Mercedes Schneider dissects the decision by the national board of the NAACP to call for a moratorium on new charter schools until charter schools agree to transparency and accountability. As she points out, the New York Times education editorial writer chastised the NAACP in advance for expecting charter schools to be accountable.
The Times acknowledges that some charters are disasters, and that more than half the students in Detroit are in charters, with no discernible benefit.
It is worth noting that the same person has been writing the Times editorials on education for the past 20 years. He loved No Child Left Behind, he loved Race to the Top, he loves charters. He loves tests and the Common Core. Once when he was on vacation, the Times ran a reasonable education editorial.
Who is out of touch?
Mercedes writes:
“It is not good enough to note that when charters excel, they’re great, or tossing off the charters “are far from universally perfect” line (which the NYT does in its op-ed) and that failing charter schools “should be shut down”–another pro-charter, clichéd non-solution that only leads to unnecessary community disruption– disruption that could be curbed if there were stronger controls in place to begin with.
“As is proven by its “misguided” editorial, the NYT editorial board is ‘reinforcing an out of touch impression,’ not the NAACP.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Their editorials on education make it hard to take their positions on other issues seriously.
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Their editorials on Syria, Russia, Israel, and their failure to criticize the imperialism of the U.S. make nearly every position they take hard to take seriously.
See this: NYT’s Absurd New Anti-Russian Propaganda – Consortiumnews
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/10/16/nyts-absurd-new-anti-russian-propaganda/
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New business opportunity for privatization promoters:
“Following the release of the ratings, ODE’s Director of School Sponsorship Mark Michael wrote in a Friday email to stakeholders that the agency is looking to beef up its staff in anticipation of taking on any schools that lose their sponsors.
“With the release of the sponsor evaluations, we are anticipating a substantial increase in the number of schools under our sponsorship,” he wrote.
A bid posting says ODE would like proposals from contractors who can provide specified oversight, monitoring and technical assistance services for community schools.”
Charter school sponsors can now outsource their sponsorship duties.
Yet another contractual layer. By the time the public education dollar reaches charter school kids in Ohio, every adult along the way will have sliced off a cut.
It’s already a bewildering mess that no ordinary citizen can follow. Now “the sponsor” won’t be accountable for the schools either- the sponsor’s CONTRACTOR will actually be performing the work. How many entities are they planning on creating to run these schools? How many contracts and sub-contracts?
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Chiara: you wrote—
“Yet another contractual layer. By the time the public education dollar reaches charter school kids in Ohio, every adult along the way will have sliced off a cut.”
Good catch!
And it makes hash of the rheephorm sales point that “it’s all for the kids.”
😎
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I was even shocked by this and I’m hard to shock on Ohio’s ed reform “movement”.
I would not have predicted they would set up a separate money-making scheme on charter SPONSORSHIP.
They’re getting really good at this. They’re inserting for-profit layers all over the place.
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Certainly this type of educational “governance” is moving to our colleges.
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All the charter proponents bash public schools for bureaucracy and union affiliation; yet they have a bigger problem. Working in a smaller district, I never had a problem with bureaucracy. As for unions, they are legal, and trying to impede them is illegal. Charter management systems can have many layers of authorizers and a maze of subcontractors with management of the other side of the country all needlessly paid for by taxpayers.
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Ohio’s charter school sponsors have to be non-profits under state law.
Are they outsourcing sponsorship duties to for-profits to get around that? Will the “non profit” sponsor be another meaningless shell entity, when the schools are really being run and managed by for-profits?
Our state lawmakers don’t even understand these layers of contracts. How are ordinary people supposed to know where their education dollar is going?
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NAACP’s summary of the issues in the press release reveals legitimate verifiable concerns about charters. Their concerns are justified and evidence based.
(1) Charter schools are subject to the same transparency and accountability standards as public schools
(2) Public funds are not diverted to charter schools at the expense of the public school system
(3) Charter schools cease expelling students that public schools have a duty to educate and
(4) Cease to perpetuate de facto segregation of the highest performing children from those whose aspirations may be high but whose talents are not yet as obvious
My hope is that if Hillary wins the election, she will enact policy to address each of these issues. She would be wise to listen to the NAACP as they have considerable clout, and minority voters support the Democratic party. We need to control the bleeding of funds exiting from legitimate public schools as this impairs instruction for many poor, minority students. We also need to tighten the reins about who can open charter schools. Lack of oversight and regulation has resulted in millions of dollars of waste and fraud. At the very least the four concerns of the NAACP must be addressed as these are real and, they impact the quality education of many students.
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Just a head’s up for public school parents. Be extremely wary of the cheerleading on”competency-based education” coming out of the echo chamber.
What is mostly seems to mean on a local level is cheap, garbage, computer -based instruction for low and middle income kids, to replace teachers and actual classes.
Ignore the hype. Look under the hood. Force the salespeople to describe what these slogans mean for your school in their own words.
It’s a bad deal. Reject it, unless you want every public school to become a cut-rate testing center.
https://edexcellence.net/articles/competency-based-education-can-better-inform-parents-students-and-teachers
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Thank you for reading the reform swill so I don’t have to.
Consider all messages in terms of who pays for them.
Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence is heavily funded by the tech industry; he is a big booster of digital learning, all day. He calls it “student centered.” Please, get this man a dose of Dewey!
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Khan Academy has a preschool app now. I’m not kidding.
They’re not going to be satisfied until all instruction is delivered by a device.
They’re already replacing language teachers with computer programs where I live- the younger parents don’t even know we used to have real teachers in those areas.
It’s a rip-off, basically. Younger parents don’t even know our schools used to be better-funded.
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Khan Academy has received millions from the Gates Foundation.
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All Presidents hype their records on the way out because they’re concerned about “legacy” but the Obama Administration sounds desperate, like they’re INVENTING an education legacy to push back against what people have seen over 8 years.
The President is even visiting an actual public high school. I thought ed reformers got their membership card revoked if they entered an actual public school, they spend so little time in them.
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Who is the person who writes the education editorials at the NY Times?
I recall that some years back, the reporter Michael Winerip was able to write a non-positive charter school story and he quickly moved (or was moved) to another beat. Then there were years of articles praising charter schools. I was shocked when last year the NY Times started doing some real investigative reporting of charter schools instead of simply doing fawning profiles of them. But it was clear for some time that someone high up is a real cheerleader and has an interest in promoting them. Even the editorials this weekend took the PR rhetoric right from pro-charter organization’s press releases about how much they help low income minority students without taking a critical look at whether they are helping ALL students, or just the ones who they want to help. There was no acknowledgement whatsoever of the points that the NAACP was making because charters are perfect and no criticism — nor any real oversight — is allowed. I can’t imagine another publicly funded program where the NY Times would criticize the people fighting for accountability and real oversight and cheer on the people saying “just trust us, we’re good”. But that’s their view of charters. How dare the NAACP want oversight – as long as some kids are helped, it doesn’t matter whether it is good public policy or whether other students are harmed, at least according to the NY Times editors.
The NY Daily News has been even worse. Their reporter and editorial department continues to be unquestioningly pro-charter. And it is actually amusing to see their reporter dutifully write an “exclusive” story by re-writing their press release without the need to do any independent reporting. One time, the NY Daily News pro-charter article appeared at the same time that a real journalist at Politico reported on how the press release touting exactly the pro-charter “story” the NY Daily News was reporting had been sent out by the charter school’s PR staff.
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Michael Winerip was removed from writing an education column and assigned to cover “Boomers.” He has since then taken a buyout.
The education editorial writer for the New York Times is Brent Staples. He joined the Times’ editorial board in 1990. Many years ago, I met with him. His views about testing and choice are unshakable. He apparently has sole control of editorials about education. Once, I recall, there was a positive and thoughtful editorial about education. I think he was on vacation. It never happened again.
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Last Sunday evening, at a meeting of the Chatauqua Society, the panel moderator Dan Schnur, head of the Jesse Unruh School of Public Policy at USC, said much the same thing to me as the NY Times editorial purports.
As we stood talking before the panel presentation, Dan told me “he LOVES testing” and also charters. He stressed the importance, in his opinion, of ongoing testing and the need for students to show improvement…implied was ‘or else’. To say I was taken aback, is to put it mildly. When I replied about the realities of inner city students and the role poverty plays, he seemed to lose interest in our conversation.
Dan, of course, used to be a reknown campaign manager for Reps and active on the Right. He now says he is not registered as either Dem or Rep. He is a well respected and nice intelligent guy, and I am hoping he will meet with some of the public school advocates in LA and at very least, listen to our position. The Annenberg School at USC (which includes Schnur’s department) has a plethora of charter supporters. To be fair, they also have the progressive Robert Scheer (as a balance) teaching journalism.
For readers who are not familiar with the university system in California, UCLA is public and rated top tier as is UC Berkeley. The entire UC system is public. Most UC schools take only a GPA of A+.
USC is private and has long been an enclave of the wealthy and tends to lean Right. Rivalry between UCLA and USC, both in Los Angeles, is fierce. USC has departments of excellence that seem as worthy at some at UCLA (e.g. Medical and dental schools, law school, etc.) When I was a UCLA student (in the Dark Ages of the 50 – 60s) it was the mantra that USC had the rich kids, and UCLA had the smart kids. No longer as prevalent a socio economic division.
The huge California State University system is public, and produces more K – 12 teachers than the others mentioned. Cal State takes C students and some call it The People’s university.
I will look forward to seeing how the LA Times treats this brouhaha with the NAACP doing the right thing, IMO. But expect they will choose to agree with the NY Times.
Tomorrow the LAUSD BoE will decide to accept or reject a group of local charter renewals including three of the Gulen Magnolia Charters Schools. We now have 159 charter schools in LA County and Eli Broad’s Great Public Schools Now intends to double that number rapidly.
The president of the BoE, Steve Zimmer, is being challenged for his seat by a rather dazzling and well funded young man who was a short term Watts teacher, and a charter TFA teacher, and who is now a lawyer, and has strong support among the WLA wealthy charter supporters. Our community presents an ongoing soap opera of ed values, lies, and video tapes (see Karen Wolfe’s on the Pacoima charter event).
Forgive me for going astray.
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Where have all these educated, affluent people been for the twenty years before our policymakers decided to monetize public education? We rarely heard a peep out of them lamenting the funding disparities in urban schools and the poor conditions of the buildings. They were too busy with the stock market to be concerned about the education of poor urban students. Today, they are all self appointed education “experts” along with corporate leaders, journalists, retired tennis pros and hip hop artists. They are tripping over themselves to cash in on the charter school feeding frenzy that provides them with access to public money with few strings attached.
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Flood the New York Times with letters and SPREAD THE WORD to other newspapers, to your lawmakers, and to all your social media friends because state lawmakers and voters everywhere need to know right now that the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools posed a risk to the Department of Education’s own goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals.”
The report documents multiple cases of financial risk, waste, fraud, abuse, lack of accountability of federal funds, and lack of proof that the schools were implementing federal programs in accordance with federal requirements.
Throughout our nation, private charter schools backed by billionaire hedge funds are being allowed to divert hundreds of millions of public school tax dollars away from educating America’s children and into private corporate pockets. Any thoughtful person should pause a moment and ask: “Why are hedge funds the biggest promoters of charter schools?” Hedge funds aren’t altruistic — there’s got to be big profit in “non-profit” charter schools in order for hedge fund managers to be involved in backing them.
And even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its “reporting” on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax money that is supposed to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets.
One typical practice of charter schools is to pay exorbitant rates to rent buildings that are owned by the charter school board members or by their proxy companies which then pocket the public’s tax money as profit. Another profitable practice is that although charter schools use public tax money to purchase millions of dollars of such things as computers, the things they buy with public tax money become their private property and can be sold by them for profit…and then use public tax money to buy more, and sell again, and again, and again, pocketing profit after profit.
The Washington State and New York State supreme courts and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions.
Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money. Moreover, as the NAACP and ACLU have reported, charter schools are often engaged in racial and economic-class discrimination.
Charter schools should (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
NO FEDERAL MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC. Hillary Clinton could, if elected President, on day one in office issue an Executive Order to the Department of Education to do just that. Tell her today to do that! Send her the above information to make certain she knows about the Inspector General’s findings and about the abuses being committed by charter schools.
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Love your list, Scisne….and support it 100%. Would that this would/could happen at LAUSD. Here it is again….
“Charter schools should
(1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public;
(2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body;
(3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and,
(4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
NO FEDERAL MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.”
I assume you are in LA and it would be valuable if you presented this list to the BoE tomorrow during public comment.
Your 4 points and capitalized statement MUST become the mantra for all districts struggling to survive the onslaught of the Broad/Walton/Tilson mentality of profiteering with NO OVERSIGHT.
If Howard Blume is reading this today, it would be a public service to publish your words despite the Broad-paid education articles at the LA Times.
As you know, BoE member, Rodriguez’s 16 PUC charter schools failed 2 audits just before he was elected, yet he won the election, and he stayed appointed by Jerry Brown to the state commission on ed. Also, the Magnolia Charters audit last year failed the finance portion, yet even before Caprice Young was hired to run these Gulen schools, the court reversed its stance to shut them down, and they were somehow re-assessed and allowed to stay open.
If the LAUSD BoE continues to play footsie with the power monger/privatizer elites, they too should be investigated by neutral media sources.
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I’m sorry but have I missed something? Why is the New York Times allowed to censor news? The NAACP’s request is news worthy. Why isn’t anyone asking the censorship question? Are charter schools so fair haired that they are untouchable regarding mismanagement and isn’t that news worthy?
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Alternet recently published an anti-charter article. It was picked up by Salon. Nothing that pro-public school readers don’t already know, but the message is getting out.
http://www.alternet.org/education/despite-widespread-failure-corruption-and-resegregation-public-schools-post-and-times-try
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Finally, some charter abuses are reaching the general public. The mainstream media generally promotes charters, and it has been difficult to cut through the pro-charter propaganda.
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