The NAACP today released a strong report demanding the reform and regulation the charter school industry. The NAACP report calls for a flat prohibition of for- profit charters and for-profit charter management companies. It says that only school districts should be allowed to authorize charters. It says that charter teachers should be certified.
The task force of the NAACP said that “while high quality, accountable and accessible charters can contribute to educational opportunity, by themselves, even the best charters are not a substitute for more stable, adequate and equitable investments in public education in the communities that serve our children.”
The NAACP report boldly acknowledges that charters are part of a public-funded system. It says that it makes no sense to strip funding from the public schools that enroll the great majority of students in order to fund a parallel system that is usually no better than the public system and often worse.
Carol Burris analyzes the report here:
There is also a link to the full text of the NASCP report and resolution.
This report strips away the claims of charter advocates who say that they are advancing civil rights. They are not. They are undermining public education by stripping students and resources away from the public schools.
The NAACP recognizes that the best way to advance civil rights in education is to assure a strong, accountable,and equitable system of public schools.
Like every national organization, the NAACP relies on major donors to survive. By standing strong against privatization of public schools, the NAACP has demonstrated courage and integrity. I add the NAACP to the honor roll of this blog, with admiration and respect.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Maybe if the CEOs of those “high quality” charters didn’t go on national television to tell the world how violent so many kindergarten children are in her charters that have almost no white students, the NAACP would have excluded those “high quality” charters from their moratorium.
I doubt the NAACP agrees with the “high quality” charters operators that such a high number of non-white 5 year olds are constantly doing violent things if they are lucky enough to win a coveted spot in a “high quality” charter.
But I’m sure lots of racists believe it.
I read of Eva Moskowitz’ ridiculous claims about violent kindergartners in news coverage of a kindergarten suspension a couple of yrs ago. Is this a widespread claim or basically a NYC/ SA thing?
Eva’s schools apparently attract very large numbers of violent 5-year olds.
Beth,
Remember when you read why John posts that he speaks for Eva. He will never admit it. But it’s obvious. He only has eyes for her. Sickening.
Diane,
I think it’s beneath you to resort to personal attacks. I know very little about SA or Eva, but I don’t believe I’ve ever said anything positive about her here.
John,
You have made it clear that you believe that as long as the SUNY Charter Institute agrees with Eva Moskowitz that she has lots of violent non-white 5 year old children that you should not question it. Maybe it’s true, you say! You just don’t have enough information to judge so let’s change the subject and talk about how the NAACP is happy to sacrifice their own children to help teachers unions — now that is something you are CERTAIN of! You can’t be certain whether lots of lots of 5 year old African-American children are violent or not, but you ARE certain that the NAACP would happily sacrifice African-American children to help the teachers’ union.
Hmmm…..
It’s an SA thing. I’ve heard some SA parents describe the school as “rigid” and like a “gulag”. Imagine being a 4 or 5 year old boy in that environment. Many children would have difficulty in that environment, not just black children. Given what we know about SA, if these children act “violently,” it reflects their frustration and speaks very poorly of the SA model. In an appropriate environment the children would not feel the need to act out.
Beth,
From what we saw on the surreptitiously taped video, it isn’t just that SA is rigid. Recall that an assistant teacher objected to how the “model” teacher was acting and she was told in no uncertain terms by the Success Academy administrators that she could leave if she had a problem with the teaching methods. In other words, what we saw on the video is exactly how Success Academy gets results.
And what we saw wasn’t “rigidity”. It was intentionally targeting the children who were struggling academically to humiliate them. And it is part and parcel of showing work or test scores publicly and other methods in which the children who don’t learn fast enough are shamed in front of their peers. In some rare cases it may make a child a better “scholar” but in most cases the child needs more than shaming — he needs someone who knows how to teach a child who doesn’t get it with the one way the inexperienced teacher knows how to teach.
The NAACP understands that charters are financially motivated to get struggling children out of their school instead of motivated to teach them if they need any extra help or resources. That is what “competition” does when the way you “win” is to have the fewest children who struggle to learn.
I certainly understand the motivation of any parent with a child who can perform well academically who chooses a school where the kids who can’t learn fast enough are made to disappear. After all, parents pay $30,000 or $40,000 a year for private schools that do just that — why wouldn’t they by lured when it is offered for free?
But it is absurd to give private charters the franchise on teaching the students with the least expensive learning issues and the freedom to rid themselves of the ones that are the most expensive. Just like it would be if we allowed health insurance companies to compete with Medicare for the healthiest seniors while allowing them to dump the ones who get sick. Teaching children is not a competitive game and curing patients of disease is not a competitive game. But education reformers have designed a system where the more low-performing students you can make disappear, the more you win.
No wonder the NAACP knows that this system is unsustainable and terrible public policy.
John,
The NAACP is made up mostly of African Americans. What would they possibly know about children of color? They are obviously a bunch of ignoramuses who know nothing about anything, and they should just follow your mansplainer mode of mindset. They certainly must not have any critical thinking skills, education, funds, clout, power, or influence, so what do THEY know?
You, on the other hand, know SO much. WOW!!!! They should just listen to you. You need to head up their organization.
You’re SO cool, John. It’s, like, “John power” has finally arrived in the realm of intellectualism, so watch out, world.
Norwegian Filmmaker “Whitesplain.”
Norwegian Filmmaker,
There’s no need for snark. There are plenty of black voices saying the same thing.
I attribute greater credibility to the voice of the NAACP–the nation’s oldest civil rights organization–than to those who support privatization and monetizing of our nation’s public schools. The NAACP courageously spoke up for all children of every race, but especially for black children, who are most often the victims of the Destroy Public Schools campaign.
And among the first groups to put down the NAACP statements was “the74,” funded by billionaires and others intent on destroying public schools and allowing segregated schools to proliferate.
“the 74” defends charters that suspend lots of non-white kindergarten children because the people at “the 74” believe the white charter operators who note how violent so many of them are.
It is certainly not surprising that they would put down the NAACP given their tendency to believe that a hugely disproportionate number of African-American kindergarten children are violent.
“The 74” or the NAACP. Who to choose? Decisions, decisions. Actually, this one is easy.
Here, Here! Say no to neo-Jim Crow!
“Like every national organization, the NAACP relies on major donors to survive”.
Yes, especially the AFT. They even have a cozy dues collection arrangement with each other.
This is about schools as employers, not about kids or parents. The NAACP has lost its way.
Are you kidding me?
You charter folks look the other way as your most financially-rewarded leaders pronounce lots of 5 year olds are violent in charter schools that just happen to serve large numbers of African-American students?
You stand there complicit and refuse to call out the racism and have the chutzpah to claim that the NAACP is doing something wrong because they got a donation from the teachers’ union? Because you are so racist to believe that they would sell out their own children for a donation that is a tiny fraction of what the billionaires would give them if they would embrace the charter movement?
Shame on you. You would sell out their kids for a donation. You are complicit.
Thank you, NYC public school parent! Amen.
Here is a quote from the NAACP’s report:
Parents described in detail what this practice is in action. Clarence Sprowler, a former charter school parent in New York City, shared the following: My son, with great fanfare, got accepted into Harlem Success Academy. Within his first day of school, I was told that he was unfocused and he needed to be disciplined. I was like, “Okay. They have high standards. This is good.” I didn’t see anything wrong with it…within days, people were coming into the classroom. They didn’t identify themselves. They were sitting in the back and they had papers and pads and they immediately, systematically, with these systems in place, identified children that they knew were going to be problematic and my son was among them, along with four other kids. Within three days, they had placed him in the back of the class in a table together and one by one, as every day went by, one of those kids were missing and they were gone. I was the hold out and I only lasted twelve days… I could not understand how a school that claimed to be public could come to me and say, “Listen. Something is wrong with your son. You got to go.” Sprowler’s experience is reflected in research that found some New York City charter schools have routinely adopted suspension and expulsion policies that the authors claim violates students ’civil rights.”
The fact that the CEO of this charter school has insisted over and over again that she gets lots and lots of violent 5 year old children that she has no choice but to suspend due to the extreme danger they pose to other children and teachers should give people like John pause.
Instead, John agrees that of course those children are violent and need to be suspended.
Or he says that if the white folks on the board of the SUNY Charter Institute agree that those kids are violent and reward the charter operator who recognizes their violent tendencies with lots and lots more schools, then who is he to question it?
And John attacks the NAACP for not accepting that lots of African-American 5 year olds in high performing charters are just as violent as the charters say they are.
John,
The unions are financed by dues of members.
Most of the national ed orgs rely on Wall Street, Gates, Broad, Walton. They sold their soul.
Please elaborate on your position that the NAACP report is about “schools as employers.”
Typical phrase from a paid shill for the Destroy Public Education Gang
Charter schools are not “employers”?
Police departments clearly exist to protect the jobs of cops
Why not fire them and give everyone a gun?
Diane,
Public education is largely failing black student and families, yet the NAACP concentrates on charters and let’s the rest off the hook. They get large support from the AFT and NEA. Not hard to connect the dots.
Their objections are transparent since many of the same issues exist in traditional public schools and they are not critical of them at all.
John,
Charters skim the kids they want. The overwhelming majority of charters do not get higher test scores than the truly public schools you sneer at. Many charters perform far, far worse than public schools. See Detroit.
Diane,
I’ve been posting for years. Show we one place where I have “sneered” at a school. Simply hasn’t happened.
You’re quoting old CREDO data and ignoring newer data.
“You’re quoting old CREDO data and ignoring newer data.”
As contrasted with the NAACP report which highlighted both relatively adverse CREDO data regarding charter schools and then also “another recent study” with mildly positive results.
But someone unfamiliar with that research would have had to peer at footnotes 17, 18 and 21 to begin to fathom that the first, from 2009, had been superseded by the latter from 2013.
One does have to wonder at that…
And wonder at the citation of data from The Civil Rights Project at UCLA regarding relative incidence of suspensions in charter and districts schools, with no reference to the fact that that material had been debunked by Nat Malkus’ study using a far sounder methological approach (https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Differences-on-balance.pdf).
And wonder at the conclusion that authorizations within a state by lots of individual school districts makes more sense than by a single state authorizer, which seemed if anything contradicted rather than supported by the evidence presented in the body of the report…
Does anyone here have alternative theories for such elements of the report that are more persuasive than John’s theory of excessive influence by the teachers unions?
While I think we should not shirk from asking that question, I think it also should be acknowledged that there was plenty of worthwhile analysis in the report… A step in the right direction overall…
Stephen,
Good points. The NAACP statement is hardly objective, is logically inconsistent on charters, and is silent on the experiences of the majority of black children who are in traditional public schools.
I agree that there are many points they bring up that are valid. There are definitely abuses in charters in states with weak charter laws. But, the right thing to do about these is to have some unified principals for what needs to be fixed, just as they should have the same about traditional public schools.
Taking away options from black families for political reasons and patronage is not what the NAACP should be doing.
John, The day you ever say anything critical of the brutal practices at Success Academy will persuade me you are not on Eva’s payroll. I think you get a bonus every time you post here.
My main position on SA is that I don’t know anything about them except what I read in the papers and what I read here.
If they kick kids out or otherwise violate their charter and/or NYS law, I hope they get called on it both by their authorizer and in court.
But, I find it hard to judge them by anecdote or a few examples of behavior I wouldn’t want happening in my school, just as I don’t judge traditional public schools based on a few anecdotes.
I’m confident that mistreated parents and students can find a voice in the media and/or the courts, and I’m confident financial backing is available from anti-charter groups for anyone who has legitimate issues. Why has there been so little of that? SA remains a school filled with children whose parents choose to send them there. Do you think parents volunteer their kids to be “brutal[ized]”?
What I know in my own city is that the union and other vested interests make up an awful lot of stuff about charters that are simply lies. They talk about “mid-year dump” despite data that shows it doesn’t happen. They talk about attrition from charters although the attrition from traditional public schools to charters is much higher. They talk about “creaming” even though incoming kids into charters perform lower on state tests than incoming kids to the same grades in the traditional schools. They talk about expulsions even though charter expulsion rates are lower than their own, etc.
So, pardon me for not jumping on the anti-SA train, but until I see something concrete, I won’t do it.
As for Eva’s salary, her Board obviously thinks she’s worth it, and based on the amount of money she raises for her schools, they may be right. It seems like too much money for the scope of her operation, but her students and families probably get many times that amount out of her being there vs. someone else.
John,
You are good at what you do.
I hope you are paid by the word.
I’m an advocate for my school, teachers, kids, and families and make no apology for that.
What is your school, John? Why don’t you use your name? I allow anonymity to protect teachers, who might be fired for speaking freely. Why don’t you use your name as so many on this blog do?
Diane,
I try to make every decision related to my school based on what’s in the best interests of my students, families, and staff. I can’t see anything good that could come out of identifying myself. This isn’t exactly a friendly environment for someone with my views.
There is a world of “gray” out here that many of your readers seem unaware of. Most charter leaders and teachers I know are very dedicated, don’t believe in “privatization”, want more spending for public education, and are generally politically very liberal. We’re out supporting DACA, criminal justice reform, etc., and just believe in providing educational options for underserved families as a social mission. To lump all of them into what you identify as “corporate reform”, and to think of charter parents as unwitting dupes is intellectually dishonest.
I find it helpful to learn from people with opposing views, which is why I read the blog. At its best, it is a good resource for that. But, in a blog that says it is a forum for discussing better education for all, I sometimes feel compelled to provide the opposing viewpoint or fill in missing data, as do a few other people on here that I guess you are not happy with. But, I don’t enjoy the occasional personal attacks and snide remarks, which I don’t think are appropriate or deserved since I don’t engage in the same. There’s no call for that in what should be a civil discussion.
Frankly, if you want the blog to be an echo chamber of one-sided information, that’s your prerogative. I think we have too many polarized sources of information in the world (e.g. Fox News) and not enough places to actually discuss issues.
Maybe I should take the hint that intellectual honesty is not what you’re going for here Say that what you want is a place to express your opinions unchallenged and that your readers should get opposing views somewhere else I’ll stop posting.
For a simple public school parent, you sure do know a lot of charter school founders and leaders.
John I certainly applaud your call for civility. So, in that light, and if I may offer my own opinion, I think your are way off-base in your r analysis of this blog and Diane’s participation in it. And the “intellectually dishonest” thing is, itself, a remarkable resort to, at best, a gross over-generalization and, at worst, and in this case, just plain wrong. CBK
CBK, I appreciate your opinion, but I stand by “intellectually dishonest” because of the myriad of logical fallacies perpetuated here and the constant cherry picking of data, not to mention personal attacks on those who challenge the group wisdom.
Diane made this clear to me when she stated what she would tell parents in my community about the high school where more than 50% of students don’t graduate. She said she would tell them that it was a good school (knowing nothing more about it than that it was public and the graduation rate) that would meet the needs of their students. That is a statement made based on ideology, not data. IMO, the definition of a good school should have something to do with education, not solely governance model. My elected school board pretty much won’t even discuss academic achievement.
Also, one only needs to look at Diane’s treatment of CREDO, where she constantly refers to older CREDO studies as gospel, but refuses to acknowledge the positive findings of the more recent urban charter study that uses the same methodology.
John Sorry . . . . I don’t buy it for many reasons, none of which I have time to develop here. But see my other note to you. I do hope you are not a troll.
If by Troll you mean someone pretending to be something they’re not or vice versa no, I’m not a troll.
I respect your opinion and read your other message. We just disagree regarding public school boards with their dismal participation rate and in many cases attempts at voter disenfranchisement.
I agree that there are privatizers with ulterior motives and that many of them support charter schools. But, I am not projecting my motives on them. To me, the privatization meme is a canard when it comes to most charter schools. Yes, fight for-profit operators and states with crappy charter laws, but when you cross over to calling even high quality, not-for-profit operators “privatizers”, you are overgeneralizing and leaving the realm of intellectual honesty. Are public libraries privatizers because they don’t have public elected boards? Are other not-for-profits providing social services?
I hear that you believe that parents choose charters because they are duped by marketing. In my community, charters do no marketing. Our parents are not dupes, they are making an educated choice. I believe that to be a giant rationalization for discounting the continuously growing number of parents making that choice. If you can believe they are being duped, no more thought is needed regarding why they are leaving traditional public schools.
As for your contention that parents have to be politically astute to decide where to send their children, I disagree. For them, the issue is about their children’s education. They will pick what they perceive to be the best school for their children regardless of type. I’m sure there are times when they are not correct, and I am not one who believes that choice in itself creates quality.
But, your contention is that they should sacrifice their and their own children’s best interests at the alter of what’s good for the current system while well off parents simply move to what they perceive as “better” school districts. I simply don’t believe they should be disproportionately bearing the brunt of the weaknesses in our public school system, and I believe the purpose of our public education system is about children and their education, not about governance structure.
John Your note is the best argument for saying exactly why we need good leadership in this most important case of the movement from public to the overlords of private institutions, and particularly for education.
You are so right–**we cannot expect parents to make the longer view-choice when the right-now education of their children is involved: and especially while they are swimming in (1) the “failed schools” propaganda; (2) the actual problems that persist in ANY school environment, but that are used to cherry-pick and demonize public schools (while they one-by-one eliminate their own “problem children”); and (3) where the money-slick marketers hold up the candy in front of parents’ hungry eyes.
The Gates, the people in ALEC, and the Betsy-group (for example and from my reading of them) DO have the longer run in mind. Unlike parents, they can afford to. Hence, the need for visionary leadership where maintenance of the democracy and its institutions is concerned. While the rest of us try to educate the polity to recognize the pied pipers among us.
And THAT’s why the privatizers and corporations are so into their double-speak of offering, as you say, DEMOCRATIC CHOICE to parents. And you bought it. Like the Russians say: useful idiots–a troll, and it seems you don’t even know it.
Here’s why: Your quote is below–but you read wrongly when you mistake a foundational argument for an “over generalization.” That you put everything on ONE PLANE suggests, again, you fail to see the importance of distinguishing topical concerns, where, as you say, I “cross the line,” from the political and cultural foundations that are not “across the line” but rather that UNDERPIN those same concerns (that’s why they are “foundational,” e.g., not topical political views but political foundations). You live in and benefit from a democracy, as privatizers do, but you would “cross the line” of your own foundations by denying democracy’s legacy of maintaining itself through PUBLIC education. You are one of the snakes eating its own tail.
I wouldn’t call you “intellectually dishonest,” except for to yourself, because you are not the thinker you think you are. From a foundational view, the privatizers are “privatizers” insofar as as they and the corporations they belong to desire to separate education in a democracy from its political and public foundations–in that sense, even “high quality” private institutions are complicit, know it or not, and the more so as they consolidate power, draw resources from public institutions, and try to separate themselves from truly-public oversight and accountability. From the longer view, they are in the stream, so to speak, towards (in today’s language) Putinization of America. Troll away, John.
JOHN SAYS: “To me, the privatization meme is a canard when it comes to most charter schools. Yes, fight for-profit operators and states with crappy charter laws, but when you cross over to calling even high quality, not-for-profit operators “privatizers”, you are overgeneralizing and leaving the realm of intellectual honesty. Are public libraries privatizers because they don’t have public elected boards? Are other not-for-profits providing social services?”
Which elementary school principal is paid $500,000 like Eva? And Eva is uncertified and never taught.
bethree5,
A majority of Black families support charters and school choice.
This is about the AFT and NEA’s support for the NAACP.
http://californiapolicycenter.org/tag/nea-and-aft-increased-its-contributions-to-naacp-and-its-affiliates-by-a-six-fold/
I was wondering if John was trying to say that NAACP seeks to hold back charters because they employ mostly white teachers vs tradl inner-city schools’ employing more black teachers. But maybe as you suggest he’s just anti-teachers’-unions.
bethree5,
No, I just think that the NAACP is doing the bidding of the AFT and NEA and not looking out for their membership.
Charters are no better than public schools. They are not an improvement. They siphon money out of the public school system without improving anything, and in many cases doing the opposite of improving things. To the people who choicey choice choose them, they are a woeful turning of their backs on the system that charters are degrading instead of improving. They are supported by those who don’t care about their neighbors. The NAACP is correctly standing up for the defunding charters cause. The whole corporate charter thing is a scam played on the small percentage of the population that falls for it. One day, opening a charter school will properly be against the law. Then, we can set about the work of improving education and life in America.
And speaking of improving the conditions of public education and life in America, I would like to remind you, John, that teachers are Americans too. Unions help improve our lives on and off the job and that’s a good thing, better than enriching corporate executives.
LeftCoastTeacher,
I don’t disagree. I admire teachers very much and support them every chance I get. I just think that the NAACP is opposing charters for reasons that are not objective and not in the best interests nor desires of their members.
One last thing: I would rather have a “cozy” relationship with teachers unions than a cozy relationship with former Enron executives, hedge fund managers and real estate billionaires.
John,
You’re saying that the best interests of black people lie in opposing teachers?! Nonsense! If black leaders and unions agree on something it’s because they’re making money off the deal, not because their causes are almost always one and the same?! That is an ignorant position, pal. Take a two history classes and call me in the morning.
Oh nice link, John, a nearly year-old statement from a far-right group linked to ALEC. I’m really going to assume that’s what black folks think >sarc<
John,
The NAACP wants TRANSPARENCY and ACCOUNTABILITY.
Why not call their bluff? Make your charters transparent and accountable?
Oh, that’s right, charters will spend inordinate amounts of money to make sure that they are accountable only to pro-charter oversight agencies and not the people in the community where they live like public schools are.
And your insistence that charters should exist as long as a parent wants them is like saying a segregated school should exist as long as white parents want it. We have rules for the kinds of schools we fund with taxpayer dollars. And it doesn’t matter whether there is a market of parents who want a school that doesn’t have to follow those rules.
NYC parent,
No, the NAACP wants a moratorium. I have no problem with them calling out issues with charters. I think it’s actually good for the charter sector as a whole to be criticz d for legitimate issues. I just think they went too far in asking for a moratorium that would stop good charters as well as bad. That’s what I objec to.
And regarding the rules for public education, you’re right, and those laws include charters. I don’t support any charter that breaks the law or their charter, nor any state charter law that doesn’t explicitly disallow self-dealing and conflicts of interest.
LCT @ 6:03pm: right on! Took the words out of my mouth. Glass-houses, pot:kettle, etc. It’s hard for me to back AFT/NEA positions whole-heartedly, as they have so often seemed to be in the pocket of neoliberal backers & sketchy on their positions. I look forward to the day when they actually take no-holds-barred pro-teachers’-union positions. But meanwhile I’ll take their wishy-washiness any day over ALEC, Koch, Walton, hedge-funders, etc etc charter/ voucher/ privatization backers.
Translation: HOORAY for AFT/ NAACP “collusion”!
Curious, John (and, admittedly, not really my business), but are you Black? Because if not, isn’t it kind of rich for you to be telling the NAACP how to represent its members?
Dienne,
John will claim that his kids go to public schools but he loves charters. He will defend one charter chain in particular, but has nothing whatever to do with that very rich charter chain.
“Which elementary school principal is paid $500,000…?” Well, there’s…and…not to mention…and, of course…and let’s not forget…
Too many to count when you make up your “facts”!
John and Dienne,
I too was wondering if John is black, citing charter backer “studies” that suggest majorities of black people want to stab other black people in the back, robbing their public schools of funds. Although, black, white or other, it’s still racism. John, support the NAACP and unions. Support teachers. Get off the Wall Street charter trolley.
LeftCoastTeacher &Dienne,
No, I’m not black, but 95% of the families in my school are.
Here are 160 black voices against the NAACP call. Read their letter if you’re interested in the dissenting opinions.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/charterschoice/2016/09/daughter_of_brown_v_board_plaintiff_asks_naacp_to_drop_charter_school_ban.html
Bethree,
With Trump in office, I look for the unions to stop their fling with neoliberals (who oppose unions, for crying out loud).
John,
Racism takes many forms. Divide and conquer is one. I read the opinions of the SELECTED black people who oppose the NAACP. They are not representative of public opinion. I’ve been through the ringer for being too straightforward on this blog and calling you a racist before. I am trying not to go there again. So, we disagree. Enough. Have a nice day. 🙂
LeftCoastTeacher,
i care a lot more about the opinions of black parents who entrust their children to charters than I do about political theater concocted by NAACP leadership and the AFT and NEA.
John says: “So, pardon me for not jumping on the anti-SA train, but until I see something concrete, I won’t do it.”
Success Academy Fort Greene — a school in which over 90% of the students are African-American or Latino — suspended 25% of the students in their school when the oldest students were in 2nd grade.
The year before when the oldest students were in 1st grade, the suspension rate was a “low” 23%. But John is reserving judgement because who is he to doubt a white educator who explains how violent those children were?
From the beginning of 2nd grade to testing time in 3rd grade, the cohort shrank by 19%. But the ones remaining all passed the state math test so who cares about the 19% who disappeared, says John. He trusts that they disappeared for a good reason and if not, SUNY will certainly investigate instead of granting them renewals years earlier than they are supposed to. Oops! Maybe not.
John sounds so much like the Republicans who say “I must enable Trump to do whatever he wants to do because no one has given me proof that he has done anything wrong and all the nasty things he says aren’t really my business so I will attack the Democrats for criticizing him.”
John says who am I to say that all those children aren’t violent and how dare the NAACP question charters that say lots of non-white children are violent when I know that they probably are. Or at least I’ll wait until someone “proves” to me that they aren’t just as violent as the white charter leaders I admire so much say they are.
“Public education is largely failing black student and families,”
That is patently false on the face of it. My children went to a well known and sought out district that had many African American students who were well served and who did a bang up job in going through school. That is just one of many districts in the area that can be shown to have successfully educated multiple generations of AA families.
Your blatant false edudeformer talking point doesn’t cut it around here.
We’re on the same page on this one, Duane!
“Your blatant false edudeformer talking point doesn’t cut it around here.”
So, how would you characterize the NAACP report? Its introduction starts with this:
“Unfortunately, in urban areas throughout the nation, chronically failing Black schools are the norm, not the exception.”
— Larry Aubry, past president of the Inglewood, CA Board of Education
Statement made at the NAACP Task Force Hearing on Quality Education
“This statement is sadly true. In 2017, over one in three Black fourth-graders and half of Black eighth-graders scored at the lowest performance level on the nationally-representative NAEP mathematics assessment.”
And the “Findings section” starts with this quote:
“Why are all schools failing African American students?
–Dr. James Comer, Yale University”
I am sure that Dr. Comer doesn’t think the Comer schools (all public schools, no charters) are not failing black students.
I know what you mean and don’t disagree. I’m not sure that quote would have survived if the report had been widely circulated as a draft welcoming comments/corrections. Shame it wasn’t.
Again, “all schools are not failing African American students” despite the statement by an African American at the vaunted. Skin color nor prestigious university (sic) affiliation does not an expert make. I can give many examples, as I gave the one I know most of, of schools and districts that serve students no matter their level of skin pigmentation or ancestor origin in excellent fashion. Comer is wrong when he asks that very misleading question. It is false on it’s face just as the other statement that I commented on before was patently false.
As far as NAEP scores go: It’s all a bunch of bullshit and mental masturbation that holds no value whatsoever in terms of validity of assessing anything. All falsehoods. So it means nothing absolutely nothing and cannot have any meaning in any true sense of the word.
Duane, of course there are plenty of where public schools are successful with black children, but the plural of anecdote is not data. My local district has a less than 50% graduation rate for black children. Ignoring that is down by that community a huge disservice.
Ignoring the root causes of those who struggle in school is the main problem. And those causes are not of the school’s making. The schools just reflect the inherent problems plaguing poor communities whether urban or rural. What is the main difference between districts that have students learn more and better than those that don’t? Socio and economic resources that are lacking in the poor communities.
Duane,
Yes, that is largely the problem, but apparently not easily solvable. I believe we need to work on what we can change, not just lament about what we apparently can’t.
If you look at a plot of school performance vs. economic disadvantage you see a largely linear correlation. However, there are quite a few outliers that show high performance with economically disadvantaged kids. We should all be focused on what they’re doing. No doubt there are some that are gaming the system and they should be called out on it. But, there are many that are not and many of them happen to be charter schools.
I know you don’t believe in NAEP or other standardized tests, but the same is true when looking at other measures such as high school graduation rates and college attainment. Big caveat here is that one has to look at attrition whenever looking at this data, but IMO, it is inappropriate to just say its impossible for kids from low income families to achieve what kids from high income families do. It certainly requires a lot more effort, but it is not impossible to do better than we are currently doing with what we have.
John,
HS graduation rates, which one would think would be something quite simple to figure are not as easy as first seems. Many factors go into those rates, and without an agreed upon definition, method to compute that rate considering all of the factors then we are again talking mental masturbation as the figures have no valid meaning or existence and are thrown around willy nilly as if they do mean something. Falsehoods abound in those graduation rates. I bring that “infidelity to truth” in those “graduation rates” to warn of snake oil, sold by many both in the public and private school sectors.
Now “college attainment” as an indicator of any K-12 school program is as bogus as it gets because once a student steps off the stage, myriad influences come into play in determining what a person does in the college realm. It’s another bogus supposed “output” indicator that is logically bankrupt and specious at best, insane at worst.
The focus that has been placed on “educational outputs” serves to mask, to hide the discrepancies, the vast differences in the “inputs” whether those inputs are socio-economic, home environment, funding dollars, facilities, faculty and staff characteristics, peers, and on and on and on. Until we quit focusing on completely invalid, totally bogus outputs such as NAEP, false graduation rates and/or absurd “college attainment” we will be doing a disservice, especially to the children in the poorer communities where many of those inputs are quite lacking.
It isn’t that hard of a concept to understand looking at bogus outputs can only serve to put the onus on the wrong side of the teaching and learning process and can only hinder said process and harm many students in the mean time.
Stephen B Ronan,
You really think that taking the easiest to teach students out of failing schools and throwing the rest back with fewer resources is the way to address the education of the most vulnerable kids?
The only thing that charters have done is offered the falsehoods that education of children in poverty with the highest needs can be done cheaply and better by inexperienced charter school teachers instead of union teachers.
For that lie, charters don’t deserve to exist. Seriously, people who are willing to promote a falsehood that hurts the majority of students while telling themselves that they are doing it for the few kids who give their school good results so they can rake in the donations should not be anywhere near children. They have the morals of gnats.
If there is education reform in which each public school system has separate but equal schools in which the students who are most motivated to learn are separated from those who are not, then we should have that without handing over the franchise to private operators.
NYC public school parent: “You really think that taking the easiest to teach students out of failing schools and throwing the rest back with fewer resources is the way to address the education of the most vulnerable kids?”
Kindly tell me where on earth you achieved that understanding.
And what do you mean when you refer to “failing schools”? Not having ever myself described a school as “failing” I’m curious how you, yourself, define what is or is not a “failing school”.
And as you surely know by now, we have in Boston, for example, lots of schools that select on the basis of test scores, interviews, auditions, and essays. Some are parochial schools, most are district schools. None are charter schools, which all admit students on the basis of lottery results.
The lottery application process is extraordinarily simple… not much more than name, address, phone and email (if available) and grade of student requested. A single submission works for almost all the schools.
You could credibly argue, however, that there are some parents who don’t have the time, energy, experience or skill to submit the application. And it would be good to make it even easier for them, if they’d like, to provide their kids also a chance to attend the extraordinarily excellent set of charter schools here. Charter schools and city officials have tried to make that more feasible by having a single simple unified application process enabling folks to combine application to charter schools and the diminishing number of district schools that admit purely by chance (as you may know, I favor that). But their efforts are vehemently opposed by the teachers unions. What do you think of that? Why do you think that is? I find it difficult to imagine a well-considered rationale that prioritizes the interests of children and their families.
Stephen Ronan,
There are PUBLIC schools that take students on the basis of a lottery. If you want to fight for more of those, you can. They are subject to oversight so that huge cohorts of children don’t disappear.
So if City on a Hill was a MAGNET school instead of a charter school whose overseers look the other way when they rid themselves of unwanted children, it would not have graduating classes of 50 students when there are 111 students in 9th grade, as they did this year. As you so honestly pointed out — thank you! At least you aren’t insisting on the illogical (and mathematically impossible) claim that it is possible to retain students forever and you’d always only have half the class graduating! Nope. Retaining is the excuse charters use when they get caught out with very small classes in older grades and desperately want to lie to the public that it’s not because low-performing kids leave but because so many of those kids were too stupid to pass. Because of course it isn’t because their inexperienced teachers can’t teach them enough to pass — it’s the kids’ fault that they didn’t learn but the charter is doing them the great favor of failing them as many times as they need to until they realize they need to leave the school!
I guess I’m supposed to be grateful that you just claim so many non-white kids are flunked (which is their own fault, not their inexperienced charter teacher’s fault) instead of claiming they were so violent they had to be suspended over and over again as charters serving kindergarten and first grade children who aren’t white tell the world.
The problem is that whatever oversight City on a Hill has enables them to shed students when they are supposed to be teaching them.
And magnet PUBLIC schools that take students by lottery have never performed far beyond public schools and yet lost so many students. It is counterintuitive because with public schools, a very high performing school will lose very few student compared to other public schools. With charters, it is the very highest performing schools that lose large cohorts of non-white students and racists promote the belief that it’s because non-white parents just don’t like excellent schools because admitting to their failures is not allowed even it hurts lots of kids. Charters are far more important than the children in them so any lie to promote them that hurts children is fine, according to their promoters.
NY parent,
You are ignoring the fact that most traditional public schools promote children regardless of their knowledge of material (a price that gets paid later when a student drops out or needs remediation) and that attrition in traditional public schools can be harder to see because new students take the place of dropouts.
I think charters should have to admit in all grades at any time of year, so we probably agree on the conclusion, but comparing exit numbers from charters to those from traditional public schools is comparing apples and oranges. Charter proponents shouldn’t compare percentages and opponents shouldn’t compare absolute numbers without acknowledging what warps both of those statistics
John I have a question for you: Do you understand (what I refer to as) the “foundational” issues surrounding the public-private debate? . . . and the “foundational” relationship between public institutions, like education, and a democratically conceived government and its cultural-political climate?
CBK,
Absolutely, and I don’t support privatization of public good (e.g. water, etc.) in general, and support single payer healthcare. However, I don’t have a problem with not-for-profit options for K12 education just as much as you may not have a problem with not-for-profit pre-K and college options or with public libraries having volunteer boards.
I also think that charters’ “democracy” is that parents decide whether their children attend or not, and I find that compelling vs. an elected school board as long as electeds make the decisions about how much money gets spent. It may be because my familiarity is solely with not-for-profit urban charters that serve almost exclusively low income families. I would definitely have a problem with upper income people creating a school to serve their own interests. I just think low income families should have similar choices to those exercised by upper income families when they move. To me, that’s economic justice.
As Diane pointed out (skeptically), my own kids are in great traditional public schools. Our TPS system is just not treating economically disadvantaged families fairly. They get the short end of the stick financially and typically have to attend schools with more violent incidents, less order, and lower academic expectations. They are essentially asked to “take one for the team” in a way that higher income people are not. As long as that inequity remains, I think it’s important for low income families have the ability to opt out of schools that they don’t want their kids in.
John says: “I also think that charters’ ‘democracy’ is that parents decide whether their children attend or not, and I find that compelling vs. an elected school board as long as electeds make the decisions about how much money gets spent.”
You sound good in some respects; and no snark here: but I think you havedrunk the poison on the “parents have choice” issue, as well as the school-board decisions–“elected” by those same parents? And if you think the above, then you really DON’T understand the foundational issues of the private-vs-public problem–you put it back into the “they can do it better or just as good” argument, or “parents democratically have choice.” Nope.
But you have a point about school boards, which are known to be the manipulative target of those who, because of their own capitalistic foundations, don’t think collaboration and LEGITIMATE compromise between different kinds of schools are important. In capitalistic comportment, winner takes all and my way or the highway. Even elected school boards CAN BE (but are not necessarily) manipulated by slick marketers who “know how to snow” parents and school board members.
Call me elitist if you want, but the “parents have choice” thing doesn’t wash either–not until everyone in the culture is POLITICALLY ASTUTE. Good leadership is key here–and that’s not going to come from the privatizer/reformers. In both cases of parent-choice and school-board manipulations, marketers know how to SELL TO PARENTS especially if those parents are desperate, only want what’s REALLY best for their children, are too-easy to respond naively to all that slick marketing and, insofar as they, like you, don’t understand the larger issues, will commonly if not always choose against their own interests.
Privatizers are like cancers on the culture. If you are not a potted “plant,” don’t project your own well-meaning thought onto them. It’s naive and folly for us all.
I don’t think I detect an answer to any of my questions.
In respect to COAH, it appears that you have now arrived at the misunderstanding that Jazzman had at the start of our conversation last September. If you haven’t had a chance yet, I would encourage you to carefully read that all the way through (including my reply in the comments section at the last of those).
In case you don’t have the links bookmarked…
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2016/09/massachusetts-charter-schools-and-their.html
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2016/10/charter-school-attrition-in-ma-reader.html
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2016/10/more-about-attrition-rates-in-boston.html
“I guess I’m supposed to be grateful that you just claim so many non-white kids are flunked (which is their own fault, not their inexperienced charter teacher’s fault)”
If a child were to leave a traditional district school to enter a charter school’s 9th grade while reading/writing/calculating with capacities similar to most 6th graders in the state, and the charter school helps advance those capacities at a rate of two years for each year spent at the school, we might anticipate that that child by the end of 9th grade is reading/writing/calculating at an 8th grade level. You would condemn the charter school and insist that the child should immediately be moved to 10th grade back in the school system where he or she had reached the 6th grade level of academic achievement? I don’t understand. Makes no sense to me.
BTW, I think you may find engaging and provocative the chapter “Promotion or Retention” by Meira Levinson, with accompanying commentary by various others. It’s in her (and Jacob Fay’s) excellent book: “Dilemmas of Educational Ethics”.
http://hepg.org/hep-home/books/dilemmas-of-educational-ethics
NYC public school parent:
“With charters, it is the very highest performing schools that lose large cohorts of non-white students…”
You repeat that position endlessly. But I don’t recall that you have ever systematically laid out your evidentiary basis for such a sweeping statement. Would you kindly do so now?
And note that once in a while when you offer that opinion, I respond with the material below… to which you never ever make any response. (As Diane might say: for a chatbot, you sure know a lot of sociology 😉 ).
In Massachusetts, DESE constructs a numeric percentile score that aims to rank schools against others statewide that serve the same or very similar grade levels. My understanding is that it derives from a complex blend of test scores, growth, graduation rates, etc. that’s tough to decipher, and that I might quarrel with if I fully understood it. But it’s the best single score I can find for purposes of ranking schools as to how much better kids read, write and calculate as they progress through school.
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/accountability/report/aboutdata.aspx
So here’s that score for Boston’s 2015 Commonwealth charter schools in the first column, and in the second column, DESE’s attrition score for the same score.
For Boston’s 2015 Commonwealth charter schools:
97 — 5.3
93 — 1.6
91 — 5.3
78 — 9.1
71 — 6.9
62 — 12
58 — 8.6
57 — 8
54 — 11
51 — 8
42 — 7.7
36 — 11.3
32 — 10
23 — 18.9
OK, no positive correlation between attrition and performance there. We could imagine that the impact is via school-year rather than summer loss, but with only 82 students total in all grades leaving all Commonwealth charter schools in the city during the school year, that’s not a compelling putative explanation.
Stephen B Ronan Like some others here, you seem to think its all about comparing public to private schools and their performance. Slick. But you say nothing about the foundational issues that hide “under” those arguments and that are the real concerns. At that level of thought and its application, privatization of education in a democracy, in fact, cuts the roots away from an education that ON PRINCIPLE fosters an openness of mind at its political core, and places it, without its roots, under any one of a number of corporate ideologies, not to mention religious.
If you understood the HUGE foundational issues, you’d see that comparing schools is just another red herring. In a field where “starve the beast” (aka public education) is the goal of many privatizers and “reformers,” such arguments are like beating your wife–so much so that she finally leaves. And then the wife-beater says: “See: SHE left ME!”
Is it deliberate? or do you just fail to understand the deeper issues that have been covered here OVER AND OVER AGAIN? I’m not snarking here when I say this: the truth will set you free but we don’t have to like it. If you are reading this blog closely, you are either deliberately obtuse, or just plain obtuse. Concretely, I have no problem recognizing that public schools have problems, or even that some private schools with out-perform them from time to time–the problems go deep and have been around for a very long time, but are not helped at all by draining funds and growing cancers in our communities.
Privatization only exacerbates present problems and cannot, ON PRINCIPLE, replace what is already vibrant about public education in a democracy, regardless of those problems. Let’s rather set about to fix them.
Catherine Blanche King: “Like some others here, you seem to think its all about comparing public to private schools and their performance.”
I most commonly allude to performance of public district schools and public charter schools in Massachusetts, where I live, and where there has been considerable research on the subject.
If you wish to contend that Massachusetts charter schools are private, kindly start by reviewing my interchange with Robert Skeels here:
http://www.eclectablog.com/2016/09/the-charter-school-debate-is-over.html
And then proceed to advance your argument, if you still consider it viable. Thanks.
Catherine Blanche King: “privatization of education in a democracy, in fact, cuts the roots away from an education that ON PRINCIPLE fosters an openness of mind at its political core, and places it, without its roots, under any one of a number of corporate ideologies, not to mention religious.”
Perhaps your concerns will be resolved once you understand that the charter schools that I find particularly impressive are all public schools, with any governing board appointments subject to the approval of a public official appointed by the Commonwealth’s Governor, who holds elective office.
But I’m guessing you may have some residual legitimate, concerns. We both recognize that some private organizations play influential roles in determining the nature of kids’ experience in in public schools.
For example:
1) Robert F. Kennedy School (Westborough) – The school is the most secure juvenile facility in the state. Operated by the Robert F. Kennedy Children’s Action Corps, Inc., the center was the first Massachusetts juvenile correctional facility operated by a private provider.
Fay A. Rotenberg School (Westborough) – The Rotenberg School is a secure juvenile treatment center for girls. It is operated by the Robert F. Kennedy Children’s Action Corps, Inc. Rotenberg houses most of the adjudicated females deemed to be dangerous, and it is the sole secured facility for female juvenile delinquents in Massachusetts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Department_of_Youth_Services
2) “Presently, more than 1 out of 20 Massachusetts students with disabilities are educated outside of their school districts, primarily in state-approved private special education schools and district-sponsored collaborative programs.”
Click to access 2013-10OutofDistrict.pdf
3) Massachusetts public charter schools are typically operated, under state supervision, by private non-profit organizations
4) The Massachusetts Teachers Association and Boston Teachers Union are private corporations that play a major role in determining how many public schools operate
5) Revolution Foods is a private for-profit corporation that will play a major role in determing the nature of the meals that kids in Boston will be eating at school. “A fresh start for Boston school lunches” July 23, 2017
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/07/23/fresh-start-for-boston-school-lunches/zt6N1DO2yFC5UwH2x0H1lM/story.html
You presumably don’t uniformly oppose the contributions of each and every one of those private entities. Perhaps you could clarify which you do and do not oppose and why.
Thanks.
Stephen B Ronan: Here’s another two to add to your list: Catholic and Montessori Schools are examples of non-public schools that, as far as I know, have operated well for years within the context of the much larger educational arena of public education in a democratic and secular culture. It’s a tense relationship but it has worked for a very long time.
I haven’t done a thorough study, but don’t think either of these (and probably some on your list) are interested in smearing public schools, public school teachers and unions, or public education so that their corporations/institutions and those like them can have a shot at the huge marketing opportunities that they have decided are available in the field of education today and that can systematize an increase of their own wealth.
Nor do they (that I know of) have concerted and well-funded religious and/or political ideological designs (some as only slightly-masked racism and false elitism itself) that work to undermine democracy (small d), its legacies that are in all of our interests, and its public institutions under the far more acceptable-sounding cover of “charter” and (pseudo) “public” education; nor (that I know of) do they use the lures of vouchers to hoodwink parents who hope they can do better for their children but who are, in many cases, entering their children unknowingly into a bait-and-switch situation.
I’m not going to do your homework for you on this or any other site about individual schools–that’s a tactic of a troll–get people so involved in “the weeds” and the analysis of the deckchairs, that they cannot see that the garden is going to hell, and the ship is being sunk.
What I can say is this: insofar as corporations and other entities, including religious entities, are involved covertly or overtly in the destruction and replacement of public institutions, including and especially that of education, in this or any democracy, and especially with the well-funded tactics, e.g., professional marketing and its refinement of double-speak (lies and half-truths), that have been exposed here and in other publications, they are in the business of killing the best political system that has come along in all of human history; and a study of history will show that they are, in fact, shooting themselves in the foot over the long run if not in the short.
Also, if history does anything, it changes. It seems to me that in the present situation as it is evolving, thanks to the so-called Freedom Caucus, Gates, and many other well-healed persons, private institutions (like Montessori and Catholic Schools, and some many others who are NOT so-involved, probably like some on your list) should do all they can (like the Texas Pastors) to ACTIVELY distinguish themselves from the well-funded, totally ignorant and/or mean-spirited, free-for-all that’s going on now as we speak.
I’m having some difficulty, Catherine, in following your reasoning.
Perhaps if we use the analogy of another sector, it may help me tease out your meaning.
Proceeding from the reasoning you offer, it would seem to follow that, in evaluating criminal justice reform, the near term immediate impacts on people in disadvantaged, low-income communities would be of secondary importance to you. What would be more important is assurance that nobody wealthy benefited from any criminal justice reform and that solidly public institutions be preserved, if the alternative involves some private profit.
For example, it’d be better to have fully utilized public country jails than to institute bail reform if the latter might enrich private companies that make, maintain and operate GPS monitoring systems. If folks like David Koch and Newt Gingrich favor criminal justice reform, we should reflexively strenuously oppose them. Folks like Koch and Gingrich are interested in smearing public county jails, jail guards, and jail guard unions so that corporations/institutions can have a shot at the huge marketing opportunities that they have decided are available in the field of ankle bracelets and that can by strategic investments systematize an increase of their own wealth.
Do I have that right? I certainly hope not.
I am disappointed to see the comparison made between prisons and schools. However, I think it necessary to point out that prison privatization has been an unmitigated disaster. A review by the Justice Depaetment reached that conclusion last summer and recommended phasing out private management of federal prisons (about 15% of the total number of prisoners are in private facilities). The review said the prisons were less safe, had fewer educational opportunities for inmates, and had greater unrest due to budget cuts to increase profits.
Diane: “I am disappointed to see the comparison made between prisons and schools. However, I think it necessary to point out that prison privatization has been an unmitigated disaster. ”
I suppose I could respond by saying I am saddened to see someone comparing public charities in the education sector with private for-profit prison corporations. I certainly share your skepticism about the latter.
I do hope that you are successfully able to distinguish between prison privatization by private for-profit corporations on the one hand, and involvement of 501(c) public charities in management of correctional institutions on the other.
As a reminder, prior to reform of the juvenile corrections system in Massachusetts, when youth corrections facilities were public institutions staffed by public employees, without support from private nonprofits:
“For over 100 years, Massachusetts training schools employed random beatings, food deprivation, and extreme periods of isolation to control youth in their custody. ”
http://www.cjcj.org/Education1/Massachusetts-Training-Schools.html
“Coughlin had long cultivated close relations with politicians throughout the state. Indeed, the Boston Globe reported in 1970 that ‘most of the department’s 900 employees got their jobs through political connections.’
“Yet, the scent of scandal increasingly enveloped the agency in the late 1960s, coming to a head in late 1968 and early 1969 with a series of investigations and news stories alleging atrocious conditions (physical abuse, rats and vermin, harsh use of solitary confinement and rioting) at the Institute for Juvenile Guidance in Bridgewater.”
[…]
“For Coughlin’s successor, Jerome Miller, Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services, “the final straw came late on a Sunday afternoon when he received a call from the state’s oldest and largest facility, the Lyman School, where – in a moment of anger – one of the cottage supervisors had caged two boys in a basement and driven away with the keys.
[…]
“Miller’s efforts to reform the Massachusetts training schools encountered stiff resistance from facility staff, and progress toward improving the quality (and humaneness) of care was uneven. Within two years, Miller would conclude that transforming these institutions was a mission impossible and that a more radical solution – closing the training schools – was necessary.
“Many Youth Services employees, especially those with 10 or 20 years under the old system, felt threatened by Miller’s approach,” the Boston Globe reported in 1971. “They had grown accustomed to corporal punishment, shaved heads and silence at meals – all outlawed by Miller.”
“Once Miller decided to close the training schools, his reform effort included several core components:
* Develop alternative programming. As federal funding began flowing in 1970 and 1971, the Youth Services Department started to make progress establishing a network of community-based alternative programs around the state. This work involved three primary tasks:
“1. Building a new finance and accounting system that would allow the Department to contract with private programs and facilities. Prior to Miller’s arrival the state had no mechanism for setting daily rates or per diem payments to private facility operators and service providers, no system for monitoring performance of these provider agencies, and no system in place to process and pay invoices in a timely manner.
[…]
2. […]
“After initially proposing to establish state-run correctional halfway houses for youth, Miller ultimately funded a network of privately operated group homes across the state, modeled more on the facilities that housed foster kids in child welfare than on the halfway houses used in adult corrections.”
Click to access Closing%20Massachusetts%20Training%20Schools%20(AECF;%20May%202014).pdf
The Robert F. Kennedy Action Corps, a 501(c)(3) public charity, operates the most secure juvenile facilities in the state.
Stephen B Ronan writes: “What would be more important is assurance that nobody wealthy benefited from any criminal justice reform and that solidly public institutions be preserved, if the alternative involves some private profit.”
To answer your question, no, you don’t have that right. You’ve presented a set of false either/or choices: Either bad public institutions OR good alternatives involving private profit. Bad private or public institutions can be corrected. But the clear effects of self-serving capitalistic principles encroaching on public-democratic principles and their services via corrupt public servants is evident in places like Flint Michigan and their water debacle.
Also, in your example, you don’t consider the question of political foundations. In your example of prisons, private corporations whose interests are, at least in part, financial profit, have an overt interest in maintaining crime and in keeping a stream of criminals coming to maintain their related streams of funding. Whereas prisons founded on the principles of democracy have a stake in actually lessening the need for prisons in a culture.
Education is quite different of course. Though having split foundations matters similarly–(1) serving the public interest (providing excellent education for all) and (2) serving corporate/profit interests sets up a conflict of interests that too-easily tips towards profit-making rather than towards excellent education for all.
But to your tacit implication: I am a capitalist at heart; but predatory capitalism? No; and not where capitalism becomes the ONLY WAY TO THINK about all human transactions; and especially not when people like the Koch’s and Betsy use their good fortune to prey on the weak, to purchase political power for themselves and away from those who live in a democracy, and to destroy the hard-won political foundations that serve all of us. But no: I don’t hate rich people, though I don’t have much respect for mean spirited power mongers who think their increased wealth equates to their increased wisdom.
While concurring with your wariness about excessive private corporate control of activities properly in the public sector, I fear that if you have clearly articulated here a rationale for your stance against public charter schools operated by nonprofit organizations under close government control, I haven’t yet been able to grasp it. I still think it might be helpful if you were to apply your analysis to some of the specific examples of private actors that I cited as playing an influential role in our public education system, differentiating which should or should not be supported in what manner and why.
Let’s just take two, for starters: (1) the public charities that operate public charter schools in Massachusetts consistent with their obligations under 501(c)(3) of the IRS code; and (2) the private corporations that represent teachers in bargaining with/against public officials and that are classified as 501(c)(5) organizations by the IRS https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopicj03.pdf
I provide no automatic reflexive support to either unions or charter schools.
In respect to charter schools nation-wide, as I’ve said recently on this blog: “I tend not to be impressed by the wisdom of anyone making blanket statements about charter schools. And try to assiduously avoid doing so myself. They are enormously diverse; in various aspects some are superb, others dismal, most in between, and they commonly have a mix of more and less laudable aspects. Kinda like district schools.”
As for unions… in the past I’ve initiated a farm animal welfare campaign that was supported by one of my heroes, Cesar Chavez, and the Farm Workers Union. And I assisted their efforts, in small ways, in the grape boycott. I was for quite a few years a member of AFSCME and appreciated what it contributed to working conditions at the locations where I worked. I’m particularly a fan of SEIU here in Massachusetts.
But I find much legitimate in the concerns expressed in this article: “The Trouble with Public Sector Unions” (https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-trouble-with-public-sector-unions). I would encourage you and others here to read that.
Here in Massachusetts in the current era, I think the public charities operating public charter schools are for the most part doing a fine job. And I’m unenthusiastic about the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which has a recent habit of intentionally deceiving voters (I would be willing to provide concrete examples, if you haven’t seen me post them here previously). But I don’t mean to imply their interests are necessarily at odds. There are some top notch unionized charter schools here.
I would hopes that your views give a very high, though not exclusive, priority, to the impacts on students and their families. I would be glad to understand those views better. I certainly share your aversion to predatory capitalism, but am mystified as to why that would logically impel opposition to any and all public charter schools here in the Commonwealth of MA.
Stephen B Ronan I’ll take your question seriously. You write: “. . . if you have clearly articulated here a rationale for your stance against public charter schools operated by nonprofit organizations under close government control, I haven’t yet been able to grasp it.” Four issues come to mind:
The first problem is, again, double-speak: Are they really public? are they really non-profit? and are they really under “close government control?” And do “we” need to define those terms to the enth degree in order to prevent nefarious forces from double-speaking them to death, over and over again, like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, to make our heads spin and to fit their shadow intentions? (This is not my paranoia speaking but a concrete problem we are experiencing daily–everywhere.)
The second problem is related to the above: when nefarious people take over such corporations, whatever the wording of the mission statement, objectives, and goals, who is going to play police? It makes schools once-removed and remote from good government policy, developed over years, that is already rooted in democratic principles and manifests in on-site practices; and it turns that government and its legitimate and reasonable regulations (insofar that it has them) into a suspicious policing organization trying to play whack-a-mole for mean-spirited “non-profit” organizations. Also, if all of education in a culture were under such “management,” what choice would parents have but to go to another corporate-run organization?
Third, though nothing is NECESSARILY wrong with those things, with the current shift in principles we have talked about here again and again, those older non-profits who are already okay with their public-education context, and who fall too-easily into that relatively new stream of thought (like Montessori and the Catholic Schools) must share in the suspicion that comes with those who are riding on that shift. On the surface, they seem the same; but at the foundational level, they are not.
It’s from that whole-cloth foundational shift that public education, by OUR definition of it, has become anathema to the overreaching business model and so presents unfair competition to schools built REALLY on that model and NOT REALLY on the outline you present above. That’s why I said those non-profits who do not participate in that shift have found themselves in an untenable position of defending their own principles while trying to peal off the dirt of those who, though they may LOOK alike on the surface (the deck chairs on the Titanic are similar), are really about sinking the ship in the long run (democracy and its own “chairs”: public schools and its education system). They really do need to separate themselves from the double-speaking scum and clearly articulate their differences.
The tension at the foundational level remains, however, because ALL children has still become SOME children at the behest of the separation.
The fourth issue is curriculum. In a democratic-educational environment, and though highly tension-filled and contested, students generally can ask about anything. Whereas, in a corporate-run or authoritarian environment, certain limitations will apply. At the very basic level, the circle of power (of the questioning spirit) has become stopped–at the top. The potential trade-off here is that schools too-easily move from (a) a place for students to be open to the universe of learning (most correlate and evident in the First Amendment) to (b) a place where curricula avoids “certain” questions and, at worst, a place for blatant propaganda to occur. (This is why racists love private schools, regardless of what they say.)
Besides the same problems above with split foundations (money or service?), and besides the inherent imposition of education for “SOME” in place of education for “ALL” that comes with separate educational institutions, the foundations of democratic curricula are the tree that democracies grow on. Close it at the top, and you close off the creative power that resides in a democratic culture.
My guess is that most here in the US are yet to understand the massive shift that’s been happening TO education in the United States in the last 30-50 years here (think ALEC, Betsy, and Koch, but more) and continue to judge newly-engaged “private schools” by old thinking–by those schools and non-profit entities who have been around a good while and, most notably, who really want to provide a good education from WITHIN a democratic environment, and who don’t desire to destroy what is **legitimately public about democracy and, thus, democracy itself. But now, things are different.**
I’ll read the rest of your note later, but this is already too long and I need to go back to work now.
Stephen B Ronan Diane herself has written here substantially the same as you have about the existence of charters. They’re not all bad. And my most recent reply to you (though brief considering the issue) clarifies pretty much the same–it’s not a blank-slate one-horse ideological view.
Correct me if I am wrong here, Diane, but my view of what’s going on here is BOTH a legitimate critique of what’s actually wrong with public education and how it has evolved over time (evidenced in Diane’s critique of both democratic and republican administrations’ education policies); AND a more crisis-oriented critique of those larger multi-dimensional predatory movements that are occurring now. those movements have a complex history (most notably) beginning with Brown vs Board of Education in 1954(?) and the civil rights legislation in the 60’s. Johnson said that, with his signature of that legislation, he’d lose the south for the Democratic party, and he did. Racism is not the whole picture, but it has been a large part of the metastatic movements of capitalistic and market mentality, and a contempt for all-things-democratic, that has saturated much our thinking since that time.
I think perhaps the point is to start by both relating and distinguishing THEN from NOW.
CBK,
Well said!
I am not comparing exit numbers between charters and public schools.
I am comparing results between high performing charter schools who you keep insisting get 100% passing rates “honestly” and the 99% other mediocre charters like yours who have been aware of those results for many years and given every opportunity to match them and have failed.
You can’t have it both ways, John. If you don’t achieve 100% passing rates you should turn your school over to someone who can. Step down. Get a job in PR instead of ineptly running a school when there are so many superior charter operators out there who would fire you in a minute if you ran their school. Get out for the sake of the kids.
I’m calling your bluff.
The problem with complicit charter operators like you is that you believe that if you promote the rich and powerful charters enough, they’ll ignore how much of a failure you are because of their gratitude. You think if you remain quiet so that the corrupt people can continue their lies that they will go after only public schools and you can keep your little mediocre charter and pay yourself whatever you want.
You are smug in your certainty that if you keep quiet, you can continue to do as you please. There have been others in history who have been just like you. Complicit.
NYC parent,
You like to put words in my mouth, but I’ve been unequivocal that one can’t look at percentage numbers without look at attrition. IMO, 100% passing with 50% attrition is 50% passing, period.
I also don’t believe I’ve ever said anything positive about the “rich and powerful” charter network you’re so focused on. I’ve sometimes questioned whether negative things about them are accurate, but that is hardly the same thing.
Stephen B Ronan,
I noticed your intentionally didn’t address the fact that the charter school you claim is excellent – City on a Hill — only managed a graduating class of 50 this year, while their 9th grade class had 111 students. Apparently, that class of 50 is made up of 18, 19 and 20 year olds — the older kids having been retained. Where are all the others?
Given that the charter has been in operation for far more than 4 years, you are absolutely lying by pretending that any “retention” policy is the reason for having only 50 kids graduating. Once the school has been in operation long enough so that any “retained” students would simply be added to the class moving up, all classes should have the same number of students.
By the way, the charters that “retain” the highest numbers of students are those that start in Kindergarten. So your suggestion that it’s the fault of the public school education that your City on a Hill somehow “retains” so many kids that they don’t even show up on the books as anywhere in the school is truly abhorrent.
You don’t get to blame the public school teachers for the fact that the worst “retainers” of students are the highest performing charter schools that begin in Kindergarten, won’t accept kids with special needs, AND claim that all the missing kids are “retained” even though it is mathematically impossible for a school to supposedly be “retaining” all the missing kids and still have tiny graduating classes forever!
If I saw a modicum of honesty from charter operators I would support them – as I did before I started hearing lies from charter CEOs I had assumed were people to admire. You throw out meaningless statistics and don’t explain how any charter can graduate 50 kids if it has been “retaining” students for a dozen years. You can’t explain it by any way except racism: “I’m sure those non-white parents who chose a top performing charter school just changed their minds and decided a crappy school was much better”.
I notice that you racist charter promoters don’t have the chutzpah to do the same when it comes to BASIS Charter School where so many of the missing students are white. You don’t criminalize the missing white kids by saying that they were violent or make some of the nastiest racist slurs by claiming that white parents just don’t like top performing schools for their kids so “choose” to leave. You acknowledge that BASIS is only for top performing kids, period.
Unfortunately for you, it’s illegal for charters in other states to only be for top performing kids and drum the others out as BASIS does in other states. So instead of telling those charters to stop doing it, you make all kinds of nasty racist implications to excuse it. If you had an ounce of integrity you’d stop it instead of attacking those who call it out.
NYC public school parent: “Where are all the others?”
In respect to the data most recently available at the time of Jazzman’s posting, I addressed the range of outcomes you are inquiring about in the dialog that I referred you to. I additionally extracted such information in this comment:
https://dianeravitch.net/2017/07/24/jersey-jazzman-the-secrets-of-successful-charter-schools-extra-money-and-shedding-students/#comment-2708925
in a thread in which you actively participated…
John,
I am “focused” on the charter school chain that says the nastiest and most racist things about the many violent kindergarten children in their schools because I believe it is a blatant lie. And it astonishes me to see people like you saying it “might” be true and who are you to question it. Even when you see suspension rates of 20% or 25% in a charter that only serves the very youngest students.
It’s especially rich to hear you profess ignorance of that when you INSIST that the NAACP is asking for charter transparency and accountability because they would sacrifice their own children to do the bidding of the teachers’ union.
When a white woman goes on national television and makes speeches saying she has lots of violent 5 year olds who just happen to be African-American and not white, you are happy to give her the benefit of the doubt because you just don’t know if that is true.
But when it comes to the motives of non-white members of the NAACP, you have no question about their motives. They’d sell out their own kids for a union donation.
I’m sorry but your racism is evident.
Stephen B Ronan,
I looked at that thread and you ignored my question.
I went to the link for City on a Hill and I posted that there were 111 students in 9th grade and only 50 in 12th which is impossible no matter how many students are retained because the school has been in existence a long time. (It would be possible if it had only been around for 4 or 5 years where the supposedly “retained” students were clustered in younger grades.
There is no way to explain why only 50 students graduates except to acknowledge that a lot of students are missing and pretending they all chose to go to schools with worse academic results is nonsense.
And the very reason that the NAACP wants accountability and transparency is that charters fight so that we will never actually know what happened to so many kids so charters can claim that their parents all voluntarily pulled them from a top-performing school and count on racists to believe them because those parents aren’t white.
Catherine Blanche King,
I apologize for distracting from the excellent points you made about privatization of public services and democracy that neither John nor Stephen B Ronan want to address.
They are deliberately obtuse when it comes to privatization. We all know that you can’t privatize some public services in which the costs are not the same for each person. That’s why even the Republicans haven’t been able to convince the senior citizens of America that if they get their voucher and have the freedom to choose a “charter” insurance company that only has to insure the senior citizens it wants to insure life will be so much better for them then having Medicare. And Americans are starting to realize even now that the Trump/Ryan health care “reform” in which the “free market” rewards the most unethical insurance companies is not a solution at all even if some very healthy Americans would “choose” it and be perfectly content.
It’s interesting that the charter folks always point to public libraries as a way that you can have non-profits offering government services. But the cost of borrowing a book is the same no matter who the “customer” is.
The cost of education or health care is not the same no matter who the customer is. And that allows the most unethical operators to flourish while those who are complicit look the other way and attack critics of unethical operators for daring to suggest that after 10 or 15 years where unethical charters have run rampant, the NAACP is wrong to say “Enough”.
Pro-charter folks don’t really care if charters are racist or exclude kids with disabilities or promote a white power agenda. it’s all about the market and as long as some parents “choose” the racist and white power school, then they should be allowed to choose it. No regulation necessary for the charter folks.
NYC public school parent The note from John is where I first heard the public libraries argument.
I guess it’s a good thing to see them grabbing at such straws–not to mix metaphors, but the focus on public libraries is just another red herring. So many differences between public libraries and public schools. And they are like Mitch McConnell with “Obamacare” (the AFA)–they never give up but just keep “Jim Crowing” the argument–changing form and concept, but the same thing bubbling up again and again.
Yes, the fact that John uses that public library analogy tells you how dishonest he is.
John’s entire argument is that the cost of educating a child is no different than the cost of having a patron borrow a book. In fact, the cost of educating a child correlates far more closely to the cost of offering health care where some children will cost more and some cost less for all kinds of reasons. I find it hard to believe that John is really so ignorant to promote the notion that every child costs the same to teach just like it costs the same for a public library to let them check out a book. What poppycock — and whether they are just liars or so ignorant as to not understand the basic economics of public services, they have no business being in charge of educating children.
Unless the NAACP is willing to fight to make their grievances known, they will be ignored the same way teachers and public schools continue to be ignored. The complaints cited in the report are the same ones repeatedly discussed on this blog for years. There is nothing new in the NAACP’s findings; we just have to have the will to address them. Their most significant finding is that no charter can substitute for a well funded and resourced public school.
The main difficulty today is our plutocracy intends to destroy public education and replace it with privatization. No amount of evidence seems to make an iota of difference. Legislators are beholden to the charter lobby to ensure that the public funds keep flowing into private pockets. The only way to threaten these self serving interests is to organize and campaign against charter supporting legislators. Flip some districts; threaten their ticket to the gravy train, and we may start to see some willingness to make change.
“Unless the NAACP is willing to fight to make their grievances known, they will be ignored the same way teachers and public schools continue to be ignored. The complaints cited in the report are the same ones repeatedly discussed on this blog for years.”
On our blog, yes, but the unions which represent a large chunk of the nation’s teachers have failed to make/ consistently stand behind such a strong & unified position. I applaud their anti-overtesting position re: tradl pubschs, but they have never been strong & unified against the school choice movement, despite its loud anti-union message.
What I mean to say is, this NAACP stand is getting coverage & national notice, & promises to put a dent in the ed-reformers’ disingenuous civil-rts faux rationale. Were AFT & NEA to join NAACP (& the other dozen+ civil-rts orgs that called for a charter moratorium months before the NAACP), the message will be that much harder to ignore.
To me, this issue looks like a good plank to add to the platform Dems need to build for 2018 & 2020 elections– more progressive, more working/ middle-class-oriented, more jobs-oriented– in order to get former tradl-Dem voters back under the tent. Neoliberalism is what moved our party to the right & caused it to be indistinguishable from centrist-Republican. Tho neoliberalism has tried to claim the mantle of civil rts, it has succeeded only in encouraging political correctness while championing token rights for splinter minority groups, meanwhile losing the big battles to gerrymandering and voter suppression and… UNIONS!
Sorry I meant losing the big battles in SUPPORTING unions!
If unions, parent groups as well as social justice groups were to unite, they would be able to get a lot more attention. Perhaps the media would be unable to ignore them, and it would be an opportunity to shed some light on the war on public education and the inequities and problems in charters.
retired teacher: I like the way you think! NAACP & other civil-rights groups, plus AFT & NEA, plus NPE & BATS, plus parent groups like SaveOurSchoolsNJ & groups in LI & Upper Hudson (& there must be more nationally): that would be a bloc w/some political power!
They’ll do to the NAACP & its report what they did to John Olivera and his report about one year ago They would address one molecule of the substance of the evidence and testimony presented, but go on a paranoid rant about being persecuted by defenders a failed status quo that puts adult interests ahead of children’s interests.
To refresh the memory, here’s John Oliver:
(In conversation, I’ve used/stolen so many of his lines that I should pay Oliver royalties — “Just as with opening of more and more charter schools, the idea that the quality of pizza increases with the number of pizzerias that open has been definitively refuted by the two words ‘PAPA JOHN’S’.”)
That Last Week Tonight episode — seen it a hundred times — never gets old.
They really will have trouble regulating “for profit” charters, though. You can ban for profit management companies and still have a charter that is 90% for-profit.
It depends. If it’s a non profit management company but they divvy up slices of the school to 30 different sub-contractors “non profit” doesn’t mean anything.
Chiara Sounds like the Mitch McConnell School of Management by Manipulation–of the law and its wording; aka: double-ospeak. Main rule: If if it doesn’t work for your ideology, change the language to fit it (your ideology).
Well, it’s complicated. A lot of people say this “I support non profit charters”. What does that mean? The CMO can’t be for-profit? Can the nonprofit CMO outsource every operation to for profit subcontractors?
There’s a whole charter industry in Ohio now- financial firms, law firms, property management- they do the work public employees do for public schools.
Most of them go directly from government into contracting.
Chiara,
In NY, charters have to be not-for-profit (501c3) and are prohibited from contracting with for-profit operators. Wish it were that way country-wide.
There are for-profit charters that were grandfathered on in NY
Eva of Success Academy is paid more than $500,000 plus bonuses; Deborah Kenney of a Harlem Village Academy, the same
Yes, I believe there are 8 of them. Definitely the exception to the rule.
Also, NJEA Executive Director made $550k last year.
John,
What are you paid to shill on my blog?
I’m not paid by anyone.
There are only so many shills and trolls I can cope with at the same time.
Diane,
Apparently what you can’t cope with is a difference of opinion. Nobody pays me related to education or policy and I in fact donate quite a bit of my own money.
Was my answer factually correct?
Union leaders are paid by members’ dues, not by Wall Street.
Peter “Curmudgucation” Greene said (to the best of my memory: “Non-profit charters are just for-profit charters with a better and more deceptive money-laundering system.”
That is why taxpayers should be entitled to accounting transparency. An independent auditor should be checking the books as they do in public schools.
Chiara, are you saying that if there were a ban on for-profit charters as well as on for-profit charter mgt cos., we would still find ourselves trying to monitor expenses of various for-profit subcontractors? Not sure I understand. Let’s imagine we also have financial transparency (another NAACP demand)– still a problem? Why couldn’t we have something similar to public works dept in my town: biggest expenses (snow & leaf removal) handled by town vehicles, medium expenses (bulk waste & recycling) competitively bid to town, smaller but regular services (wkly gbg disposal) chosen by citizens from a list of private cos. which meet town stds? Note: NAACP position mandates charters to be approved/ overseen by local school districts.
Here’s something I’ve always wondered. I
f people who work for public schools are “self interested” because they get paid, if I accept that, then people who work for charter schools also must be “self interested”, correct?
Unless people who work for charter schools are just inherently better human beings, for some mysterious reason that only ed reformers can discern.
If I accept one don’t I have to accept the other? If you approach the world based on looking at who is “self interested” and who is not, and then dismissing the views of the “self interested” group, then BOTH sets of employees have to be self interested, right?
I can tell you charters in Ohio definitely look out for their own interests, judging by the lobbying efforts. So why are public schools the only schools that have been determined to have impure motives?
That is the propaganda the union bashing charter supporters want people to believe. CEOs of charters must be very self interested as many make between $200,000 and $400,000.
Good points Chiara, retired teacher, & CBK. Chiara brings up a philosophical point argued down thro the ages– & yet, so relevant in the current era. We ignore self-interest at our peril when formulating laws. Tax laws in particular are formulated w/ the understanding that folks will pay only what the law demands; both household & corporate budgets will pay as little as reqd by law.
But the overall thrust of the law– whether it operates for the good of all, or only for those w/most $/power, engages the larger vision of voters in terms of the nature of the society they want to live in.
Chiara, the ed-reformers’ mantra that [union] pubsch teachers are self-interested vs [lower-pd] charter-school teachers is purely a play to generate class-hatred from middle/ working-class folk who are struggling financially & want to be told that state-certified teachers– despite their advanced degrees/ student loans/ reqts for summer PD to keep certs current– are perpetrating a scam on the public as evidenced by school taxes such folks can barely afford as their own job wages lose purchasing power or disappear. It’s a grand deflection from attention to what voters should be asking their govt reps, i.e., what have you done for me lately? How come the best job I can find doesn’t cover the cost of decent pibliced for my kids?
And I meant to say, too: the plague of Friedmanism/ unfettered-capitalism concepts– aided & abetted by economists’/ edumetricians’ measurements– that have swamped centuries of liberal/ philosophical thought/ research since 1980 are also big part of this nefarious interpretation of ‘self-interest’.
The concept implies that self-interest will work at all levels of society, but in its implementation [obviously], $/power quickly trickles up. Thus those w/less $/power are left to squabble over the crumbs, exercising ‘self-interest’ [meaningless at that point]. It seems we will have to live thro the gilded age once again, until economic upheaval is so severe that another New Deal is in the offing.
Chiara Yes–both work under self-interest, but there’s more to it. There is the question: What is the horizon of your (or others’) self interest? Most teachers that I know (I taught in a teacher education masters program for four+ years) identified themselves as generally loving the art of teaching and of teaching the children in their chosen age-group/range, and of “making a difference” by doing something good in the world. So when they teach they are in fact serving their self-interest, which is to be involved in teaching. If they make a salary, then their self-interest is fortunately aligned with their monetary livelihood, but the money is not the self-interest driver.
Those who think money is the only legitimate object of self-interest are those who understand nothing about human beings, human development, or the complexity of human motivations.
Your last sentence is exquisitely wonderful, Catherine!
Duane’s right on this one, but please excuse my envy. I would have liked to written that.
Looks like some public school students somehow got past security and into the US Dept of Ed today for summer reading.
They better step up security. They’ll want to keep the “dead end” public school kids out of the hallowed halls of learning there in DC.
I myself wouldn’t send a public school student in there. They’re likely to hear that they’re headed straight to prison, coming out of the dreaded “government schools” and all.
Charter schools are the lucrative profit-making part of the “education reform/choice/voucher” movement that has from its very beginnings has been rooted in racism. But the movement has always had resegregation of America’s schools as its core agenda.
Multiple 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 ACLU has called for a complete freeze on the formation of any more charter schools because of the racism in charter schools.
The deceptive call for “choice” and 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.”
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. So, 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. These aren’t onerous burdens on charter schools; these are only common sense requirements to assure taxpayers that their money is being properly and effectively spent to educate children and isn’t simply ending up in private pockets or on the bottom line of hedge funds.
These aren’t “burdensome” requirements for charter schools — they are simply common sense safeguards that public tax money is actually being used to maximum effect to teach our nation’s children.
The result of full, detailed financial reporting will cause most charter school operators to fade away because once what they’re doing with public money comes to light, the game is over.
NO PUBLIC TAX MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.
“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.”
I would argue that charters don’t get serious scrutiny even then. Unless the definition of “serious scrutiny” is checking whether the students who are allowed to remain in the charter score high on standardized tests.
Anything that is done to get high percentages of kids passing — suspending them, having got to go lists, discouraging them from enrolling in the first place due to discriminatory practices that mean the most vulnerable students won’t enroll — is not any of the concern of the oversight agencies even when they are up for renewals.
The actions of the SUNY Charter Institute with regards to charters with high suspension rates of non-white 5 and 6 year olds — awarding them with early renewals years before they should have — demonstrates how little oversight charters have, period.
There is something extremely racist when a lot of white people work so very hard to come up with cockamamie excuses for why so many African-American students are suspended or disappear or get flunked over and over again until they are years over age in their charter school classroom.
I question the motives of those that believe minority children should attend a charter with “teaching” temps” while white students in the leafy suburbs get a public school with legitimately trained teachers. It strikes me as another example of separate and unequal.
While I agree w/your post 100% [parts of which you have posted many times– à la D Swacker on Deming 😉 ], I feel you give too little weight to the other political forces at play here– besides racism, I mean. Many others have jumped onto this bandwagon. The biggest group would be Koch/ Walton et al billionaire pressure groups who just want to see public education deleted from US overhead so it can compete w/low-pd global labor. Next would be Gates/ Jobs-widow/ Zuckerberg-Chan, who want to de-bricks&mortar US ed so everybody has to buy their sw/hw products. Then there’s the libertarian-purist end of TP spectrum (most visibly represented by Rand Paul), who want to eliminate govt from most aspects of public life. & finally, the Christian evangelists who want public $ to teach religious agenda: I include them only because there are black religious denominations which feel the same way.
Noel Wilson is who I reference a lot, not Deming, but I was reading and using Deming and JIT in the early 80s before he became more popular here in the Us.
Oops, right, I meant Wilson…
From the Report:
“The conclusion of this set of hearings may have been best summed up by Chris Ungar, Past President, of the California School Boards Association and Former Special Education Director in the San Luis Obispo County Office of Education:
“Can charter schools be part of the solution? Absolutely. But that solution must be intentional, well-planned growth that takes into account the health and sustainability of the entire public education system, including the so-called traditional public schools that educate 90% of our country’s students.”
Hard to argue with that.
Reform charters: Here’s an idea. Why don’t we 1) neuter(or de-list) their damn snake-oil businesses (especially those that cannot even meet the accountability standard set by their own cheerleaders and/or do even worse than underperforming public schools); 2) relocate their buildings, and 3) re-classify them as properties of pre-existing public schools (especially in a poor district)?
John,
The benefit to identifying yourself is owning what you write. I have enjoyed coming out of the anonyminity closet. It is liberating.
anonymity
Abigail Shure,
We should be able to discuss issues without the desire to find out more about each other personally, don’t you think? Yes, being anonymous means people question my motives and make baseless allegations, but I meant what I said about being primarily interested in my school’s best interests, not my own. When people make those allegations, it just says to me that they don’t believe it would be possible for someone to hold my opinions and not be a paid shill. Their loss, not mine.
It’s not just that John has disagreeable opinions stated in anonymity; it’s that he changes the subject whenever someone refutes his argument. He never answers questions directly. It’s maddening. Add to that his smarmy way of claiming to respect teachers while attacking our unions and claiming to respect black people while running a segregationist charter scam, and you wind up with a situation in which John needs to do more to justify his existence here in the living room that is not his. State your full name, army of darkness rank, and serial number, John.
LeftCoastTeacher,
If everyone here wants to believe or pretend to believe that the AFT/NEA backing for the NAACP is not part of this, and that the 700,000+ black families with children in charters aren’t quite angry about this position, which seems to have been taken in spite of public input, that’s their right.
But, it’s inappropriate to turn this into a discussion about the motives of someone who dares bring up the dissenting opinion. Your baseless allegations about a “segregationist charter scam” are offensive to me and should be offensive to anyone wanting to discuss the topic on the merits. Ad hominem attacks are inappropriate.
While we’re at it, I see that you’re anonymous too, yet you ask me to identify myself. Why the double standard? I’d be crazy to provide my name given the personal animosity you and others have shown based on differing opinions.
John,
You insult the NAACP by saying they were bought by the NEA and AFT.
If they wanted to sell out, the big money is with the billionaires, not the unions.
I am shocked you would say something so vile about the NAACP. Unlike your friends on Wall Street, the NAACP held hearings and listened to black parents.
When did Gates, Broad, and Walton hold hearings? When did DFER hold hearings?
When I left the rightwing circles that you now defend, I was accused of being a shill for the unions. Your allies couldn’t believe that anyone could have a principled reason for opposing privatization.
Now you insult and demean the NAACP for the same reason.
You should hang your head in shame.
John,
You will apologize for slandering the NAACP or you are not welcome.
“You will apologize for slandering the NAACP or you are not welcome.”
To allow virulent personal insults to be incessantly delivered by one of your anonymous fans here, while banning someone who has the temerity to suggest that a private nonprofit with a brilliant history might at some moment in time be excessively influenced by one or more private corporations (in this case the teachers unions) would be difficult to understand as consistent adherence to a laudable principle.
When I examine the NAACP’s arguments on the merits, I find them excellent in some respects, inadequate in others. As does John.
I assume that you would have a similarly mixed, or perhaps entirely contemptuous, assessment of the various arguments on the same subject that have been advanced over the years by the National Urban League.
“Hugh Price, president of the National Urban League, suggested in 1999 that we ‘charterize’ all urban schools.”
https://www.aft.org/ae/winter2014-2015/kahlenberg_potter
May I give you a hand, help you dismount from that high horse you’re on, remind you of stuff you’ve written here like this?
https://dianeravitch.net/2014/09/27/national-urban-league-with-lots-of-gates-supports-common-core/
Stephen,
Let me explain.
I was on the right for many years. If you are a luminary on the right you collect big bucks. Supporting charters opens doors to foundations and corporations.
The NAACP needs money to survive. It would be very easy for them to collect millions from zwalton, Gates, Broad and other foundations if they were pro-charter. The NEA and AFT together cannot match Walton OR Gates OR Broad or Arnold. The unions don’t have billions. They donate to civil rights groups, but they do not have the vast resources of the billionaires.
It is vile and insulting to say the NAACP sold out to the unions. If they wanted to sell their policies, they would be bought by the billionaires.
I am very sensitive on this point since the same charter hacks accused me of changing sides to get union money. False, insulting, and absurd, since I was on the rightwing gravy train and abandoned it.
John claims: “the 700,000+ black families with children in charters aren’t quite angry about this position…”
Why would they be angry that the NAACP is calling for accountability and transparency? The fact that a handful of people who work in the school reform business are willing to sign a letter says nothing about whether parents in charters think that having transparency and transparency is a bad idea.
It’s so condescending that you believe that parents who choose charter schools then want to make sure the school can keep all their practices top secret. And I challenge you come up with a large group of charter school parents who insist that their charter should have the right to conduct their business secretly because they shouldn’t have to be subject to transparency or any accountability beyond “the kids that are allowed to remain do okay”.
You can choose a charter and still believe in accountability and transparency. In fact, that’s what all parents want. Only the administrators and their billionaire boards want to hide their practices. As you do.
Respect and apology for the NAACP on the Honor Roll? … Crickets…
What a card. The most shocking and inappropriate comment that puts a commenter into the coffin. The name on the casket says, John Dough. R.I.P.
Didn’t the NAACP support charters and privatization just a few years ago, when the frenzy of teacher hate was at its pinnacle?
Bed. Made. Lie.
The NAACP Resolution calling for a moratorium on charter authorizations still stands.
https://cloakinginequity.com/2017/07/30/did-naacp-roll-back-call-for-charter-moratorium/amp/
Stephen,
No space on this blog for Dr. Perry.
Ah, OK, I thought, in her dialog with Roland Martin, Alice Huffman’s apparent frustration (7:00) at the possibility of having a charter school nearby that is oversubscribed was particularly unexpected and interesting.
But, in any event, as a substitute, how’s this: Randi Weingarten three days ago talking about the NAACP report:
http://news.wgbh.org/2017/07/28/bpr-0728-full-show-post
Randi is introduced at 34:00
But, whatever you do, don’t let Gary or JJ hear this statement by Randi at 42:00
“But Margaret, you’re talking to the head of the AFT. I run a charter school in New York that had a 100% graduation rate.”
Ai-ai-Yi.
We know that any charter school claiming a 100% graduation rate is juking the stats, whether public or charter.
It was particularly remarkable to me that the NAACP didn’t carefully review the research on the impacts that charter schools seem to have on public district schools in the same locale.
Adding to the growing body of research that suggest that the impacts are most often benign, this study: “In Pursuit of the Common Good: The Spillover Effects of Charter Schools on Public School Students in New York City”, Sarah A. Cordes, Temple University
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxrKdaoARx08Y19ZdEF5emhxbTQ/view
Cordes writes: “The implications of this research for policy are twofold. First, charter schools appear to have small positive effects, or at the very least, no significant negative effects on nearby TPS student performance. This suggests that rather than capping the number of charter schools, it may be beneficial (and certainly not harmful) to allow for further expansion in NYC at the margin. Second, results show that co-location may actually be a good policy for both charter and public schools in NYC. While charter schools benefit from the relationship financially, public school students appear to benefit from improved performance and higher PPE. ”
[ PPE = per pupil expenditure ]