You might find this interesting.
Jay Mathews has been writing for the Washington Post for many years. He is a big fan of charter schools. He wrote a book about KIPP. He admires Teach for America. Despite our differences, Jay is a genuinely nice guy who likes to exchange ideas and he listens. He sent me some questions, and I responded to him. He gave me an opportunity to review what he wrote.
Basically, I want a moratorium on new charters until certain requirements for transparency and accountability are met. I agree with the NAACP. I would like to see existing charters conform to the same standards of transparency and accountability as public schools. I would like them to stop cherry-picking students they want and pushing out the ones they don’t want. I would like to see a flat ban on for-profit charters and for-profit management organizations. I would like to see for-profit virtual charters shut down altogether.
With the incoming Trump administration, any charter reform is off the table. Betsy DeVos spent over $1 million to block legislation in Michigan to require charter accountability. Under her guidance, 80% of the charters in Michigan operate for-profit. There will be neither accountability nor transparency. There will be no effort to stop for-profit entrepreneurs. Profiteers will get free rein. Graft and fraud will get the green light. Taxpayer dollars will be squandered by chain-store corporations. Children will not be better educated, and many will be subjected to abusive disciplinary practices. If there are responsible voices in the charter industry, they should insist on cleaning up their own house. Otherwise, the scandals will multiply.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have to wonder why people like –jay are still on the charter bandwagon after all this time, after the lack of increased “achievement”, after all the scandals, after the profit taking of CMOs was exposed, after the calls for moratoriums by civil rights groups, after seeing public schools and entire public school districts used up and thrown away… After all that, how can a sentient person just stand there and shrug his shoulders, saying, I just know in my heart there are some good things coming out of some of those charter scams. How, if you’re not taking money for it, –jay? How can you? Why?
LikeLike
Any so called charter school whether for profit or not that is not under the auspices of the local public school district is a private school and should be subject to all those vaunted free market forces without the interference of the government, i.e., government monies. Let that vaunted free market determine who the winners and losers are in the private charter school sector. But don’t expect any of our tax dollars to support those private schools.
LikeLike
Amen!
LikeLike
Right on, Duane…let the free market rule, but not on taxpayers money.
LikeLike
I want something else. I want the public employees in state and federal government to SUPPORT existing public schools.
I want the exclusive focus on charters and vouchers to end. It is harming existing public schools and I am not paying thousands of federal and state employees to harm existing public schools.
I don’t care if they prefer charters and private schools. No one hired them to privatize schools. In fact, they didn’t run on privatizing public schools because they know if they had run on that they would lose.
I don’t care if public schools are unfashionable in DC or “expert” circles. No one gave these people a mandate to abandon public schools. In fact, many of them are paid to IMPROVE public schools.
I’m not asking for a whole lot. I’m asking public employees to do the job they’re paid to do. They can pursue their anti-public school agenda on their own time with their own money.
I’m sick of paying thousands of federal and state employees to bash public schools and promote charters and vouchers. That was not the deal when we hired them. If they oppose public schools they shouldn’t be taking a paycheck for a job where 90% of schools are public schools.
Ohio lawmakers finally got the message. The exclusive focus on charters and vouchers has ended. They’ve decided to do 90% of the job they’re paid to do.
LikeLike
Is that an outrageous request? I can’t ask public employees to support public schools?
Instead I have to pay them to pursue their personal ideological vision for a privatized system?
SUPPORT. Affirmative. Not graciously allow our public schools to exist alongside their preferred sector. Do you jobs or get out of the way and let someone who values public schools have the job.
I know public schools are unfashionable. I get it. I’m not paying these people to pursue “fashionable”. I’m paying them to improve public schools.
It’s freaking outrageous that thousands of public employees at the federal and state level have decided their job is to replace public schools. No one hired them for that.
LikeLike
Go to any ed reform site right now and look for a positive policy agenda for existing public schools.
It doesn’t exist. So can someone explain to me how this happened? How did this “movement” completely capture our government when this movement has NO positive policy agenda for 90% of the schools in the country?
That’s ludicrous, but that’s where we are. 10% of schools are driving 100% of policy. 90% of public school students have NO representation in their own government. Their schools are dumped on and defunded and used as punching bags by their own elected leaders! How is that fair? How did this happen?
We have two groups in DC. We have “agnostics” and zealots who are promoting charters and vouchers. You know who ends up with no positive representation in ed reform? Public school students. 90% of students. Not one of these people advocate for them.
LikeLike
Show me the senator or governor who advocates for kids in existing public schools. Show me one. Not an “agnostic”. A public school supporter.
I’ve already given up on “President”. It’s clear our Presidents don’t support kids in existing public schools.
Bush, Obama and now Trump. Trump and his education secretary have already decreed all public schools are failing. Our kids don’t have a single person in DC who works for them.
LikeLike
Chiara,
Hillary and Bernie went to public schools. Trump did not. I think he visited a public school once, as “principal for a day.” He held a lottery to give New Balance sneakers to the winners. He created great disappointment among the majority that did not win his fake lottery.
LikeLike
Even Representative Rob Bishop (R-Utah), a former public school teacher, supports vouchers. When the voucher fight came to Utah 10 years ago, he made pro-voucher commercials. I wrote a really strongly-worded email, chastising him for supporting public money for private schools, when he knew the difficulties public schools were facing.
One of his staff emailed me back, saying that since this was a local issue, he wasn’t getting involved. AARRRGGHHH!!
LikeLike
Utah turned down vouchers, overwhelmingly. No jurisdiction has ever voted in favor of charters or vouchers.
LikeLike
Charters, charters, charters turns to vouchers, vouchers, vouchers in DC circles.
Do any of these public employees work on behalf of public schools? There are thousands of them. One would think we could get a single adult who has some interest in the public schools 90% of US kids attend.
Ridiculous. This is what capture looks like.
LikeLike
I want the exclusive focus on charters and vouchers to end. It is harming existing public schools and I am not paying thousands of federal and state employees to harm existing public schools.
Agree. Agree. Agree.
LikeLike
To LeftCoastTeacher:
I live in MI, where the charter movement was an outgrowth of Betsy DeVos’s inability to get a voucher law through, resulting in her turning to charter schools (DeVos family paid–twice!–to put failed voucher initiatives on the ballot). Initially, 25 years ago, the goal was conversion charters–making Christian (not Catholic) education free for white parents in western Michigan, by putting up a new sign and moving Bible Study classes to the end of the day, as an “elective.” A few education progressives took advantage of the law to start high-tech schools (very sexy, at the time), including one in Henry Ford Museum. Charters were all about serving the privileged kids and the promising kids, with new, out-of-the-box thinking.
It wasn’t until the DFER Democrats came along, promoting charters as a “civil rights” initiative (just about the time the admin turned over), that charters could also be positioned as a cheap and promising strategy for “saving” kids in troubled urban districts. Connecting charters to the civil rights movement was a brilliant (although utterly failed) strategy, because the charter model produced nothing of consequence in urban education, except financial malfeasance.
People who live in states where charters are very limited and relatively new immediately perceive–because we have plenty of evidence now– all the things that are wrong with the charter movement. You have to go to a state where the policy has been in place for 25 years–like Michigan, which has 300+ charter schools–to see what advanced-stage charter syndrome looks like.
Jay Mathews is just stuck in the past, following an old (but seductive) narrative. And he has plenty of company–witness the terrible, deceptive coverage of education (and the policies of major candidates) in the 2016 election.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Very well remembered: ‘It wasn’t until the DFER Democrats came along, promoting charters as a “civil rights” initiative …that charters could also be positioned as a cheap and promising strategy for “saving” kids in troubled urban districts.’ We must keep our eye on the reality that the last 8 years of “Democratic” leadership fully prepared the way for DeVos and her ilk.
LikeLike
nflanagan and ciedie,
Yes!
–jay and others like him should take a lesson from the great teacher, Diane Ravitch, who shows us we can learn from mistakes and change instead of remaining stuck in the past, beating dead horses.
LikeLike
I found you through this article and have enjoyed reading your posts this Thanksgiving weekend. Good on you for your writing and I am learning a lot. Virtual schools are a particular red flag for me because of how aggressive they are without knowing if they even help.
LikeLike
If you are on a learning curve with “virtual schools” the mythology is that these offer personalized learning and that digital anything is cheaper and better. WRONG. But marketing is the thing, and these have been a darling of USDE in addition to international operaters of schools-in-a-shipping container there funded by US philanthropies with ties to Microsoft, Pearson,and others.
LikeLike
I’m glad he published this. I don’t really understand his fascination with charters as an innovation.
I commented:
My children attended one of the “good” charter schools on the west side of Los Angeles. The reason we chose that school was to have freedom from the LAUSD bureaucracy to create a sort of alternative school that reflected our community and gave more personal attention with smaller class sizes.
Over the eight years we were there, I came to experience many characteristics that I have since learned are common with charters: We segregated ourselves from the rest of Los Angeles while fooling ourselves into thinking anyone could attend; we could do things a lot cheaper with volunteers and cheap labor; teachers came and went to the tune of 50% turnover every year causing constant upheaval; special ed kids were counseled out because “there are other schools that can better meet your needs”; our pride in high test scores and lack of professionalism led to teacher cheating; the school district did not care one iota what “innovations” we were practicing; and we had no recourse when things went wrong because there were no rules, few regulations, and zero accountability. The only thing public about us was our per pupil funding.
LikeLike
I left this comment on the WaPo page:
RESPONSE REQUESTED: In NY state, charters were passed into law in 1998 only after very prominently promising “special emphasis on students at-risk of academic failure”. Insert laughter there, as charters have excluded the highest need children ever since. Their very existence was predicated on charters innovating solutions for high need students to help, not cannibalize, the larger system. Obviously this failed.
RIGGED: Neither Mr. Mathews or Ms. Ravitch address here the application/lottery process which effectively weeds out the most needy children because parents are not involved or aware of deadlines or paperwork requirements. Thus, charters segregate small children according to parental action/inaction. Is this fair?
CLASS WAR: Please also address the effect of concentrated money in the coordinated effort to “sway” politicians, media and even parents with an avalanche of campaign cash, ad buys, reporter “scholarships” or “walking-around” money. In one case, a pro-charter billionaire actually purchased the education section of a major newspaper.
REVOLVING DOOR: Wealthy charter advocates also fund “fellowships” to recruit educators and politicians and amplify their voices way out of demographic proportions. This meant top appointments, including Secretary of Education (yes, Arne Duncan was on a leaked list of Wall Street favorites) or rewarding former officials with think tank jobs to signal how lucrative charter support is.
Public ed supporters are up against a billionaire-funded onslaught in both parties, made awkwardly clear by recent leaks and our own union leaders suicidally support charters too. The only thing on our side are facts, with a dwindling number of “journalists” reporting critically on cherrypicking or money conflicts.
Finally, what if we allowed public schools to innovate? In NYC, the joint UFT/DOE Prose program has allowed flexibility around regulations in hundreds of schools doing this for years, begging the question – why do we need privatize?
LikeLike
Guess what! New York schools did innovate before NCLB when teaching was respected, and teachers were considered credible advocates for students and better instruction. My district and others were moving towards portfolio assessment, detracking our secondary schools, increased collaboration as well as alternative forms of evaluation for teachers before NCLB arrived with its punitive wrecking ball.
LikeLike
Yes, the Performance Standards Consortium had portfolio-based assessment before the feds took over local schools (and continue a great track record, particularly with high need students). But the consortium is today limited to grandfathered schools, proving that the money-drunk officials won’t even look at a proven alternative to controversial ed reform theories.
LikeLike
I would also like to see mentioned that charter schools are draining public school districts of much needed funding. There is something wrong when charters can be a forced on a district which the district is then required to fund despite having no oversight over them. It should be a no brainer for Matthews to see what has been done to DC schools’ funding. It doesn’t take a financial wizard to see that the public schools are being starved of much needed resources.
LikeLike
I hope Jay Matthews reads E.D. Hirsch’s latest and most powerful book, “Why Knowledge Matters”. It makes clear that both charters and public schools operate on the faulty principle that transmitting knowledge doesn’t really matter much –skills is the whole game. This is a fatal error and no amount of tinkering with school governance will overcome it. Both France and Sweden had high-achievement before adopting American-style education in the last few decades, whereupon scores collapsed and the achievement gap widened dramatically. Japan, China, Korea and Finland still put knowledge-transmission at the heart of their schools, and the results are sky-high PISA scores and a dramatically narrowed achievement gap. Germany recently increased knowledge-transmission and achievement is rising. American literacy scores crashed in the 60’s just when the anti-knowledge, pro-“critical thinking skills” ideology took full effect. Hirsch shows that “critical thinking skill”, like many of the other vaunted skills we’re supposedly teaching, is a chimera. Good thinking about topic A depends on knowledge of topic A; there is no such thing as all-purpose critical thinking skill. General knowledge is the closest thing we have to it. We base our whole approach to education upon a myth. This needs to change.
LikeLike
Part One
Jay Mathews may, in fact, be a “nice” guy. But he doesn’t listen. He just keeps writing the same old pablum about Advanced Placement and charters like KIPP no matter what the research says. And sadly, way too many public school educators and administrators have taken Mathews’ ideas to heart, even though they have little to no substance.
Mathews has a long history ignoring all the research about KIPP and AP that he doesn’t like and shunting aside comments from readers of his column that refute – with evidence – what he says. However one slices it, that cannot be called “listening.”
Let’s consider a couple of examples.
First, KIPP. Mathews slobbers all over it. Then a study came out several years back that noted how much money KIPPS schools get and spend, and criticized KIPP for its high attrition rates. How did Mathews react to the study’s conclusions?
Mathews acknowledged that the study conformed to “standard academic research methods” and raised “good questions about KIP .” But then he said that he “a problem with the attitude behind the report,” and the “report leaves the impression that the researchers are not here to help raise student achievement,” and the “report decries the fact that KIPP does not admit students in the middle of the year.”
In other words, the bulk of his column was spent in trying to tear down and refute the study’s conclusions.
Those who bash public schools often cite spending data per pupil that includes operating and capital expenditures. KIPP doesn’t want that data used to calculate its higher per pupil costs. But even when capital outlaws are adjusted for, KIPP spends significantly more than regular public schools. Mathews tries to explain this away by citing the old conservative canard that “governments have been spending more money on schools than ever before but not seeing similarly large gains in achievement.”
What Mathews does NOT say is that KIPP students have to wear uniforms, they are subjected to a very strict, authoritarian code of discipline, they get mostly direct instruction (think test prep), and KIPP students have to APPLY to go to KIPP schools; this is a key and often overlooked point. Students that go to KIPP schools (and that largely excludes special needs students) are motivated to go there, and they have parental support. Indeed, that parental support is critical since KIPP hours are “7:25a.m.- 4:30p.m.; and Saturday School sessions throughout the year,” and “summer school is mandatory,” and parents and students have to sign a “commitment to excellence contract.” Student motivation and parental support alone explain any tenuous achievement gains in KIPP schools, not anything that KIPP does.
So for KIPP (or others) to try and compare KIPP schools to “regular” schools is more than just a little disingenuous. It’s flat-out wrong and unethical.
Yet, given all of these KIPP advantages (higher per pupil spending, strict discipline, rote test-focused instruction, student motivation, parental support, longer school days and years), the KIPP achievement gains are marginal. Yet, according to KIPP and Jay Mathews, one might think KIPP was working “miracles.” (One might think back to the so-called “Texas miracle” of George W. Bush that got enacted into No Child Left Behind, or the Michelle Rhee “miracle” that she falsely claimed to have performed as a teacher in the Baltimore city schools.)
And, this raises another issue that both KIPP and Jay Mathews prefer to overlook, which is just how tightly linked KIPP is to Teach for America and the corporate business-model of “reform.” KIPP founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin are both Teach for America alumni. KIPP’s board of directors includes the manager of an investment company, a former for-profit school executive , the president and CEO of Viacom, a co-founder of The Gap, Inc, the president of conservative, private and still male-dominated Rice University, the managing director of a private equity investment company, a trustee of the conservative Walton Family Foundation, the president and CEO of a real estate development company, among others.
But Mathews doesn’t tell his readers much if anything about all this. Not a “nice” thing to do.
LikeLike
Part Two
If Mathews is blind to what research suggests about the limitations and effectiveness of KIPP, he’s equally obtuse when it comes to Advanced Placement. Mathews has yet to face the facts about AP.
A 2002 National Research Council (NRC) study found that AP tests are a “mile wide and an inch deep,” are focused on rote memorization rather than conceptual understanding, and fail to align with researched-based principles of learning. And a fairly recent USA Today analysis of AP test scores reported that 42 percent of AP test-takers “earned a failing score of 1 or 2.” Moreover, for years Mathews misrepresented the research of Clifford Adelman who wrote the following in his 2006 ToolBox Revisited study:
“With the exception of Klopfenstein and Thomas (2005), a spate of recent reports and commentaries on the Advanced Placement program claim that the original ToolBox demonstrated the unique power of AP course work in explaining bachelor’s degree completion. To put it gently, this is a misreading.”
Mathews, however, said the 2002 NRC study was “not only old, but was badly skewed” (this from a guy who likes to trot out his more than two-decade-old-limited-case-study book on Jaime Escalante to “prove” his view of AP). He said the NRC study was a bad one because it “ignored the fact that AP was the way it was because it was designed to mimic final exams for college introductory courses.” In essence, he blames the messenger for a message he doesn’t like.
Mathews has implied that Adelman signed off on Mathews’ misrepresentations of his original ToolBox research. Yet Adelman also wrote in 2006 that “Advanced Placement has almost no bearing on entering postsecondary education,” and when examining and statistically quantifying the factors that relate to bachelor’s degree completion, Advanced Placement does NOT “reach the threshold level of significance.”
The College Board is notorious for research that promotes false claims about its products. But Jay Mathews refers to AP tests as an “incorruptible standard. The College Board says the PSAT indicates “college readiness,” although family income is the best predictor of both PSAT and SAT scores. Colleges use PSAT scores to send tens of thousands of application solicitation letters to students, most of whom will be rejected. The College Board sells “hundreds of thousands of student profiles to schools; they also offer software and consulting services that can be used to set crude wealth and test-score cutoffs, to target or eliminate students before they apply…That students are rejected on the basis of income is one of the most closely held secrets in admissions.” This is a far, far stretch from “incorruptible.”
A 2006 MIT faculty report noted ““there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Mathews called this an isolated study. Yet two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard” (Seebach, 2004). Students admit that “You’re not trying to get educated; you’re trying to look good;” and, “The focus is on the test and not necessarily on the fundamental knowledge of the material.”
The Sadler-Klopfenstein-edited book, “AP” A Critical Examination” (2010) lays out the research that makes clear AP has become “the juggernaut of American high school education,” but “ the research evidence on its value is minimal.”
AP may work well for some students, especially those who are already “college-bound to begin with” (Klopfenstein and Thomas, 2010). As Geiser (2007) noted, “systematic differences in student motivation, academic preparation, family background and high-school quality account for much of the observed difference in college outcomes between AP and non-AP students.” Even the College Board concedes that “interest and motivation” are keys to “success in any course”. Klopfenstein and Thomas (2010) find that when these demographic characteristics are controlled for, the claims made for AP disappear. Gone. Poof.
Whether or not Mathews wants to admit it, AP is part and parcel of corporate-style “reform.” Research doesn’t support it. It’s mostly hype.
Maybe one day Jay Mathews will face the facts about AP and the “reform” ideas pushed by Teach for America and KIPP and others who receive corporate funding. In the meantime, don’t hold your breath.
LikeLike