Arne Duncan was the best friend the charter industry ever had in the federal government. He praised them again and again, and he periodically announced that he had found a charter school that had closed the gaps and done what no public school could do. He lavished hundreds of millions of dollars on them. I can’t recall him ever praising any public school the way he praised privately managed charters. Apparently, he hasn’t changed his mind. In this article that appeared in The Atlantic, Duncan is back to his old stand, singing the virtues of charters.
But once again, as I have in the past, I have to save Albert Shanker from the bold assertion that he was the visionary who created the charter movement. It is true that Shanker was one of the first to describe a new kind of school that he called a charter school (the other was Raymond Budde at the University of Massachusetts). In 1988, he sang the praises of this experiment. He saw it as a school within a school, made up of union teachers, that would be free to try new methods to teach the disaffected, the kids that regular public schools were not doing well with. He thought these schools would seek out the toughest kids. He said that the charter would have to get the permission of the local teachers’ union before starting. It would be an autonomous teacher-run school with a five-year grant of authority. He saw it as an R&D lab that helped public schools try out and learn new ways to educate.
What people like Duncan and others who invoke Shanker’s name will never tell you is that Shanker turned against his creation only five years later, in 1993. He concluded that charters had been taken over by corporate interests and that his idea had become a vehicle for privatization of public schools. He denounced them as vociferously as he denounced vouchers.
See pp. 123-124 of my book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” (The page numbers might be different in the new edition. Just read Chapter 7.)
Twenty-three years ago, Shanker repudiated his love for charter schools. Yet people like Duncan continue to salute him as a founding father, as if that makes privatization palatable.
Maybe Donald Trump will make Arne Duncan his Secy of Education again. I see no difference between them.
Probably set up Arne in Room 101 as Ministry of Truth.
He’s out of touch and I hope no one is paying him any attention.
Is the Whitmire promotion of charters coordinated w/in ed reform? It feels like a marketing campaign.
Big book release, all the superstars in ed reform promote the book uncritically- this can’t be accidental or organic, can it?
It would be odd if so many people recited the same set of talking points at the same time without some kind of coordination or communication.
I’ll wait for Arne Duncan to contribute to a book about public school leaders. I’ll be waiting a long time. He’s made it clear he prefers privatized systems over public systems.
Arne Duncan talking about public schools might benefit this country but would do absolutely nothing to benefit his own bank account. Do teachers’ unions set up think tanks that provide extremely well-paying jobs requiring almost no real work? Do they provide you with a ghostwriter (or “research assistant”) to fashion most of your book so you have lots of time to make some tweets and publicize the faux “studies” someone tells you to publicize. Or travel first class to speaking engagements?
Until teachers union and public school parents understand that no one is going to care about their issues until they provide lucrative jobs for dozens or hundreds of “public opinion makers”, it’s doubtful that any of those very greedy “public opinion makers” like Arne or Peter Cunningham will listen or care about them.
Those people know exactly where their bread is buttered and that is far more important to them than truth, honesty, or the education of at-risk students who aren’t a “credit” to their charter school.
I understand, as a former charter operator, why other Dems (I have voted dem my entire life) hate charters. Mine was a mom and pop, no corporate connections, no payments leaving the district for ‘curriculum’ or other support. But the national charter movement has been coopted by corporate interests, no doubt. But the question that still haunts me is this: are all those parents who choose charters just duped? Are they pawns to corporate interests? Are their neighborhood schools actually good and are they too ignorant to notice? What is your advice to those parents?
Are all the people who abandon their local mom and pop stores when Wal Mart waves “low prices” at them duped? Do they think, well in the long term after all the mom and pops close and Wal Mart raises its prices, it might not be so appealing?
Of course not. They are making a choice that in the short term seems like the best one. Especially if Wal Mart is subsidized by money from the federal government and billionaires whose interests it is to make all mom and pop stores disappear.
Charters are given an even bigger advantage than Wal Mart since no one cares (except their parents) how they treat the most expensive students. When you are offering a “fee for service” school in which you are paid the same no matter how much a child costs you, the incentive is always to treat the expensive kids in the manner most likely to get them to leave your school. That is the “market” that reformers adore! They don’t even realize that the more they praise how charters are “market-driven”, the more that public parents understand exactly what they mean. Some of those parents will (perhaps reluctantly) exchange any concern about other kids for the chance at a much better funded school. Some of those parents are delighted that “those kids” won’t be sitting anywhere next to theirs.
The point is that the reform movement ONLY wants to give parents this false choice. Either choose a school that works for your easy to teach child at the expense of the most vulnerable kids who will be treated like garbage so your child may thrive. Or send you kid back to those public schools where we send all the garbage and where the same resources we can spend to teach easy children must be spent to help the students who need far more attention.
I get how this “choice” is appealing. And if so, maybe every public school system needs to open a nearby “choice” option where parents whose kids are easy to teach and well behaved may choose and any who don’t meet the grade are drummed out of.
At least the profits from teaching the well-behaved, academically inclined children would stay in the system and could be used to benefit the students who are drummed out of the public “choice” school. At least there wouldn’t be billions in wasted dollars going to charlatans and faux “reformers” and marketing and promoting their brand. It would be spent in schools.
I always felt there was an obvious experiment that was never tried — probably because the powers that be prefer to waste money on privatized quick fixes than any long-term real solutions. Every public school would have reasonably small class sizes (20 for K, no more than 25 for older grades, moving up to 30). If students are disruptive or having trouble adjusting, the teachers aren’t told “deal with it”, but instead there are separate classes where those kids can be sent staffed with specialists whose goal is to try to figure out what is really going on in that child’s life and whether it is external (bullying, bad situation at home, in some instances a mismatched or even bad teacher) or internal (learning disabilities, vision problems, etc.) All children are welcome to return to the mainstream classes at any time IF they are able to be there and not disrupt the learning of other students, but they are also welcome to remain in these “alternative” classrooms where kids with learning styles that may need different ways of teaching are taught by teachers who want to teach them.
What’s not to like about that?
Well stated NYCPSP!!
Other than this “(20 for K, no more than 25 for older grades, moving up to 30)” Max for K-5 should be 15 with one aide and a SpEd teacher as needed, 20 max for 6-12 with an aide and SpEd teacher as necessary.
This country has more than enough wealth to provide those levels. The question is do we have the sense to do so.
Unfortunately I know what the answer is to that question.
Really? Your “mom and pop” charter school was overseen by a democratically elected board of which the transparency and accountability was regulated by laws governing the accessibility of public institutions for all? And no payments were made to you? You were transparently compensated at the same rate as public servants? The question that haunts me is this: are all those parents who wind up sending their kids to publicly funded private scams as educated as I am about these issues? Are some parents just as likely to be influenced by advertising campaigns into sending their kids to fast “food” chains for dinner as to charter “school” chains for breakfast and lunch? Are their neighborhoods and communities better off if they participate instead of running away? Are their cities and communities actually good and you are too racist and/or classist to believe it? My advice to those parents is to hang on. One day, community and democracy will save them, will bring them back home. One day, outsourcing will cease. The quality of life in our neighborhoods will be restored to improving instead of dissolving. We and our jobs and schools will all be brought back home.
I wonder how those parents feel when many of their children are tossed back into the public schools. Some of the new arrivals are still wearing their charter shirts.
Has Clinton in any way indicated her disagreement with Duncan? He and President Obama have been a disaster for public schooling.
She has said very little about K-12 other than disapproval of for profit charters
Unfortunately neither Bernie Sanders nor Elizabeth Warren have stated any disagreement with Duncan. Sanders had the opportunity and the bully pulpit to make this into an issue and it obviously held no interest for him. The notion that he didn’t think public education was worth making into a campaign issue was one of the great disappointments in his campaign, in my view.
Clinton may be no better than Obama but it’s hard to believe she will be worse. She seems to be far more interested in evidence and facts and thoughtful discussion than Obama, who believed anything Arne Duncan told him and must have put in ear plugs whenever he came near any public school parents or teachers who could have explained to him where reform was doing more to enrich charter operators than it was teaching at-risk kids.
Duncan did as he was told.
Is it true that people in Chicago “didn’t care” when ed reformers shuttered 50 public schools in their neighborhoods?
Where they evidence that they “didn’t care”? It seemed to me that they cared. Does Arne Duncan have some unique insight into what people care about that is different than what people say they care about?
That’s what makes Arne and his reformer buddies so pro-Trump. They don’t believe in evidence. They don’t believe in honesty. They just “know” what is right and what is wrong, and by golly we should understand that Putin telling people what they think is a good thing.
NYC public school parent:
What you wrote.
😎
Your line “they don’t believe in evidence” exactly sums up year after year of the invasions and programs and endless change brought to low-income schools by test-score “reform” — where evidence points directly to the destruction wreaked, yet the “reform” never stops. The fact that across the nation there is a growing teacher shortage should be EVIDENCE enough that the government’s punitive test-score policies have been the opposite of successful.
One goal was the creation of a teacher shortage in order to accelerate the implementation of personalized computer instruction.
Oh help. I didn’t think of that…
“They don’t believe in evidence. They don’t believe in honesty.”
In other words they are “infidels to truth”.
It’s kind of the same thing with healthcare and Kaiser Permanente. It started out as health care for a large group of employees. The ideas was great in that the workers could get good medical care within the system. Problem is…..GREED got in the way. Profit could be made and the bloody waters attracted many sharks. Mr. Kaiser would not have wanted to participate in his own HMO if he were alive today (I think he’s dead?). At least Mr. Shanker can admit that it didn’t turn out so well once the sharks took over the idea.
Dear Diane Ravitch, I thank ‘heaven’ (God?) every day for giving us Diane Ravitch to save America from ‘Charter Schools’; for saving us from private profit at public expense under the guise of ‘educating’ our children … I am 85,and still dedicated to Public Education – the Backbone of Democracy. Why have we ‘voluntarily’ surrendered the guarantee of a Democratic state for the next generation – meaning publicly educated citizens .. when it is ours by choice and paid for by our taxes? What a tragedy … we are witnessing while standing still and silent.. No, you are not ‘silent’ and your voice is spreading … but it may be too late … because those citizens elected to govern us are ‘duped’ into believing Charter Schools (you can’t really label them ‘schools’) are better than public education – ignoring the painful truth that Public Schools fall short because State Gov’t side-steps putting our taxes in our children’s education. Well, we are over the brink… in free fall. I doubt that we can row our way back to choosing our government once the corporate elites take charge. J. Ellingston, Green Party Washington DC (40% Charter Schools)
On Sat, Sep 10, 2016 at 12:01 PM, Diane Ravitchs blog wrote:
> dianeravitch posted: “Arne Duncan was the best friend the charter industry > ever had in the federal government. He praised them again and again, and he > periodically announced that he had found a charter school that had closed > the gaps and done what no public school could do. He” >
Dear Mr. Ellingston,
I never give up hope that even the worst situation can be reversed. I remember once having a conversation with the great sociologist James Coleman, about 40 years ago. I was feeling despairing, and I said that I felt like I was on a train that was going somewhere I didn’t want to go and the train couldn’t be stopped. He disagreed. He said, every train has a conductor. If it doesn’t, then go for the controls.
If I felt hopeless, I could not spend 6 or more hours a day replenishing this blog.
It makes me angry that my tax dollars are being used to pay for private choices, for religious schools, and for frauds. I pay taxes to educate children to be citizens, not to train them to be parrots or seals.
So, yes, we will fight on.
Back when the news of the Atlanta cheating scandal broke, what was Duncan’s take on the Atlanta cheating scandal?
Mehhh, it’s no big deal.
ARNE DUNCAN (blase): “This is an easy one to fix: better test security.”
Watch the August 2011 video:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/07/atlanta-cheating-scandal-_n_892169.html
Oh, I’m so glad Arne got to the bottom of this whole problem, and identified the cure. We can all relax now.
This interview is great. Apparently, this was just some local Atlanta reporter, but she asked some pointed questions.
She asks him if the unrealistic expectations of NCLB are part of the problem, and he’s totally non-responsive… he doesn’t give a yes or no to this. Instead, he just says, “There are great teachers who are amazing… beating the odds… blah blah blah”
Later, she says that “a lot of this is about money”, and asks if punishments and monetary rewards “need to be de-coupled from student learning.” Instead of owning up and admit this obvious reality—painfully obvious, in the light of what just happened in Atlanta– Dun-an says… oh no… not at all. We need to do this MORE.
Check out this word salad (including the usual Duncan smarmy “snow job” of praising teachers and principles… the same folks whose profession Duncan has destroyed):
————————————————————–
DUNCAN: (at 02:30) “Well, I think rewarding teacher excellence is important. I think I would argue the opposite (i.e. don’t “de-couple”), that far too often we haven’t we haven’t celebrated great teachers. We haven’t celebrated great principals who are making a huge difference in students’ lives. You just want to make sure that they’re doing it honestly, and again, the vast majority of teachers are doing an amazing job, often in very difficult circumstances, in helping students beat the odds every single day. I think we need to do a better job of spotlighting that, and incentivizing that, and encouraging that, and learning from that.
“In education, we’ve been far too reluctant to talk about success. We just need to that. We just need to make sure that we’re doing it with integrity.
“Not too hard to do.”
————————-
Really Arne? “Not too hard to do”? “Merit pay” and basing personnel decision on test scores has been tried countless times for over 100 years, and it has always failed.
What you claim is “not hard to do” HAS NEVER WORKED.
IT WILL NEVER WORK.
In fact, when it’s tried, it actually causes severe harm—narrowing of the curriculum, turning schools into test prep factories, etc.
Duncan’s corporate reform masters need testing to drive privatization, corporate profiteering, and union-busting, and so Duncan will defend to the death the misuse, the over-emphasis on testing, the massive over-testing in general, etc.
My preparation to be a teacher/teacher educator occurred at Montclair State University, in a network of public schools,including Newark and Paterson, part of NJNER). At the time, our Dean, Nicholas Michelli, made abundantly clear to all of us that he was opposed to charter schools, as privatization. However, when I completed my studies, as a new immigrant and newly minted EdD, I grabbed the first full-time job offered to me, to teach English at a charter school run by L4L, largely run as Independent Study, Credit Recovery schools, where students attend in order to graduate high school or (express their desire to) return to their district high schools in order to graduate.
The very first new teacher orientation at L4L covered COMPLIANCING, record-keeping, not so much of grades, but rather the markings that completed learning modules and ADA forms should bear, this being in large measure 40 percent of my work as a teacher –unsurprising, as it ensures continuous funding. Note: I had previously taught–as an independent contractor–part-time at a tutorial outfit serving public schools where everything had to be filled in blue ink, or you would not be paid. At the Compliancing Orientation, the soon-to-be-dismissed principal noted the look of dismay on my face when graduation figures appeared on the screen. They were very, very, and painfully low! (For this aspect of my work as a teacher, I held compliancing as analogous to coding procedures in qualitative research.) I asked my colleague, the one doctoral candidate “How can this school justify its existence if it cannot graduate students?!?!
Compliancing protocols frequently change, so throughout the year, teachers are constantly undergoing retraining in compliancing. At the end of my year at MVPC-Inglewood, I was one of the top three teachers, in the number of students graduating from our caseload. Though, you should have seen the stage at graduation, the Board of Directors, 97 percent of whom are Caucasian males, were onstage, and us peons, teachers, beneath the stage. The keynote speaker was your token African-American.
I am certain we would have graduated more students, but the school is 1. underresourced, and 2. mathematically challenged timewise, among other factors, but these two problems are standouts. First, I will write about the school being underresourced. Students complete most, if not all, of their ELA work online because few have the wherewithal to use the local public libraries–though I helped them fill out library card application forms and directed them to the ones closest to their homes–, and the charter school does not have a library (After L4L, I interviewed at the union-busting
ref: http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/06/07/61411/mixed-ruling-on-claims-alliance-charter-school-lea/
Alliance Gertz-Ressler, the flagship school of that charter chain, and they, too, do not have a library.) Furthermore, the ELA Common Core curriculum was cobbled together; it had gone through four iterations in about as many months that I was there. In fact there were teachers who were yet to implement said curriculum (i.e. Common Core). Some members of Administration and teaching staff were not prepared in the democratic underpinnings of education, working with at-risk populations, working with the ethnicities of which there was a preponderance and which L4L was established to serve, OR had been at the top of commercial outfits (e.g. Sylvan), OR were pedagogically underprepared, e.g. hired to teach ELA with a background in Speech Communication, and could not teach poetry, incl. Shakespeare.
Second, there are not enough hours in a teacher’s daily 6-hour shift to attend to students one-on-one, on twice weekly, 30 minute bases, for an average of 30-student caseload. (My mentor, who had his own reduced caseload because he was making his markedly swift– 5-month– ascendance from new hire to administrator, would keep students waiting, sometimes standing them up, and then when he appeared, instruct them with thinly veiled disdain.) At this rate, even if students attended daily, they would not be able to complete one year’s worth of academic credits in that span of time. Hence, the assertion that the school is mathematically challenged timewise.
Given these two conditions, i.e. being underresourced and mathematically challenged timewise, I can only surmise that to keep students believing they will graduate even if attendance is not compulsory (as I described in a previous post), and prolong their attendance, remains profitable moneywise to the charter school operators. As my immediate supervisor-mentor-LCC said of a higher up who had all of his–unearned– admiration (I paraphrase.): “We can sell them anything!”