Charles Pierce blogs for Esquire, where he turns out spot-on posts about many issues. He lives in Boston, so he is well aware of the millions of dollars being spent to deceive the public into thinking that more charter schools means more money for public schools.
In this post, he explains that the issue is about siphoning money from public schools and sending it to privatized schools.
He writes:
The people seeking to blow up the cap on the number of charter schools here in the Commonwealth (God save it!) have turned on the afterburners in recent weeks, as we get closer to balloting in which a referendum on lifting the cap will be placed before the voters. The airwaves are thick with commercials about how lifting the cap on charter schools will provide more money to public schools, which is a dodge, because charter schools are not in any important sense public schools.
There is no public oversight. There is little public input. They are privately run and funded with public money. This is the same principle that has worked out so well with prison food.
In New York on Monday, Jonathan Chait jumps into the issue with both feet. (To his credit, Chait is quite clear that his wife works for a charter company.) He argues no less a case than that the referendum is “one of the most important tests of social justice and economic mobility of any election in America this fall.” Glorioski! And, of course, he characterizes the opposition to lifting the charter cap as wholly influenced by the all-powerful teachers union, which he casts as a thoroughgoing villain, and which he comes dangerously close to accusing of enabling racism—or, at the very least, as heedless to the concerns of the poor and disadvantaged.
This is noxious garbage; the great majority of the people represented by the teachers union work in classrooms that most of us wouldn’t walk into on a bet. And, anyway, as the very excellent Diane Ravitch points out, a huge number of local school boards have lined up against lifting the cap. These are not all puppets of the evil teachers union. Many of them are composed of people who have looked around the country and seen that an untrammeled charter system is an amazing entry vehicle for waste and fraud. Chait dismisses these people as the heirs to Louise Day Hicks or something.
Pierce reviews the millions pouring into the state from billionaires who live elsewhere, and he writes:
Call me crazy, but I don’t think Michael Bloomberg and the Walton family give a rat’s ass about educating children in Roxbury or Mattapan. I think they are running for-profit businesses that want to increase their profits and, in Massachusetts, they see a chance to make themselves more money, the way they have in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Arizona, and all those other places where education is considered an industry and children, essentially products. (Especially Sacramento, where Michelle Rhee, Queen of the Grifters, is married to Kevin Johnson, a truly horrible person.)
They are not campaigning for freedom of choice for Massachusetts children. They are campaigning for their own freedom to gobble more and more from the public trough. See also: Privatization, all forms of.
In fairness, I don’t think Bloomberg or the Waltons expect to make a profit. They don’t need the money. I think they have a dedication to the free market (it works for them), and you can be sure that the opening of more charters will attract profiteers and entrepreneurs. It has happened everywhere else. Why would Massachusetts be immune? Deregulation and privatization will undermine Massachusetts’ excellent school system. School board members understand the threat, which is why more than 100 school boards have passed resolutions against Question 2, and not even one school board supports it.
What do you thinking of the Brookings Institute report on MA Charters? They seem to think they work well in urban settings:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/massachusetts-charter-cap-holds-back-disadvantaged-students/
Brookings invited Eva Moskowitz to address them and then wrote glowingly of how great her charters are and how wonderful it is that she suspends lots of little violent 5 year old African-American children who deserve it.
Just kidding, they didn’t mention the suspensions. Or attrition. They just praised her through the roof for recognizing which at-risk minority children are deserving of an education and which ones are not. And if they are not, off to the trash heap they go.
What Brookings means is that the charter cap holds back the CHOSEN disadvantaged students who charters would happily educate as long as they get lots of money to do so.
The Brookings evaluation is not based on a speech by anybody; they claim to have evaluated the performance of the schools by rigorous analysis, taking advantage of the lottery system which naturally randomizes which school that students go to.
Now, it may be true that long-term success of the schools depends on a high attrition rate, but that, of course, wouldn’t improve the outcome for individual students. However, the nature of the studies they claim to have evaluated appear to be taking that into account.
As far as I can tell, the following is true:
Brookings ONLY looked at charters serving middle and high school students.
Brookings compared students who won the lottery and STAYED with students who lost the lottery. In order to see if they are gaming the system, it would be a simple matter to present readers with the following:
How many students entered the lottery for a charter school entry level grade, period? What was the breakdown by race/income/etc.?
How many of those students won a place in a charter school? What was the breakdown by race/income/etc.?
How many of those students who won a place in a charter school accepted the place in the charter school? What was the breakdown by race/income/etc.?
Presumably, Scott Draper, these would be equal, or the number of at-risk students who accept the spots would be higher than the total in the lottery, and not fewer. If more at-risk kids are turning down places in charters than middle class students, that’s a red flag. Why?
Once we determine that the % of at-risk students who win the lottery and accept the spot is random, the next thing is to measure how many of those students REMAIN in the charter school until graduation and how much time it takes. It is clear from the study that charter schools regularly have at-risk kids flunk a year because a significantly higher percentage of the ones who make it to graduation do it in 5 years and not 4.
Failing large cohorts of at-risk kids because your teachers failed to teach them can either be a sign of having high standards, of having terrible teachers, or a sign that the charter school uses flunking as a means to encourage low performing students to attend a different school so they are off the charter’s books
So the next thing a researcher who actually cared about whether schools were working would be to look at EVERY entering student and track their progress at the charter school. What percentage of the at-risk kids graduate in 4 years from that charter, in 5 years, or disappear?
Maybe that information is buried somewhere in the Brookings’ Study, but I can’t find it.
All I find it a comparison that says “hey, the kids that charters allow to stay do better than the ones who go to underfunded public schools that have to address the learning issues of ALL students”.
If reformers REALLY cared about “results”, they would advocate for public schools to set up such a lottery magnet school and give those schools the freedom to flunk or dismiss any student who can’t do the work.
The last thing real reformers would advocate for would be to allow private organizations to pay their administrators huge amount of money to do the EASIEST job in public education — educate only the kids who they are able to educate and throw away the rest.
In fairness, Scott, I find educational studies to be a waste of time generally. There are many reasons but I’ll highlight the two reasons they hold little water for me.
First, they base everything on test scores. Sure, they might include other elements but it ALWAYS comes back to test scores. Test scores are not meaningful to the scale with which they are propagated. They’re snapshots and the older students get the less invested they are on performing. The trick to good test scores is to get the kids to care. Charters do this through endless rounds of shaming and pressure (along with considerable test prep).
Second, most studies are not viewed through anything resembling an unbiased lens. Ideology enters the research too much. Consider the research on New Orleans schools. Anyone could statistically prove anything. And they have.
I’m weary of metrics when applied to human beings. We’re not predictable. Who know why people are motivated to do the things they do? There’s so many things that cannot be quantified. I coached high school baseball for fifteen years. Two important things we evaluated as coaches were work ethic and being a supportive teammate. We never put numbers on it but they were crucial to our success.
Ultimately, I think the question is this: are we willing to let the strivers (Petrilli’s term) get good schools while everyone else is thrown into a morass? Because that’s what’s happening when charter schools roll in.
Also, Scott, the Brookings article says nothing of peer effects. This is something that has never successfully been measured but we all know it exists. The student chemistry of a classroom can be quite important to individual student success. So when their randomization argument is lottery winners and losers in comparison, peer effect matters. A room full of winners versus a room of mixed elements is big, IMO. (Plus Gates Foundation kingpin is one their referenced researchers. Yes, the discredited former romantic partner of VAM.)
They try to make the argument that o the skimming is deep since one-third of Boston parents apply for charters but that isn’t deep at all. If I could have only the most one-third of the motivated families applying to be in my classroom, that would be a monumental difference.
So, yeah, I think Brookings saw what they wanted to see.
“Test scores are not meaningful to the scale with which they are propagated.”
Test scores, being completely invalid aren’t meaningful to anything other than mental mathturbators.
” I coached high school baseball for fifteen years.” My condolences-ha ha. Let’s see my pitcher has just blown two fastballs by the hitter, the hitter not even coming close. So the pitcher decides-on his own-which would be okay if it worked, but. . . , to get tricky and throw a circle change or curveball, leaves it up in the zone, and crack, there goes the ball over the fence. Even though one has discussed this exact situation with the pitcher many times before and the need to put the batter away with another high (or low) hard one. Ay, ay, ay! Seen it too many times.
“Ultimately, I think the question is this: are we willing to let the strivers (Petrilli’s term) get good schools while everyone else is thrown into a morass? ”
Close, but the real question is: Are we willing to outsource the education of the “strivers” to private entities so they can profit from having disproportionate resources to educate them while public schools make do with less money to educate the most expensive students?
Public magnets are just as good — arguably better — than charters. And they don’t even get to drop as many kids as charters do with no oversight whatsoever.
If we want to tell magnets to stop trying to KEEP kids and start trying to compete more with charters and drop the problem kid in exchange for the better student on the magnet wait list, let’s do it! No doubt Brookings would approve of the studies that say the students who enter those magnets and stay do better!
Getting credit for despicable behavior that promotes your own profile above the education of ALL students is absolutely wrong. But in charter land, those are the people rewarded the most. The people spending millions for more charter schools in Mass don’t really care abut all students — they care only about the strivers who will make charters look good. And for that they should be run out of the education “business” that they so dearly love.
Also, we have no way of knowing how accurate or authentic the data from the charters are. Charters are known for “sins” of commission and omission when reporting on themselves. I would only trust data from an impartial third party.
Duane, purely in reference to your baseball post. What you described about pitcher decisions, I learned about ten games into my career. After that, my assistant coach (who was our pitching coach) called pitches. He would explain the reasoning behind his pitch sequences and then he would allow kids an inning here or there to call their own games late in the season. Lots of formative assessment!
Also, I based playing time on non-quantitative factors that were created with the intention of maximum work ethic and collaborative behavior. Worked great. We had a better second half record than first half record in all but one of our seasons.
Brookings credibility as an independent research institution was shattered recently in a NYTimes investigation into their research ties to private industry.
Think-tanks have become intellectual influence peddlers lending an aura of scientific fact to their personal policy curiosities. Many of their bought & paid for scholars rotate in and out of government powerful policy centers.
.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/us/politics/think-tanks-research-and-corporate-lobbying.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/us/politics/think-tank-scholars-corporate-consultants.html
“But the examination identified dozens of examples of scholars conducting research at think tanks while corporations were paying them to help shape government policy. Many think tanks also readily confer “nonresident scholar” status on lobbyists, former government officials and others who earn their primary living working for private clients, with few restrictions on such outside work.”
Using think-tanks to advance industry interests and a political ideology began in the Reagan administration. When the evidence was clear that a nuclear war between the US & the USSR would result in a nuclear winter and the death of all living creatures, cold war hawks feared public opinion would turn against financing nuclear warheads. Privately funded think tanks sprung up to discredit legitimate scientists & their research conclusions.
These think-tanks fueled confusion & doubt about the reality that life on earth would end following a a nuclear winter, despite overwhelming evidence of mass destruction. In the end, Reagan & the hawks got their massive military budget & nuclear proliferation.
The oil & tobacco industry followed the same playbook re: climate change & tobacco related cancer. Their product was doubt. Read Naomi Oreskes & Erik Conway’s book “Merchants of Doubt” (now a movie) for the history of the few industry paid scientists who clouded public understanding of climate change, tobacco products, and nuclear winter. http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/
A few of the more well known “stink-tanks” harboring industry shills include AEI, CATO, Heritage, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute, Mercatus Center.
No doubt, CAP should be hailed as front & center on school reform distortions.
Think about who these people are- they were & are willing to risk the destruction of humanity to force their profit-driven ideology into public policy. Taking over public education is the logical next step to fueling the next generation of like-thinkers & strivers.
I was kicked out of Brookings as a Senior Fellow in 2012 by Grover Whitehouse, who had been George W. Bush’s education research director. In 2012, he was advising Romney. I published a piece criticizing Romney’s education platform–all privatization, nothing about public schools–and a few hours after it was posted by the New York Review of Books, I was fired from my unpaid position. Guess who was recently invited to become a Senior Fellow at Broookings? Arne Duncan. The wheel keeps turning.
They don’t need the money. They enjoy the tax breaks and the power to use money in order to secure a (pseudo) market-based system in education and in other once public, “common good” institutions. They have no basic interest in other people’s children. It is gratifying to see the school boards in Massachusetts opposing this infusion of money from those who know nothing about education.
Jomathan Chait has been embarrassingly bad on this issue.
He accepts the charter school CEO’s claims that minority 5 and 6 year children are violent in large number when they get to charter schools. He seems to think that it is only the fact that public schools condone and encourage violent behavior in Kindergarten classrooms that they aren’t handing out suspensions to one out of every five minority at-risk kids and no doubt Chait would attack those schools for not suspending more kids as the charters he admires does.
The Mass charter initiative is being led by Families for Excellent Schools, which promotes the highest suspending charter schools! For FES, the sign that you are a great school is how many of those 5 year old African-american students you suspend. The more the better!
Shame on them. And anyone who supports them under the pretense that a few kids are helped so why should Chait care one whit about the many, many at-risk 5 year olds who the people he admires so much call violent and unteachable. They are almost never white so Chait no doubt believes that they are violent. At age 5 and 6. The subtle racism of people like Chait is terrible and he always doubles down on it when he can.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
A huge part of the Walton opposition to public schools comes from the Walton opposition to labor unions.
The Walton family are vehemently opposed to any and all labor unions. That ed reformers blithely ignore this is laughable. That Democratic politicians happily accept rank and file union support while also ignoring this is shameful.
It’s not a secret that Wal Mart opposes labor unions.They all know it. Yet all of these Democratic politicians are happily shilling for the Waltons.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
I don’t know but I think people are finally figuring out that ed reformers do nothing positive for public schools.
They made a fundamental error- they really believe that because THEY don’t value existing public schools, no one else does either. That’s simply not true.
If they want to be welcomed in public school circles they’ll have to offer something positive to public schools. That doesn’t seem like it would be hard to understand, but apparently it is.
People don’t hire state employees to weaken their existing schools. That isn’t why we pay them.
I read a lot on the ed reform side and this is a typical piece on an “ed reformer”
https://www.the74million.org/article/74-interview-republic-schools-ravi-gupta-on-the-next-frontier-of-the-education-wars
They simply don’t notice that they never mention improving public schools. It’s all about replacing public schools as quickly as possible.
It’s an echo chamber. 15 years ago when this started in Ohio there was at least a token glance towards existing public schools. Now it is all charters, all the time.
We thought we were hiring “education reformers” and we actually got people who entered this to replace public schools with privatized systems.
That’s a massive bait and switch and it was conducted entirely internally, within “the movement”- the public wasn’t privy to the decision to replace public schools. Of course there’s blowback- that’s what happens when you sell your agenda dishonestly.
What if all schools could keep just the kids they are actually funded to teach? Right now we have a private system that means that huge tuition is paid for some children who need dramatic help. Poor students are sent to public schools where an over burden of these needy students often overwhelm the staff. These schools are usually underfunded. What if we allowed schools to determine if their funding level was appropriate? How would that look or work?
What we have now is a huge unfunded mandate. How could it be worse?
While Michael Bloomberg doesn’t need the additional monies per se…his financing of the charter movement runs hand in hand in the way he ran New York City.
Mr Bloomberg didn’t need the salary as mayor of New York…to a billionaire such as he, the salary for mayor would have been to him what 2 cents would mean to working people.
It was n opportunity to have power over the lives of the people of New York, and the ability to open opportunities for those willing to do Bloomberg’s business…
Joel Klein was tapped as his chancellor of New York City public schools…an attorney, he was Bloomberg’s right-hand man to disable and eventually estrous the teachers union. Mr Bloomberg hates unions…he hates when workers have any rights…and he was often eager to wield his axe at the slightest whim.
When Klein decided to leave, (after all, the rsponsibility of running In-Bloom was certainly a more lucrative financial opportunity, newly appointed as Rupert Murdock’s “right-hand” man)…Mr Bloomberg tapped martini glasses with Cathy Black…it was the beginning of a new television show…”Love, American Billionaire Style” and their conceived idea of her as chancellor was formed. A few short months later, she was out.
He then appointed Dennis Wolcott…a yes man for Bloomberg, who would carry out directives from his Manhattan office. Mr Wolcott never displayed any autonomy, and certainly never disagreed with Bloomberg, or the axe would have fallen on him.
Mr Bloomberg spent millions of dollars enriching his minions with Aris…then more millions with Daedalus…City Time…paying astronomical fees to “independent contractors”…while denying New York City public employees a contract.
New York City was both a cash register for Mr Bloomberg, as well as judge, jury, and executioner against the middle class.
And it was also very profitable for him as well, by the way…his estimated worth increased from approximately $4.5 billion to $40 billion.
Mr Bloomberg…the philanthropist that impoverishes the people, while rewarding himself and his friends.
Now for Mr Bloomberg, it’s on to Massachusetts…
It’s off to steal from the public coffers in Boston, Worcester, Roxbury, and Springfield…
For Mr Bloomberg, hatred of the working man and woman, as well as the destruction of public services is profitable…
For Mr Bloomberg, crime does pay…it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Just ask Joel Klein.
I’m hopeful because over 100+ school committees (and many city councils) have passed resolutions to vote No on Question 2 (do NOT lift the cap on charter schools. Boston is our largest city and Worcester is 2nd largest — there are many activists there and I am hopeful for democracy. As I mentioned the other day , we have a charter problem but we also have a democracy problem. When I talk to people about the charter schools that are corporate sponsored or chains, often they see it separate from the testing issues. Many taxpayers don’t have the information on the issues and they thank me for the phone calls. I did mention that Chrtine L’s…. comments in the Lowell Sun are helpful (we have a “turnpike city” that starts at Lowell, through Lawrence and up to Haverhill — like the New Jersey turnpike.) One woman who reads the Lowell Sun wrote a private email to me and said “keep up the work; I hear people talking about those comments at work the next day.” I am not too anonymous because I use jeanhaverhill at my aol address also so it was easy for her to find me and I appreciate it. I worked last night with a handful of volunteers who are Latino and we all made phone calls in the same space . Today I go back to Haverhill and on Saturday we have HEA (MTA affiliate) to do canvassing. Some voters see it as a hate the teacher union issue and I try to remind them we need nurses, counselors, librarians and resources for ALL the children not just a few who are “creamed” off the top for high test scores or striving . As the Louisiana teacher describes this can be devastating for the students who are in the charter . Thank you for the Pierce article as well and we have one in the Brockton Enterprise today as well.
http://www.enterprisenews.com/news/20160920/booed-in-brockton—-state-education-head-hammered-on-charter-schools