The short answer: No.
Julian Vasquez Heilig explains why charters are not the answer to inequity. They deepen inequity.
Here is an excerpt:
My Confession is that I am a former charter Volunteer (MN), Educator (CA), Parent (TX) and Donor (CA) I’ve also publish peer reviewed research on charters.
I am a scholar. We are in pursuit and convinced by evidence. So I’d like to talk about evidence today.
Here are 10 things to consider about the market-based charter schools debate:
Where did market-based school choice come from? Writing in the 1960s, academics such as the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, followed by John Chubb and Terry Moe in the 1990s, argued for a profit-based education system where resources are controlled by private entities rather than by democratically elected governments. They recommended a system of public education built around parent-student choice, school competition, and school autonomy as a solution to what they saw as the problem of direct democratic control of public schools.
School “choice” does not cure the inequality created by markets. Not surprisingly, the academics neglected to mention that market-based mechanisms are the very system that created the inequities in American public schools today. Along with other public policies, including redlining, market forces created racial and economic segregation. Instead of making this situation better, school choice made this situation worse. Research by the UCLA Civil Rights project has demonstrated this fact. I have included this report and other resources in your green folders. I have a few extra packets that I can give to folks after my presentation.
What does the research tell us that happens when everyone has choice? Also known as Universal choice? A group of economists mentored by Friedman, the Chicago Boys, took Friedman’s theories about education back to their home country and to push an education system with universal choice and relaxed regulation and oversight. Over the past several decades, Chile simultaneously became one of the richest countries in South America and the most unequal developed country in the world. In markets there are winners and losers.s I also recommend you check out Linda Darling-Hammond’s, a Stanford Professor, new book Global Education Reform Movement. This book examines countries around the world and finds that market-based reforms have failed spectacularly when compared with equity-based reforms.
The position of the NAACP and Black Lives Matter on privatization is consistent with the views of past civil rights leaders.NAACP co-founder E.B. Du Bois, in his essay Negroes and the Crisis of Capitalism in the U.S., extolled the virtues of collaborative social and government action. He railed against the role of businesses and capitalistic control that “usurp government” and made the “throttling of democracy and distortion of education and failure of justice widespread.” Malcolm X characterized market-based public policy as “vulturistic” and “bloodsucking.” He advocated for collaborative social systems to solve problems. Martin Luther King Jr. argued that we often have socialism in public policy for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor. White academics pressing for market-based school choice in the name of “civil rights” ignore this history of African American civil rights leaders advocating for collaborative systems of social support and distrusting “free market” policies.
Is the NAACP and Black Lives Matter position on schools out of touch with civil rights? A barrage of criticism has come from market-based school choice proponents and charter operators about the NAACP and Black Lives Matter resolutions. However, the NAACP has for years been consistent in its critique of charters schools. At the 2010 convention, the NAACP national board and members supported a resolution saying that state charter schools create “separate and unequal conditions.” A review of ten years of research supports their statement. I have included the review of research in your packets. More recently, in 2014, the NAACP connected school choice with the private control of public education. More recently, the 2016 resolution includes a variety of civil rights-based critiques such as a lack of accountability, increased segregation, and disparate punitive and exclusionary discipline for African Americans.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I regret we didn’t fight to solve the funding inequities in urban schools. Our urban schools have been unfairly funded resulting in larger class sizes and less money for support programs for decades. I also regret we didn’t fight for innovative incentives to promote integration when the country had the interest in addressing these problems in the sixties. This neglect of urban education has provided fuel for the “reform” agenda with their fake battle cry, “the civil rights issues of our time.” “Reform” has offered no viable solutions, It has reshuffled the inequities while it has weakened our public education systems.
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I think that the charter industry does not give a wit about the issues that are so well stated in this review. The consequences of nearly unlimited expansion of chartering and variants has been rationalized and sold with the aid of Friedman pronouncements “markets are always best.” Best for whom? When? In relation to what other possibilities? Who gets to decide policy and the nitty gritty details?
The fate of the charter industry is being tied to the fate of democratic governance. Until there is a total meltdown of that, the deep-pocket non-profits are functioning as a proxy for the work of a governance structure. Public money goes to charters, but not without the infrastructure of support from mission-driven non-profits, and for-profit investments of the kind funding pre-schools–investment products called social impact bonds or pay for success contracts.
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“new book Global Education Reform Movement. ”
Something to read. I do not see it at Amazon or anywhere.
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It’s at amazon. Search on “Global Education Reform”. It has various authors, listed under the first two (Frank Adamson and Bjorn Astrand.)
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Actually, mine was supposed to be a reply to a different therad where somebody said that the book with this title was supposed to be written by Darling-Hammond.
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From the posting: “Martin Luther King Jr. argued that we often have socialism in public policy for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.”
Someone described the economic meltdown and the government’s response to it —too big to fail!—as a classic example of socialized risk and private profit with many many losers and a few very big winners.
Paralleled by the attitude of the heavyweights in corporate education reform where nothing is too good or too costly for THEIR OWN CHILDREN but when it comes to OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN, well, when they are able to tie the profit motive to the quality of education offered to OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN, if whatever is left over after a few have raked in $tudent $ucce$$ is not much—
Too bad. Because someone has to make the tough decisions to produce a few big winners and many many losers. And you wouldn’t want the students at Lakeside to fail at their athletic endeavors because they don’t have such goodies as “artificial turf fields lined for multi-sport use, a natural-grass soccer pitch, an all-weather track, a shellhouse for all crew teams, a Middle School multi-sport gymnasium”—now would you?
Don’t be hating on the children of billionaires!
🙄
After all, if Bill Gates and his wife freely chose to send their children to Bill’s alma mater, Lakeside School, while the vast majority chose schools which are underfunded and under attack and opened and closed in the service of rheephorm and some even eliminate recess—and worse yet, many of those parents didn’t choose to meet the standards of so many charter schools of excellence—then they made bad bad choices.
If they were good parents, why didn’t they measure up and send their children to schools like Lakeside? It’s all on them.
Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org
Choice. If you’re for inequity, you gotta love it.
But if you’re in favor of a “better education for all” maybe there’s a better way to go…
Just sayin’…
😎
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Like!
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I wonder if the review of waiting for superman by peter downs….which seemed to be gone from the internet, but saved in my private collection….was considered not usable here. I thought the points were devastating in their detail. oh, well.
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I need to calm down and behave myself.
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Of course, chaters are not the answer, but technology. As our new BossVoss in the Washington says
“I don’t think we should be as focused necessarily on funding school buildings, as much as we should be having a conversation around funding students.”
The fuller quote is
“DeVos doesn’t think we should be funding school buildings as much as students.” The line caught my eye as I scrolled through social media this weekend. How could it not? I’ve been working hard over the past year to try and convince other education activists that the true endgame of the reform movement is to make school buildings obsolete. So I listened to the video of DeVos speaking to attendees of the Magnet Schools of America National Policy Training Conference in Washington, and there it was at timestamp 11:40: “I don’t think we should be as focused necessarily on funding school buildings, as much as we should be having a conversation around funding students.”
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The entire “education reform/choice/voucher/charter school” movement has from its very beginnings been rooted in racism: The first outcry for resegregation in the guise of vouchers arose immediately after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that separate but equal was inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then —and still today — as merely giving parents free “choice.”
But the 1950’s voucher crusade faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would never become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing.” With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
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” because of the financial fraud, the skimming of tax money into private pockets that is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
The Washington State Supreme Court, the 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. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL” because no charter school fulfills the basic public accountability requirement of being responsible to and directed by a school board that is elected by We the People. Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money.
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.
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 PUBLIC TAX MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.
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Former president of the St. Louis school board, and the man who made Mayor Slay and other big shots go to the state board to have st. louis voters disenfranchised regarding their children….now in its tenth year….they did not want Peter Downs to get in the way of the increase in charter schools….when public radio bought out the Beacon, Peter Downs review of waiting for superman was erased from the archives, and is not available online….until I found it preserved in my emails……here is what he had to say about the movie:
Superman’ runs a con
By Peter Downs, Special to the Beacon
Posted 7:30 am, Wed., 11.17.10
I went to see the movie “Waiting for Superman” expecting to be either inspired or outraged. Instead, I was merely annoyed – irritated by simple-minded assertions and gross misstatements of facts – until it hit me: Director Davis Guggenheim must be running a con.
The message of Guggenheim’s movie is an education version of a get-rich-quick scheme. Getting a great education should be easy, he says. It is simply a matter of the teacher pouring knowledge into kids’ heads. He even has a cartoon of a teacher pulling the tops off of children’s heads and pouring something from a pitcher into the empty vessels of student heads while the children sit smiling and passive in their seats. Probably any parent, who has tried to teach a child anything, would recognize the absurdity of the image, but the idea behind most get-rich-quick flimflams are absurdly simple, too.
Guggenheim says that even though getting rich – I mean getting children a great education – is so simple, we’re getting deeper in debt – I mean our schools are getting worse. Guggenheim appeals to middle-age pride and the nostalgia that middle-age, middle-class people have for their childhood. American public schools used to be the best in the world, he says, after all, you got a great education at yours, didn’t you? Schools were so good, he says, that student performance kept getting better and better, climbing every decade until 1970, when performance flatlined.
He has a cartoon to illustrate that idea, too: a line graph climbing sharply until 1970 when it suddenly flattens out and drifts down.
The reality is different. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there is only one nationally representative assessment of what students know and can do in reading and math and it is called the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress). Those assessments only started in 1971. There aren’t any good data to support Guggenheim’s claims of rapid improvements in student performance before 1970, and after that the NAEP shows improvements in student reading and math skills in 4th and 8th grades, or among 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds, in each of the last three decades. It shows, for example, that 4th and 8th grade students are successfully working math problems that are about two grade levels above what their counterparts could do 20 years ago. Of the different ages and grade levels tested, only among 17-year-olds have scored stayed steady, and in understanding that the period from 1970 to today takes on added significance.
The 1970s were a time when public education in the U.S. became much more broadly democratic. The decade of the 1970s saw the first federal laws to ban discrimination in educational opportunities on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender or physical handicap. It also was the time of the first state supreme court rulings making it illegal for states to ignore the educational needs of mentally (slow) children (federal legislation followed in the 1980s).
Before then, many public schools took it as their mission to sort students. Only the select were allowed to earn a diploma and graduate. Many African-American students, most students with learning disabilities, many women and poor white men, were, in the words of a former St. Louis deputy superintendent, “handed a certificate and shown the door” when they hit age 16. Now we expect high schools to work to help everyone graduate.
Of course, democratization didn’t happen everywhere at once and all at the same time. A lot of work remains, but significant strides toward universal high school education were made. The percentage of African-American men who had earned a high school diploma, for example, climbed from 37 percent in 1970 to 87 percent in 2000, and the number who had attended college jumped from 13 percent to 44 percent.
The democratization of high school opportunities, all word of which is absent from Guggenheim’s account, means that the scores of 17-year-olds in 1971 still represented what the elite who would go on to become managers and professionals knew. The test scores of 17-year-olds today represent what everyone knows. Put another way, the youth today who are going to end up as retail clerks can read and think mathematically just as well as today’s CEOs could when they were 17. Guggenheim’s nostalgia is a nostalgia for a more elitist school system.
If you buy the lie that public schools used to work but don’t anymore, Guggenheim will tell you that school boards and teachers are responsible for the breakdown, but mostly teachers. The problem was caused by bad teachers, he says, and teacher unions that keep them in place. Apparently, bad teachers are forever, causing innumerable good teachers to wait in vain for a job to open up.
He won’t tell you of the problems urban districts have filling job openings. He won’t mention that 40-50 percent of teachers quit by the end of their fifth year, or that another 15-20 percent quit by the end of their tenth year.
What he will tell is … well, conclude for yourself.
He says teachers get lifetime job security, tenure, after only two years, even though in 41 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia tenure takes three years or more. In Illinois, it takes four years; in Missouri it takes five.
Then Guggenheim takes a report by Scott Reeder that says teachers rarely get fired in Illinois and extrapolates that to the rest of the country. But when you ask Reeder, as I did, where his numbers come from, you find out that he never asked any school districts how many teachers they fired in any year. All he counted were the number of teachers who appealed their firings to a state appeals board and lost. He doesn’t know how often teachers get fired in Illinois or anywhere else and neither does Guggenheim.
If is is a con, what is Guggenheim selling? Charter schools. He says the way out from bad schools caused by bad teachers and unions is the charter school industry. Twenty percent of traditional public schools are failures, he says, but 20 percent of charter schools are successes. His argument – some public schools are failures, but some charter schools are successes, so charter schools are better – is nonsense. If you wanted to know which was better, you’d have to look at which failed more often than the other, and which succeeded more often, with like groups of children, which is something Guggenheim does not do.
As in many scams, Guggenheim relies on cute children to help make his sale. Even if the children are wrong, we can’t really blame them. How are they to know better?
So it is that when a little girl in Guggenheim’s film says something that is not true about a charter school (the KIPP Academy) – “they won’t let you fail” – we can’t blame her, but we can blame the director who used her. California KIPP Academies are famous for the high rate at which students leave their schools without finishing.
Defenders of the schools say the same thing happens in public schools, but, through a little girl, Guggenheim is making the claim that KIPP schools are different, that students don’t fail to finish KIPP as students fail to finish public schools. Neither is the ‘they don’t allow failure’ line true of another charter school that Guggenheim touts, the Promise Academy, which expelled all the students in its first batch of 9th graders because their test scores weren’t high enough.
A heart-tugging look at children who, Guggenheim says, are doomed to failure unless they can win lotteries to get into charter schools provides the cover for this apparent scam. The climax of the film is a selection of scenes where the children wait in auditoriums to hear if they will get picked to win the supposed prize of a seat in a charter school, although it is hard to imagine why parents would subject their children to that experience without urging from the director.
Guggenheim is right in that the promise of a quality education for all in America remains unfulfilled. His film takes advantage of people’s desire to deliver on that promise, but his “solution” would have us back away from the promise, not move forward.
Peter Downs was a member of the elected St. Louis School Board. This article was originally sent by the author to his own list. To reach voices authors, contact Beacon features and commentary editor Donna Korando.
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Excellent piece, thanks for posting it.
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I am beginning to believe that each state should pass a law making “profit” illegal in charter schools. Set a budget and stick to it. They are only allow to keep 4 months operating funds in their “saving fund balance”. Any amount over that will be kept by the state.
If you take their motive, money, away then they will scatter like roaches when the lights come on.
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I agree, but I doubt it will happen. The charter lobby group is so well connected and wealthy, representatives are afraid to cross them.
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Yep…unfortunately.
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Amen! Unfortunately many communities have been hoodwinked into thinking ‘charter’ automatically means higher quality. The students that my high schoole receives from charter middle schools are far behind their peers from traditional neighborhood schools.
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Many of us in the charter world, especially those who are associated with independent charter schools see the work we do as the outgrowth of a long struggle for greater autonomy within public schools and prefer the mantle of Ted Sizer than Milton Friedman. The charter movement, at its inception was an educator-driven initiative to find a way to escape district-imposed conformity and its original proponents came from the small schools movement, the teacher-led schools movement, labor and other democratic, progressive public school initiatives.
No – market-based reforms will not ensure equity in education any more than it will in healthcare or any area of social welfare, and the charter movement, writ large, is at danger of becoming the plaything of those who promote an aggressive shift to market reform. Our group is intent on recapturing the democratic principles behind the movement for autonomous public schools. http://www.c3s.nyc/democracyineducation
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Steve Z,
I know the history of the charter movement well. I wrote about it. I lived it. It began as a democratic, teacher-led movement. It is now a corporate movement, funded by the Walton family, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, John Arnold, Wall Street, etc.
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Diane,
We are “originalists” in terms of our commitment to the democratic principles that were at the founding of the charter movement and we’re not giving up on that.
Traditional district public schools are already embracing “choice” in a variety of ways, some of them clearly discriminatory. The real challenges are how to include genuine equity, transparency and adequate funding with choice involving both traditional and charter public education AND simultaneously how to combat the forces of racism, systemic poverty, profiteering and disregard for science that are affecting all of us.
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Steve, do your schools have same accountability as public schools?
Yeah, autonomy is an enormous problem.
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Our schools DO have rigorous “accountability plans” that are overseen by charter authorizers in New York and they are, unfortunately, heavily based on standardized test results. But our accountability also deals with fiduciary responsibility, community responsiveness, equitable enrollment practices and adherence to mission. We hope to be able work with authorizers to develop accountability measures that address the whole child, foster innovation, collaboration, and real-world problem solving — but that discussion will take time and persistence.
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I meant to ask about financial accountability for what happens with tax payers’ money.
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I can only speak for the charter schools in our coalition http://www.c3s.nyc which are self managing and independent. We all have a very rigorous financial accountability which requires transparency and strict conflict-of-interest reporting with regards to all finances. There are strict rules in place to prevent self-dealing. Most authorizers require bimonthly financial reports which must be available to the public. All our schools are audited annually. For-profit charter management companies are not allowed in NYS and multiple bids are required on contracts over $5000. That being said, there have been complaints with regards to the financial transparency of the large networks that manage multiple schools — I cannot speak to the financial practices or accountability of those management organizations. They are running large, complicated enterprises. But the independent schools, which make up half the schools in NYC, are very well overseen financially.
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