Jersey Jazzman, aka public school teacher and Ph.D. candidate Mark Weber, wrote a blistering reproach to the charter school cheerleaders who have persuaded Governor Chris Christie that charters accomplish more with less. This enables Christie to propose an outrageously inequitable plan that takes from the poor and gives to the rich.
He shows how certain loud charter zealots in New Jersey have argued that charters in Newark are way better than Newark public schools, despite the clear evidence that the charters enroll a different demographic and have high attrition rates.
He points out that when honest critics point out the verifiable facts, they can expect to be slimed and smeared by the charter cheerleaders, who glory in the privatization of public schools.
Weber reviews the shameless attacks by charter zealot Laura Waters and refutes her claims with data, evidence, not rhetoric.
He concludes:
I’ve spent more time answering Waters’ post than it deserves; however, I’m doing so this time for a reason. Chris Christie has proposed a radical change in school funding — one that even Peter Cunningham agrees is pernicious for this state’s neediest children. Yet how does Christie justify his plan? With stories of charter school “success.” And who has sold this tale?
Laura Waters, Peter Cunningham, and the well-heeled charter school operators themselves. In their zeal to pump up charters and shoot down honest critics like Julia Sass Rubin, these fine, reformy folks have set up the students who attend New Jersey’s urban, public, district schools for a huge cut in their schools’ budgets.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: I don’t ever pretend that I don’t have a point of view. I’m a New Jersey public school teacher and I am damn tired of being blamed for things completely out of my and my colleagues’ control. I think the celebration of charter school “success” is largely a pretext for beating up teachers unions, gutting teacher workplace protections, and cutting back even further on public school funding, particularly in urban districts. I think charter cheerleading keeps us from having a real conversation about the structural problems related to race and economic inequality in America.
But now we’re seeing the consequences of unbridled charter love are even more dangerous than mere charter expansion. Charlatans like Christie are using the very arguments charter cheerleaders spout daily to make the case that we can simply turn our backs on urban schools and their students. So long as a few charter schools get better than average test scores — by whatever means necessary — it’s perfectly fine to cut the budgets of urban district schools.
This awful rhetoric can be laid directly at the feet of the charter industry and their willing saps in the media — and that includes the professional reformy propaganda machine that exists solely to counter informed critics like me or Bruce Baker or Julia Sass Rubin.
I won’t speak for Bruce [Baker] or Julia, but I’m pretty sure they’d agree with me when I say this: I am not against school choice or charter schools per se. I started my K-12 career in a charter school. I think there are worthwhile reasons for having charters and other forms of alternative schools. I have been teaching long enough to know not every kid is going to fit well in her neighborhood school, and that there are good reasons to offer other choices. I think there are charters that have practices that may well be worth studying.
So folks like me and Bruce and Julia may have a point of view our opinions, but we aren’t questioning charter cheerleading simply as a reflex; our criticisms are reasonable and informed by the evidence. Do you disagree? Fine, I’m happy to debate.
But understand: your ill-informed, statistically-inept charter cheerleading is no longer simply about justifying your own school; it’s now being used to excuse a wholesale defunding of our urban public schools.
Do you really want that on your hands?
He’s right, and it’s not just NJ.
Here’s the ed chair in the Ohio House, making his argument for charter schools:
“Why are we spending $15k to $20k per student in traditional public when we can get the same results for 1/2 the price.”
Thanks ed reform advocates! Good job! Are they TRYING to damage existing public schools? Ohio doesn’t fund public schools at “15 to 20k” by the way, not that facts matter.
The Obama Administration should go on another “public schools are all failing” national tour. That way no one will ever pass another funding initiative again!
I can’t help but notice that public schools in 30-some states have lost funding over the last 8 years, yet there are (now) thousands of paid ed reform advocates and hundreds of well-funded ed reform orgs. Do they just not advocate for existing public schools or are they lousy advocates? One or the other is true. Public schools seem to do worse as the number of paid ed reform advocates increase.
Excellent!
Ohio is now contemplating lowering standards for all public schools in order to save the lucrative “cybercharter sector”. Can I chalk this up as another ed reform success? Is there anyone in this “movement” that considers the effects their actions have on public schools? 93% of the kids in this state attend them. They’re pretty important.
Christie is ignoring them on funding because Christie got everything he wanted- they went along with his entire agenda. He doesn’t have to give them anything.
Looks like public schools are collateral damage again in a “movement” ideological battle. Oh, well. No great loss. They’re all failing anyway.
This enables Christie to propose an outrageously inequitable plan that
takes from the poor and gives to the rich.
Sort of a Dooh Nibor . . . (reverse Robin Hood)
There have been and continue to be alternatives to public schools that do not involve privatization supported by the public’s tax dollars that are diverted from already underfunded public schools.
It is a false premise if Jersey Jazzman is saying privatization of public education is justified because public school system doesn’t work for every single person. With over 2.5 million students in privately managed charter schools time to admit the charter school privatization reform has failed, that those 2.5 million students are not in an alternative school system better than the traditional public school system.
And, it is time to also admit that the existence of the alternative system is weakening American public school system.
Also, the unintended consequence of creating charter schools is to create a private charter interest that grows in strength its charter school friendly super PAC with each non-profit, as well as for-profit unionized or not charter school that is authorized.
This charter super PAC wild-fire like growing strength is shifting politicians’ decision to approve charters and charter interest legislation, not on the education merits of the legislation, but on whether or not a politician will become a target of the charter school super PAC money. Political arena is witnessing capture of the charter school issue much as the NRA has captured the gun issue. Politicians do not want to be seen as the enemy of charter schools.
Way politicians cover themselves is to hide behind the charter school camp’s propaganda that charter schools are public schools. This successfully buries the issue of a politician having to go on the record of being an opponent of charter schools and suffer bringing the wrath of the charter school super PAC down on them.
A cautionary tale is that I heard is that a county superintendent wanting to replace someone on her county board of education goes to charter school super PAC leadership and requests that the super PAC independently fund a candidate to run against an incumbent. The incumbent was defeated in a narrow victory. Growing wealth of charter school super PAC has, and will be, manipulated to serve the interest of politicians.
The charter school alternative to public education has proven on the whole to be worth less than the public school system without the privately managed charter school alternative.
The public interest is best serve by public schools and not privatization of public schools.
The whole “choice” argument is overrated. In my experience with public education, I have seen public education provide alternative programs for at risk students. I have seen public districts band together to provide career alternatives and special needs placements from the Board of Cooperative Educational Services to a variety of students that didn’t fit the mold. It was an efficient and cost effective way to serve these students, far cheaper than charters. Charters have failed to innovate. In fact, they are more likely to offer a one size fits all model of instruction. What is innovative about “no excuses,” suspensions, attrition or even cyber behaviorist instruction? If anything, these are remnants from the 19th century.
Did you read this entire article, or Jersey Jazzman’s original article? Because if you did, you would not have written:
“It is a false premise if Jersey Jazzman is saying privatization of public education is justified because public school system doesn’t work for every single person.”
Where does Jazzman even imply this? He is quoting charter school advocates, and extensively countering them, not saying at all that “privatization of public education” is justified.
Laura Waters is one of the worst and most irritating charter cheerleaders and bloviators. She makes regular “contributions” to NJ Spotlight and other venues. She has been elected four times to the Lawrence Township Board of Education, and served over eight years as Board President. She is a PHD in literature and pedagogy. And yet this woman makes lame, knee-jerk, bumper sticker-like and puerile arguments for charter schools and resorts to velvet ad hominem attacks.
“And yet this woman makes lame, knee-jerk, bumper sticker-like and puerile arguments for charter schools and resorts to velvet ad hominem attacks.”
One wonders if this (and so many examples like it) are an indictment of the PhD as a kind of elevated form of certification, or of the evil transformative effect of power and greed.
I would say both.
There is an enormous gap between the ideological notion of an alternative school and the run away gravy train of today’s charter chains. These are not “laboratories of innovation” that enhance public education. As Diane had stated, charters in their current form are parasites that drain resources from the host until the host can no longer sustain it. Charters are designed to weaken public schools, and they have become a political hydra of economic and political power supported by billionaires so that nobody examines the evidence or impact of them. Worst of all the political partiality of the charters has resulted in giving policymakers a green light to disinvest in the common good. Since our 2008 economic meltdown many states have slashed public education budgets while increasing funding and grants to charter schools. Christie’s unrealistic proposal is symptomatic of a greater problem that is playing out in state after state, and city after city. Our current test and punish policy is designed to crush public education and unions while it allows a few to profit at the expense of many.
“There is an enormous gap between the ideological notion of an alternative school and the run away gravy train of today’s charter chains. ”
Yes! That’s what we must get the public to understand
Comprehensive high schools, and other well funded public schools are large communities that bring together enough students with enough interests to allow for a small university of choice. A range of sports teams with deep benches, an arts program with a focus on a variety of disciplines, and the staff and resources, to support them. A school Magazine or Newspaper, or both. Cheer leading squads, bands, science clubs, and etc. My high School actually had all of these things and more! I belonged to many of them, exploring my own interests and working in community with both adults, and peers.
All of these enrichment opportunities unfolded naturally from the academic programs that were rich and varied. This was simply one public high school in suburban Long Island, made possible by the functional support and funding of the community.
Public schools like some of the best known stories, have no single author whose name we know, but are passed down, coming to us as a distillate of many voices and visions.
Here is an institution created not just by the largesse of local, state and federal funding, but by the power of community.
Charter schools on the other hand are cheap imposters of what a real public school, when actually funded, can and should be. Too often charters become an excuse for bare-bones schooling. Their genetics come from the same corporate gene pool as Dunkin Doughnuts, with a “more for less” mentality
Cheap imposters providing a most restrictive environment. They more closely resemble the stereotypical Catholic schools of the 1960s.
Jazzman (as quoted by Diane): “So folks like me and Bruce and Julia may have a point of view our opinions, but we aren’t questioning charter cheerleading simply as a reflex; our criticisms are reasonable and informed by the evidence. Do you disagree? Fine, I’m happy to debate…. But understand: your ill-informed, statistically-inept charter cheerleading…”
Late yesterday I posted to the comments section of Jazzman’s site, under the article, a query doubting whether the data that Julia cited adequately supported her conclusions. That comment still awaited moderation when I checked earlier today. And now I find that JJ’s article is, at least for the moment, no longer available. “Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist.” A temporary technical glitch?
DIane: “He points out that when honest critics point out the verifiable facts, they can expect to be slimed and smeared by the charter cheerleaders, who glory in the privatization of public schools.”
Perhaps rather than a technical glitch, these are honest critics who have now realized that the pertinent facts were not as verifiable as they had originally, mistakenly perceived. Rather than debate it, delete it?
Stephen, I happened to stop here b/c someone tweeted out a link to Diane’s post. And then I saw my original post was gone.
Believe me, the last thing I want is to see my work disappear by accident. Maybe I’m responsible somehow, but if I am, I don’t recall what I did.
Luckily, Blue Jersey had cross-posted my work and I was able to recover it. And somehow, Blogspot recovered the original link. So the link Diane gave above seems to work. If not:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2016/07/how-charter-cheerleading-industry-is.html
I’ve been at this a good long while, Stephen — I don’t back away from arguments often. If you want to leave a comment now, by all means please do. I apologize that you weren’t able to before, but trust me — it’s not because I’m shy about debating.
Hi JJ, thanks for the alert that the blog posting has been recovered. I have tried several times to post a comment, but after seeing: “Your comment has been saved and will be visible after blog owner approval” it never appears. Would appreciate your fixing that if possible… I’ll post it here below… feel free to cut and paste it if that helps:
Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I get the impression that you and Julia Rubin and Bruce Baker are looking at North Star enrollment data and jumping to conclusions about how many students are “lost” without paying attention to grade-level retention. I wonder whether any of the 5th graders Julia cited as having been “lost” might instead have been retained, bumping up those 5th grade numbers, and successfully graduated in 5 years instead of 4. If your analyses do pay attention to the effects of grade-level retention, where do you find the NJ school-based grade-level retention data? I discussed this issue with a Colorado-based opponent of charter schools in the comments here without getting a convincing explanation of the validity of her calculations: https://themerrowreport.com/2016/03/18/evas-offensive/
BTW, if you haven’t read the Angrist and Setren papers I quote from below, I think you’ll find them of interest and somewhat relevant to the assumptions made for your above article. While they refer to research conducted regarding charter schools in Boston, their findings may have some relevance to your analyses of what’s transpiring in Newark.
“Stand and Deliver: Effects of Boston’s Charter High Schools on College Preparation, Entry, and Choice” — Joshua Angrist, et al
http://economics.mit.edu/files/9799
“Charter schools are sometimes said to generate gains by the selective retention of higher-performing students — see, e.g., Skinner 2009. In this view, charter effectiveness is at least partly attributed to a tendency to eject trouble-makers and stragglers, leaving a student population that is easier to teach.”
[…]
“These results suggest that positive charter effects cannot be attributed to low-quality peers leaving charter schools. If anything, selective exit of low achievers is more pronounced at Boston’s traditional public schools.”
————
“Special Education and English Language Learner Students in Boston Charter Schools: Impact and Classification” — Elizabeth Setren
http://economics.mit.edu/files/11208
“I also document striking differences in special needs classification practices in Boston charter and traditional public schools. Charter enrollment nearly doubles the likelihood that a student in special education at the time of the lottery loses this classification by the beginning of the following school year. Moreover, charters are three times as likely to remove an ELL classification. Charters are also three times more likely than traditional public schools to move special education students into general education classrooms… These differences in classification practices make the proportion of special needs students in charters appear smaller.””
Best wishes. I thoroughly concur with your desire for the NJDOE to release far more detailed data.
– Stephen
Hi Stephen,
Your comment is up. I have to screen comments, unfortunately, b/c of problems with spammers. I try to get to the blog once a day to approve comments but sometimes life keeps me from doing so. I’m a part-time blogger and that’s just the reality of my life.
If there was significant grade level retention at North Star, the drop-off numbers would only affect the first cohort studied. In other words, the first cohort would lose kids, but the next would pick them up, and those kids would stay with their new cohort until they graduate. The retained kids in that cohort would then move to the next one, and so on.
When we look at multiple cohorts, however, that doesn’t appear to be the case. North Star appears, cohort after cohort, to lose many kids.
Which doesn’t surprise me at all. A “choice” system would almost dictate this sort of behavior. See:
http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/student-attrition-core-feature-school-choice-not-bug
This said, I will concede we don’t have student-level retention data; we can only study-grade level enrollments, which give us some good evidence but aren’t complete. So why, then, is the Christie administration barreling ahead with charter expansion, especially for Uncommon/North Star in Newark and Camden, without gathering the data necessary for answering this rather basic question?
I know Angrist’s work quite well. And I reviewed Steren’s paper for NEPC:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-charter-expansion
It’s a good study but it is not at all sufficient evidence to justify a wide-scale expansion of charters, either in Boston or Newark. Same w/Angrist’s work.You’ll find many of my reservations articulated here:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2015/10/charter-schools-exchange-part-ii.html
Best,
Mark
JJ: “If there was significant grade level retention at North Star, the drop-off numbers would only affect the first cohort studied. In other words, the first cohort would lose kids, but the next would pick them up, and those kids would stay with their new cohort until they graduate. The retained kids in that cohort would then move to the next one, and so on.”
Sounds like that riff was composed with more intuition than spreadsheet, Jazzman.
Those effects would not entirely dissolve over time. If the grade level retention is consistently front-loaded at the beginning of a school’s years or, for that matter, backloaded at the final year, that will continually skew the results one way or another… giving a false impression of how high the attrition rate is.
Consider, for example, a four year H.S. opening up with enrollment every year of 100 incoming freshmen, and with 10 freshmen retained each year. Zero dropouts/attrition/transfers.
100
110 90
110 100 90
110 100 100 90
110 100 100 100
110 100 100 100
10 “lost” now every year? No.
Balfanz and Legters at Johns Hopkins recognized the potential problem in the technical appendix to “Locating the Dropout Crisis” http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED484525.pdf where they wrote about potential impacts of a “9th Grade Bulge” and/or “12th Grade Bubble”:
“Comparing the number of students in 12th grade to the number of students in the 10th or 9th grade three or four years earlier is susceptible to several biases which makes it unreliable as a direct measure of the dropout rate…
“There are two potential sources of bias in graduation/dropout estimates and indicators which compare enrollments in the senior year to enrollments in the freshman year or enrollments in one year to graduates in another that are commonly mentioned in critiques of these measures.
“The first is ninth grade repeaters. One potential weakness of using a promoting power measure as a proxy for the dropout rate is that ninth grade enrollments could include a large number of students who are repeating the ninth grade and could, in theory, go on to graduate in large numbers.
“A related critique is that students can be counted multiple times in the ninth grade enrollment counts (the year they are a first time student, then each year they repeat) whereas they can only be counted as a graduate one time…
For their research purposes, Balfanz and Legters figured that repeating 9th graders wouldn’t overly skew their figures:
“Absent a strong and sustained intervention, there is little evidence that students who failed to be promoted to the tenth grade will right themselves by simply being given a second try (Roderick et al., 1998).”
However North Star from what I can tell may well represent a “strong and sustained intervention” for a significant number of its students.
Thanks for the link to your review of Setren’s paper. I’m impressed! Nicely done.
In respect to your dialog with Melhorn, I look forward to reading it in its entirety, plus comments. As for the Part II quote from Noguera… If you haven’t had a chance to watch this yet, I think you’ll find it worth your time (while multitasking)… Elizabeth Green, Co-Founder, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Chalkbeat at the NewSchools Venture Fund 2016 Summit moderating a panel exploring school discipline and zero tolerance policies in schools: https://fpdl.vimeocdn.com/vimeo-prod-skyfire-std-us/01/3502/6/167511127/535429134.mp4?token=57a27acf_0xa85812f9947e7ae24b26f6cebcee7362201c28af
Stephen,
Be sure to read Dobbie and Fryer’s new paper, which I am posting tomorrow.
Do your children go to a No Excuses charter school?
“Be sure to read Dobbie and Fryer’s new paper, which I am posting tomorrow.”
Thanks! Will do! Look forward to it.
“Do your children go to a No Excuses charter school?”
What makes you think I’m old enough to have kids, Diane? That I’m not here completing an assignment for my 6th grade ELA class at a no-excuses charter?
In any event, to continue the conversation, even on a hypothetical basis, I think the next step would be for you to define a “no-excuses charter”. And then for me to quibble with the definition.
Have you had a chance to watch that video yet?
To cut to the chase, if it helps, I would warmly welcome Shawn Hardnett (or Steven Evangelista) as head of discipline at any school that I or a loved one attended.
Stephen,
You have convinced me that you are a sixth grade student at Deerfield Academy writing a term paper on the joys of No Excuses charter schools.
Hah! Touché!
Go to bed, Stephen. Past your bedtime.