On March 1, there was a heated debate around the proposition “Charter Schools Are Overrated,” hosted by Intelligence Squared. The room in New York City was packed. Two academics–Gary Miron of Western Michigan University and Julian Vasquez Heilig of Sacramento State–debated two charter advocates–Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform and Gerard Robinson of the American Enterprise Institute in D.C.
Education Week covered the debate here.
Vicki Cobb, a celebrated writer of science books for children, attended the debate and reports on it here. Cobb notes that she previously served on the board of a charter school, so was not anti-charter. Apparently the audience was evenly divided or undecided before the debate.
Cobb describes the major issues: the question of democracy and control; the question of teacher turnover. On the matter of data, charter schools on the whole perform no better or worse than public schools. Some get higher scores, some get lower scores. It is a wash. But as the anti-charter side pointed out, test scores are not everything.
As Julian Vasquez Heilig argued for the motion: “Charter schools, if they don’t have public accountability, direct public accountability, are antidemocratic. So, saying that publicly elected school boards and districts and unions, which are also democratic organizations are an old idea — I don’t think democracy is an old idea. In fact, I think we need excessive democracy when it comes to our thinking about education reform. We need to avoid education reform that is top down and concentrates power in the hands of just a few people.”
Cobb writes, “By the way, the team for the proposition “Charter Schools Are Overrated,” won the debate.
According to Education Week, The debate’s winner was determined by the percentage of audience members who changed their minds. In the first vote of live audience members, 33 percent cast votes for the motion and 31 percent against. In the final vote, 54 percent were for the motion and 40 percent were against. The rest were undecided.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Gary Miron sounded the alarm on Michigan charter schools years ahead of anyone else.
It’s not like they didn’t know what was happening in ed reform circles. Miron testifies before the legislature and he’s a former charter supporter.
You have to wonder why he was completely ignored. FOR YEARS he has been patiently documenting and reporting this stuff. In Michigan. Reported by an academic in the ground in Michigan. Extensively documented.
I mean, come on. They didn’t want to hear it! They were so bound and determined to continue charter cheerleading they ignored what was right in front of them and it took some effort! They had to put WORK into pretending this was a big success.
We’re seeing the same thing with vouchers. They HAVE voucher experiments and not just in Milwaukee. They have Ohio and Indiana. It doesn’t matter. They are currently engaged in a huge, national voucher marketing campaign.
These were NEVER experiments. It never mattered if they “worked”. This is 90% politics and ideology with a sprinkling of “science” words on top.
I’m convinced one of the reasons Michigan charters are untouchable and charter-mania continues in that state is because there are a lot of Michigan colleges and universities who are financially benefiting from “authorizing”. Look at the Detroit authorizers sometime. Some of them are located 300 miles from Detroit. How could they possibly be overseeing these schools and why are they collecting fees out of Detroit when they have absolutely no connection to that city? It’s like they found a revenue stream in K-12 funding and now they are loathe to give it up.
In this case. aren’t politics and ideology a screen/rationale/overlay for the pursuit of financial interest?
That screen may hide the truth from the believer as well as the public, but when politics and ideology are so closely intertwined with the financial benefits of those practicing that politics and professing that ideology, the extraneous (politics and ideology) products fall away like the slag in an ore-smelting process. What’s left is the red hot, 999% pure element of naked financial interest.
Here’s (yet another) negative report on vouchers. This one is out of Indiana but it could be Ohio because the Ohio report looks exactly the same.
Click to access Vouchers_v4b-1.pdf
So what is your US Department of Education spending the day on today? Promoting vouchers. Boldly ignoring the mounting evidence from the voucher states to push more and more and more vouchers. Apparently none of the 4200 public employees at the US Department of Education can find a single successful public school or public school student in the entire country. This is “science”? Baloney.
How are these people credible? Why in God’s name would a public school rely on them for “guidance” or “advice”? So we can join the ed reform campaign to destroy our own schools?
Thanks but no thanks. I’m not lining up for community suicide. They’ll have to conduct the anti-public school campaign without the help of public school parents and public school students. They’ve gone from offering nothing of value to public schools or public school students to insisting we join them in their anti-public school political campaigns.
Here’s today’s anti-public school editorial from the US Department of Education:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/03/02/betsy-devos-trump-delivers-education-promises-column/98594982/
It’s the usual ed reform drivel- a droning recitation on how public schools suck and unequivocal cheerleading for charters and vouchers.
I don’t know- is it “science” that none of these people can find a single positive thing to say about any public school or any public school student?
That seems unlikely given that 90% of kids attend public schools. I’ll have to see the “data” that justifies this odd omission of anything even remotely positive on public schools and public school students. Looks to me like politics and utter and complete capture by the “ed reform movement” but then I don’t pretend to be a scientist so what do I know.
Great reporting by Vicki Cobb. Thanks for reposting and discussing it, Diane Ravitch. It’s outrageous that public schools are being trashed…lots of very smart, accomplished people were educated in public schools. And to take money from the school systems and hand over to private profit-making, charter, or religious schools is awful. Ms. Cobb also made a good point about teacher turnover, and the fact that charter schools tend to hire younger, less experienced teachers. There is no substitute for experience, in almost any field. Particularly when it comes to the complex and difficult job of educating and dealing with children.
It’s not just the for-profit charters that are insidious. Even the so-called non-profit ones (since all kinds of wealth enhancing financial games are played by them) are destructive to the public good, since they extract funding from real public schools.
The most inportant information is contained in this line. “Some get higher scores, some get lower scores.” Public school is something not right for every student, It’s the reason we were forced to leave. Many children are miserable in public school and without choice, they suffer. Just saying.
But there are plenty of public “choices.” Many districts have magnet schools, special programs, and etc.
Usually,
You have many choices. If you choose a private school, pay for it yourself.
And there are plenty of options. In my own public school district we offer: CTE, IB, tons of AP courses, regular old high school and an alternative program with small class sizes.
My neighbors also thought public school wasn’t right for their kids. They tried two other avenues only to find their kids back in public schools. Just saying.
I hate that everyone is ignoring your comment Usually Right. I have some philosophical concerns about charters, but I also have a kid who has been frustrated in a public school where the kids are not engaged and the teachers are unhappy and constantly focused on student disruption. We have tried to make it work, but have been considering a charter for next year. Our neighborhood schools are extremely segregated. The charter reflects our city’s racial and economic demographics. Our regular school has burnt out teachers who refuse to send their own children to the school. We cannot afford private school, but we did consider somehow making it work when we first realized the issues we were having with the school. We have not won the lottery for the better schools (read schools where kids can learn without constant disruptions). We have seen our child stall out in her learning over the course of the year. I never thought I’d send her to a charter, but she desperately wants a school where she can learn instead of listening to teachers yell at other kids all day. At the end of the day, we’re done sacrificing my kid’s education on the altar of some ideal of what should be. I expect my other kids will remain in regular public schools and this one may return for high school, but for now, whatever decision we make, will be what’s right for her.
ND,
You are implying that there is a charter for your child that she can go to — that is open to any family who wants their kid to learn without the teachers having to be focused on the constant student disruption.
In other words, you know that at the charter, there are no disruptive students for the teacher to worry about.
Maybe you should be fighting for a second co-located public school option in every school that is chosen by any family who doesn’t want their kid to be bothered by those disruptive students. And if the family chooses it but their kid turns out to be too bothersome, they are returned to the other school.
Would that work for you? Because that is what you are proposing.
At least it would be HONEST. And more resources could be directed toward the school with all the disruptive students instead of them being directed toward the school that has the least expensive students like your daughter, who is eager and ready to learn.
If we didn’t have lying and dishonest charter school operators making claims about educating the same kids found in failing public schools with “less money” we might have solutions that benefit ALL kids.
Or, we can continue to have the selfish charter school parents who don’t mind what happens to the children left behind because their children benefit as long as their charter CEO keeps supporting the right wing agenda and keeps those right wing billionaire dollars flowing into the schools. And if the schools those unwanted kids have to do with less due to the lies and dishonesty, well that’s none of their concern because their kids are being showered with luxuries.
That’s the problem. The dishonesty of the charter movement. Even if they are not outright liars themselves, the leaders are scared to call out the biggest liars because it would hurt their bottom line. And in doing so they hurt ALL children even if they help the few who are allowed to attend their own schools.
The rise of selfishness, as demonstrated by Donald Trump and the right wing billionaires.
Yeah, I’m selfish and dishonest for wanting teachers with classroom management skills. My child’s desire for an actual education should be thrown in the trash can. She should wait the rest of her life for an education. Community school advocates are the ones who need to be honest. You can afford to live in a community where the schools are good. You love your segregated schools. I on the other hand am considering leaving the most segregated school I’ve ever seen in my my life and going to an economically and racially diverse school that reflects our entire city. So selfish to want a school that’s diverse to reflect my diverse family. So selfish to want a school that actually teaches the children instead of a school that can’t manage discipline well enough to spend enough time teaching. The day they shut down private schools is the day we will have equity. Until then, telling low and middle income families to just accept the scraps under the table is selfish. Hell no. The community schools in this city are segregated and the high and holy anti-charter advocates here want to keep their mostly white schools that way. There is some truth telling for you. I haven’t even decided to go with the charter school, but you all attack me for telling the truth about my kid and her desire to learn. You seriously think its ok that my child is not progressing? You think its ok that she listens to screaming teachers all day? NO! It is not acceptable and I will not accept it.
While often initially voters, without information, feel OK about charters, after hearing arguments from both sides they become more skeptical. That’s why here in Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly voted down charter expansion.
The entire “education reform/choice/voucher/charter school” movement has from its very beginnings been rooted in racism. The movement, of which charter schools are the profit-making part, has always had resegregation of America’s schools as its core agenda. Everyone should know that the call for vouchers was the first racist response to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that “separate but equal” public schools are 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 a “choice.”
Reports from the NAACP and ACLU have revealed the facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children, and last year the NAACP Board of Directors passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice. Moreover, a very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that private charter schools suspend extraordinary numbers of black students.
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.