores are only one of several factors Standford uses to decide who they accept as freshman and Stanford rejects more than 90% of all applicants regardless of how high their test scores were. Stanford also looks at GPA, an essay, and if an applicant is a scholar athlete and involved in other extra curricular activities while in high school to demonstrate they have the discipline and social skills to be successful in the Stanford environment.
John’s entire argument is based on the results of dubious, secretive, for profit tests for a minority of corporate charters — not the majority of corporate charters, and to achieve that slight gain of 1/9 of a school year in math, corporate charters like KIPP had to add the equivalent on entire semester to the school year. To gain that 1/9 in math,schools like KIPP had to increase the school year by 50 percent.
That is not efficient at all and very suspicious. Meanwhile in Finland, children start school two years later and have shorter school days and shorter school years. The biggest difference between Finland and the U.S. is the child poverty rate. Less than 5% of children in Finland live in poverty while almost 1 in 4 (24%) live in poverty in the U.S.
Test scores will never end or reduce poverty.
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Wohlstetter’s paper on charter schools, co-written with Walton-funded Fordham and, financed by hedge funder, former Enron guy, John Arnold (and the Walton’s) provided evidence that people in Columbus, Ohio, don’t want charter schools… except the state representatives and senators. (Wohlstetter cites the only occasion upon which, anyone in Ohio was asked.) IMO, a bit disingenuously, Wohlstetter, identified political support as the first criteria, in assessing successful charter schools (quality was last), without mentioning campaign contributions from charter school operators, to politicians (which has been well documented).
I’m highly “disgusted” by the comments of harvard’s Roland Fryer (Deutsch 29 blog), as well as the venture philanthropic grants he’s received.
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John, I repeat, even with longer days and longer school years, and the harsh autocratic no nonsense environment in most if not all corporate charters, after more than 10 to 20 years, 72% of charters are still no better or are worse in reading and 57% are no better or are worse in math.
John, it doesn’t matter what you think or claim, those facts can not be denied. The corporate public education reform movement has failed and the only reason it continues and has supporters willing to spend hundreds of millions a year on charter school support and propaganda is because of the profits to be made from public money.
K -12 education in the U.S. is an emerging market — thanks to support from people likie you — worth more than $600 billion dollars annually. There’s big money to be made educating America’s poorest students.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/charter-school-executives-earning-big-bucks-education-city-poorer-students-article-1.437341
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/4/8/1290529/-Is-public-school-for-sale-the-cost-of-KIPP
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John needs to tell his friends and family to start saving for enrollments in Bridge International Academies. The sole purpose of charter schools is to get public buy-in for the privatization of public schools, Then, the for-profit model will replace publicly subsidized education, just like the World Bank promotes. There’s a reason the Aspen Institute has David Koch on the board and that Gates funds its education programs.
“The ideal of quality public education, for all, is under greater threat today than it has ever been.”
I think people like John are too afraid to admit that they’ll be treated just like the lowest of the low, when the richest 0.1% govern the US. as a colony.
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Not a colony. A fiefdom like in the dark ages, and the 0.1% see themselves as the new royalty like King George reborn.
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Lloyd,
You are right.
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