The State University of New York charter committee, which contains no educators, made a few tweaks to its plan to lower standards for new charter teachers and is forging ahead. Charter schools in New York have high teacher attrition and constant need to hire new teachers. The best way to help them is to lower standards for new teachers. Charter teachers with a fast-track license will not be qualified to teach in real public schools.
Whereas real teachers need to pass three tests to become certified, charter teachers will have to pass only one test.
When the Regents dropped the number of tests required for new teachers from four to three, “reformers” howled that the Regents were lowering standards. Now that charter teachers need pass only one test, the howls are not heard at all.
This means that students in charter schools will not have fully qualified teachers. It means that the charters are self-certifying their own teachers. Above all, it is a slap in the face to the teacher education programs at SUNY, which prepare teachers to meet all requirements to be professionals.
But charters in New York have a special status due to their relationship with Governor Andrew Cuomo. His campaign donors from the financial industry want more charters and don’t believe teachers need any professional education. Cuomo appoints all the members of the SUNY charter committee. The Board of Regents, supposedly the ultimate education authority in the state, cannot override decisions made by the businessmen and lawyers on the SUNY charter committee.
A sad state of affairs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I know I sound like a broken record but…
Rather than discuss whether a charter-trained teacher can be a decent teacher, the focus of criticism should be on the SUNY Charter Institute themselves.
They are now the sole overseer of a state charter school system that is huge and dispersed. In NYC alone, the SUNY Charter Institute is the sole oversight agency for a system that is twice as large the the entire Boston Public school system. And the SUNY Charter institute staff must also oversee the charters all over the state that teach thousands more students. One organization is claiming it can do all the oversight necessary when charters train their own teachers and there are complaints that the ill-trained teachers are abusing and otherwise harming children.
So how has the SUNY Charter Institute overseen charters in the past? They have received myriad of complaints — where are the dozens of investigations they have undertaken to address issues with charters?
There are none. SUNY has done nothing. Their entire “oversight” is: did the children in 3rd grade and above get good scores on exams. If so, we don’t care how many left, how many were suspended, how many parents have come to us complaining, how many empty seats, how high the attrition rate is, how violent the charter CEO claims the 5 year olds in her school are. We are done with oversight. Carry on.
Someone needs to ask the SUNY Charter Institute whether their sole criteria for whether a charter is doing a good job will continue to be ONLY about the kids who reach 3rd grade and will they continue to look the other way at unethical practices that get rid of kids before 3rd grade? Have they even once done a proper investigation in response to parent complaints?
The SUNY Charter Institute has abandoned its oversight mission. They are now a PR firm for charters. And why is the PR firm for charters making any decisions about how teachers should be trained?
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Why School Choice is the Last Thing America Needs to Solve Its Huge Racial Wealth Gap | Alternet https://www.alternet.org/racial-wealth-gap-housing-segregation
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Charter school critics: Charter schools were meant to experiment with different approaches to education!
Charter school: experiments with a different approach to education
Charter school critics: No, not like that!
The fact is that there is no conclusive evidence proving it makes any difference whether teachers are prepared traditionally or alternatively. Charters should be free to pursue this, regardless what the glut of education schools and the unions representing public school teachers have to say on the matter. After all, the state’s private schools, from the elites like Dalton and Calhoun to the privates that districts pay to take the most challenging cases off their hands, don’t require graduate education coursework or state certification, and everyone has been mum about it for decades.
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How about innovating with unlicensed surgeons?
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Are there numerous peer-reviewed studies showing no difference between unlicensed and licensed surgeons? Is there a network of elite high-performing hospitals that get fantastic results with a mix of licensed and unlicensed surgeons? Can virtually anyone with a college degree become a surgeon? Or is maybe the surgery analogy not a great one . . .
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Unlike education, frauds in hospitals would be spotted, fined, jailed
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What network of schools gets “fantastic results” with a mix of teachers? First, define “fantastic results” (test scores, of course?). Second, demonstrate that those high test scores are a result of anything other than selectivity and test prep.
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The network of schools I’m referring to is elite private schools like Dalton, Calhoun, and the like—the $50,000 / year private schools that don’t require their teachers to have a master’s in education or even a master’s degree, period.
The same is true of the private schools that the state’s Board of Regents has approved as special education providers. These are schools that districts send their most challenging and difficult-to-educate students to, at taxpayer expense. There are 853 of these schools statewide, as opposed to around 300 charter schools.
http://www.p12.nysed.gov/specialed/privateschools/853-statewide.htm
Isn’t it weird that people were perfectly happy—and had been for many decades—with publicly funded private schools not having traditionally trained teachers, and now all of a sudden it’s a problem?
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Tim,
Students at those schools come from very wealthy families. No kids with cognitive disabilities. No ELL.
Class sizes of 12-15.
How can you compare the ideal to the reality of public schools? These kids will do well no matter who the teacher is.
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Diane is correct. The students that go to these schools would teach each other if there were no teachers. In fact, if a teacher died at his/her desk while reading a newspaper and no one knew he/she was dead, the children that go to these expensive private schools would ignore the corpse that they didn’t know was a corpse and teach each other.
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Fair enough, although it is interesting to consider that “best and wisest” parents are happy to trade off traditional teacher training for lower class sizes, French and physics teachers who have master’s degrees in French and physics as opposed to education, and the like.
However, there are 853 private schools in New York State that have been approved for public districts to send their most vulnerable and difficult-to-educate students to at district and taxpayer expense.
http://www.p12.nysed.gov/specialed/privateschools/853-statewide.htm
Public dollars going to private providers that do not require their teachers to be traditionally trained or have a master’s degree from an approved school of education. Why have I not heard any objections to this arrangement and why is all of the focus on charter schools?
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IMPORTANT CORRECTION: there are around 125 authorized private K-12 special ed providers in NYS, not 853. They are called “853 schools” after the legislative chapter that authorized them. My apologies for the error, which does not change the substance of any of my comments.
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There are almost 7,000 publicly funded private sector corporate charter schools in the United States — not 300, unless you are talking about some other type of corporate charter school, a subset of the almost 7,000.
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That’s useful information, Lloyd!
I think if you review my comment on this blog post about charter regulations in New York State, you’ll see very quickly and clearly that I was referring specifically to the number of charter schools in NY. Thanks.
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“Is there a network of elite high-performing hospitals that get fantastic results with a mix of licensed and unlicensed surgeons?”
I think you mean Cancer Treatment Centers of America. They get better results than MD Anderson and Sloan-Kettering and their doctors and surgeons are not nearly as experienced and highly trained. Of course, CTC of America just tells the patients it can’t help to leave because they don’t want to treat them at all if the patient can’t be helped.
In other words, Tim’s “research” tells him that we should close down MD Anderson and Sloan-Ketting and replace them all with the wonderful Cancer Treatment Centers of America. If some patients are harmed, well that’s the breaks, as Tim would say. Because Tim’s “research” tells him that CTC of America are far superior.
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It is beyond appalling that supporters of charter schools are now reduced to saying “But Dalton and Calhoun don’t require any special teaching credentials.”
Dalton and Calhoun also simply drum out the kids who can’t be taught by their uncredentialed teachers. Even if their parents are willing to shell out the $50,000/year, Dalton will say “sorry, no can do, your child can’t be taught for $50,000/year”.
Now if these supporters of charters were honest actors instead of shills for whatever rich person pays them to be shills for, they would say:
“Dalton refuses to teach children with their untrained teachers even if they are offered $50,000/year to do it. I’m shocked that anyone would suggest a public school do it for half of that. We need to double the amount we spend per pupil in public schools to $50,000/year or even more so that trained and experienced teachers can teach them”.
That is the ONLY conclusion one can make from the “evidence” and “studies” that the promoters of charters are using.
Tim seems to be insisting that public schools need to receive AT LEAST $50,000/year per student. If so, I thank him very much for finally being honest.
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Tim says:
“is it interesting to consider that “best and wisest” parents are happy to trade off traditional teacher training for lower class sizes, French and physics teachers who have master’s degrees in French and physics as opposed to education, and the like.”
Just so we are all clear, Tim calls parents who can afford upwards of $50,000/year for private school tuition the BEST and WISEST.
Because, to Tim, if you can afford $50,000/year, you must be the “best and wisest”!
Aside from the shocking elitism and snobbery that Tim just demonstrated with his statement about what the “best and wisest” parents do, let’s actually be honest about what happens with those “physics teachers who have masters degrees in physics”.
The “best and wisest” parents (according to Tim) are also happy to pay private tutors upwards of $100/hour to tutor their precious darlings when the children of the “best and wisest” parents aren’t grasping what those “superior” physics teachers are teaching.
And as we all know, those are the children of the “best and wisest” parents who haven’t been counseled out of private schools for not being smart enough!
So to sum up the logic according to Tim:
There are private schools that will ONLY teach the brightest students of the “best and wisest” parents. If one of the students admitted turns out not to be bright enough, out they go. These private schools then hire physics teachers who don’t have certification but have masters degrees. When the brightest students can’t learn from these vaunted teachers, the private school tells the parents to hire a tutor. And a very high number of parents do.
The facts above prove Tim’s claim that charter schools are wonderful because they are just like these private schools. Yes they are, Tim.
Yes they are. And in pointing that out you unwittingly proved to us exactly why charters should be shut down as a waste of money.
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A friend of mine taught French at a very prestigious private school in Manhattan. From France. No degree in education.
He quit after the first year.
He knew French but he didn’t know how to teach. No clue how to manage a class of only 15 ten year olds.
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The daughter of a friend of mine graduated from an Ivy League College with honors. She then earned a degree at Oxford.
She returned to New York City, where she went through an alternative route and got a job teaching in a very good public high school. One of the city’s best. She didn’t last a full semester. She knew so much. She is brilliant. But she didn’t know how to teach adolescents.
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Name a single time that there has been any oversight done by the SUNY Charter Institute, Tim.
(Tim will ignore this request because it embarrasses him that the SUNY Charter Institute agrees with Eva Moskowitz that lots and lots of violent African-American 5 year olds win the lottery for Success Academy schools. Tim doesn’t actually agree that Eva Moskowitz is correct that an extraordinarily high number of naturally violent 5 year old African-American children win her lotteries (but not the lotteries for any other charter). Because Tim knows it is a very racist statement. But sometimes, Tim believes, you have to let those racist statements go unchallenged because if it takes racism to get more charter schools, then racism must go unchallenged. No matter who it harms.
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Does SUNY get a cut of each charter dollar?
That’s how it works in Ohio and MI- the “sponsors” or “authorizers” are paid out of charter funding.
I don’t know what they do to earn it since no one seems to regulate the schools.
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Chiara,
I believe the SUNY Charter Institute is supported by additional taxpayer dollars. You can’t expect the charters to give up a penny of their extremely generous per pupil allowance — that they receive on top of their free rent, maintenance, transportation, and anything else they decide that public school children should subsidize — to pay for their own oversight.
Better that it comes out of the public school budgets like many other things that charters insists public school children pay for as “charity” because the charter school kids should be given a direct donation from the per pupil budget of public school children. (Believe it or not, that actually happens! Each public school student has a per pupil allocation and from that allocation they pay for all charter school rent, transportation, and a myriad of other charter school costs. It comes directly out of their own per pupil allocation and it’s the typical right wing ideology where the poor subsidize the rich.)
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Tim,
A private school is not legally obligated to teach anyone except those who pay their tuition. And if a child turns out to be more trouble than the tuition payment, out the child goes.
I realize you are promoting charters that do the same thing, but that is against NY State law. Maybe you can get your pals to buy some more State legislators to change the law so charters can only teach the children who are worth teaching. With the rest being dumped on the street.
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Charter schools: We’re going to show you how to solve the problem of failing schools!
Charter school critics: Why are you drumming out so many kids?
Charter schools: That’s how you solve the problem of failing schools! You dump the kids who make them failures!
Charter school critics: But that is illegal and against state law.
Charter schools: We are going to show you a different approach to education that allows us to abandon our mission to teach the kids in public schools that we never wanted to teach anyway. Look at us!
Charter school critics: Every public school that does what you do is just as good except they are doing it for less money because you have been given many tens of millions in extra funding each year.
Charter schools: Shut up we just bought some politicians to change the law in our favor.
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NYC public school parent is on fire tonight!
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Jcgrim,
Agreed!
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I know I’m posting a lot but this is something I feel very strongly about. There was a time when the SUNY Charter Institute tried to do some real oversight. It was led by Pedro Noguera who was extremely pro-charter but also believed in facts.
Noguera resigned when he realized that the other board members of the SUNY Charter Institute saw their role as cheerleader and enabler of the worst bad practices and lies of charters.
(Noguera resigned when SUNY allowed Eva Moskowitz to change the location of a school from a very poor school district to a very rich one AND drop priority for poor kids in favor of the kids whose families could afford to live in the very wealthy district! Not surprisingly, that school has twice as many middle class and affluent students than at-risk ones! And of course, the at-risk kids get treated the way we witnessed in the video to encourage them to leave.)
Maybe if he had stuck it out then Joseph Belluck would not have turned the SUNY Charter Institute into what is basically a rubber stamp for Eva Moskowitz because her billionaire funders are very important to him and the man he answers to, Andrew Cuomo. Those billionaire funders are much more important than any children or the myriad of complaints from their NOT politically connected parents which the SUNY Charter Institute seems to never investigate.
The SUNY Charter Institute does oversight over billionaire-supported charters the way the Republican Congress does oversight over Trump. In other words, they do none.
I’m hoping a journalist starts investigating the stink of unethical behavior and oversight coming from the SUNY Charter Institute ever since Pedro Noguera resigned in 2012. There seems to be absolutely no oversight except “as long as the students you allow to reach 3rd grade have good test scores, we will ignore every complaint that comes to us.”
The SUNY Charter Institute is now saying “trust us, we promise to oversee all these charter-trained teachers” when they have never once looked into the many complaints of charter practices (unless it is one that does not have billionaire Cuomo donors on their board).
That should be a red flag to any journalist. I hope one of them cares enough about public education and ethical behavior to report on this.
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NYC Parent,
You and Diane and Lloyd kicked the stuffing out of Tim in this debate thread. A very enjoyable read.
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Let’s examine Tim’s statement that “Charter schools were meant to experiment with different approaches to education!” from a properly historical perspective. Charter schools were in fact meant to experiment with different approaches, as they were invented by teachers, specifically by the head of a teacher’s union. They were meant to experiment with pedagogical, classroom approaches to meet the specific needs of specific populations of students.
Then corporate America got involved, and the experiment deVolved into finding ways to profit off the taxpayer. Charters were NOT meant to experiment with eliminating unions or the professionalism of teaching. They were NOT meant to eliminate but rather enhance community input. They were NOT meant to drain resources from other schools. They were NOT meant to narrow curriculums focusing on otherwise meaningless standardized tests.
Charter schools were not created with the intent of putting experimentation in the hands of billionaires and politicians, people who lack expertise in education. Quite the opposite.
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The claim that Albert Shanker created the charter school concept is inaccurate.
http://educationnext.org/no-al-shanker-did-not-invent-the-charter-school/
Charters were invented to give parents an alternative to traditional public schools. How this has played out depends greatly on the charter laws and regulations in each state.
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Albert Shanker and an obscure ed prof in Mass named Raymond Budde came up with the charter idea in 1988. Shanker promoted it relentlessly for a few years.
Then in 1993, he realized that entrepreneurs and profiteers were moving in and he wrote a column in The NY Times declaring that charters and vouchers were the same thing: privatization and union-busting.
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I’d really like for someone to describe all these so called innovative ideas that are being used in charter schools. Articles often mention them, but no one has ever explicitly said what what they are. Anyone?
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Peter Greene wrote that charters have failed as laboratories of innovation. Their biggest innovation is selecting students with care. https://dianeravitch.net/2015/04/10/peter-greene-charters-have-failed-as-laboratories-of-innovation/
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It is “innovative” to identify the inherently violent tendencies so many non-white 5 year olds exhibit and suspend them often from your charter school.
It is “innovative” to identify the lack of work ethic so many of the non-violent non-white 5 year olds exhibit and hold them back to that they are repeating Kindergarten, first and second grade — some of them held back more than one year. That “innovative” practice leads to many of their parents pulling them from charters and many others having years of extra learning before taking state exams.
It is “innovative” to have tens of millions of dollars in extra funding to spend in your charters.
It is “innovative” to train your fresh out of college teachers how to best achieve #1 and #2 above.
It is “innovative” for your board to make very large donations to politicians so that you have no oversight into the practices of #1 and #2 above.
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It is even more innovative when 30-50% of your teachers leave every year. This creates a perennial shortage, which can be ended only by lowering standards.
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Tim:
Although I might be wrong, the linked article seems to have been written by someone who believes that turning education over to the private sector is a good thing. He diminishes Shanker’s role in the creation of charter schools because Shanker got off the bus when the private interests started to roll in.
This move on the part of Shanker is applauded by most of us in the educational community. He and Budde came up with an idea that would have created a more individualized approach according to the classroom dynamics and the teacher’s ability to read them and modify instruction accordingly.
They did not want outside interests involved in the process. This doesn’t change the fact that the initial idea came from those two individuals.
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Hi, gitapik,
Here is a different, much longer piece, written by a very pro-labor reporter, that also shows Shanker had an extremely limited role in creating the charter school concept.
https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-untold-history-of-charter-schools/
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It’s a well written article and seems to be well researched, Tim. I haven’t fact checked, but the piece contains info of which I was not aware.
For me, however, the idea that Shanker was not the original brainchild of the concept and implementation is secondary to the fact that he ended up publicly removing his support when the ramifications became obvious in terms of the business world taking advantage of the movement.
Cohen doesn’t go into detail on that withdrawal of support, but this quote would indicate at least part of his reasoning: ““I wish the architects of the bill had worked out the collective bargaining issues with the teachers unions,” Shanker told Kolderie, two months after it passed.”
I remember the ’80s well, Tim. The magazine titles went from “We” to “Me” almost the instant Reagan took office and the all out assault on unions began in earnest. It was a difficult time for unions and their leaders.
Citing Cohen’s article in order to advance your point is a double edged sword, though, as she’s clearly stating what those in the field have recognized for years: the charter school movement began and has evolved further into one that is about privatizing our nation’s public schools. A Nation at Risk was only the beginning of a national propaganda campaign that’s aimed directly at this goal.
The bigger question is whether the reader believes this is a worthy goal or not. I, for one, do not. You?
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Without Shanker’s enthusiastic support, there would have been no charter movement. Shanker and Buddy began advocating charters in 1988. The first charter opened in 1990.
Shanker laid out principles:
Charters should be approved by the local school board, the teachers in the building, and the local union (if there was one).
Charters should enroll the students who were not making it in the regular school.
Charters should share whatever they learned with their colleagues in the public school.
Charters were not meant to be businesses, or chains, but Teacher-run.
In 1993, Shanker withdrew his support because he realized that businesses were moving in to the charter game and all his principles ignored. He declared that charters were no different from vouchers. They would privatize public schools and bust unions. He was right, too late.
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That’s the part of the equation that was left out of the article. Not surprising, I suppose, considering that it’s content was specific to tracing the origins of the “charter school” movement.
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Tim says: “Charter schools were meant to experiment with different approaches to education”.
NY Times 11/3/08 demonstrate how one charter leader, Eva Moskowitz, “experiments” with new approaches:
“Greeting parents coming to pick up their children. Ms. Moskowitz asks a lot of participation from parents, as a condition of admitting their children. She told one group, “If you know you cannot commit to all that we ask of you this year, this is not the place for you.”
Wow!!! What innovation!!! Now that’s a model for public schools to follow. I hear it works very well to raise test scores – as long as you aren’t responsible for the students and parents who “cannot commit”.
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There is no secret sauce ! Re: interview with Koop on Charlie Rose…what are the innovations that charters have brought ? Please enumerate them.
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The student population served by NYCcharter schools is 95% black and Latino and 80% low income. Most of their families live in highly segregated neighborhoods and are zoned for traditional public schools that no one reading or commenting on this blog would for even one second consider sending their own child or grandchild to.
The primary purpose of NY’s charter school law was to give children like these additional public school options. Parents are choosing these charter options, the schools are performing well, and all the available evidence suggests the presence of charters benefits kids in nearby traditional public schools.
That’s plenty innovative as far as I’m concerned.
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Yes. Teach like a robot and behave like a trained seal. Very innovative
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It works when you keep out the kids tryout dont want
And push out those who get low scores
Got to go list
Send the ones you don’t want to the public schools
Con racist billionaires to believe you have a secret formula
Millions for charters cost them less than higher taxes for equity
Very innovative
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It doesn’t matter how many of the children in NY corporate charter schools are a minority or live in poverty and I’m going to tell you why.
I taught for thirty years (1975-2005) in a school district in schools with child poverty levels starting at 70-percent and climbing from there. Every minority child and/or child that lives in poverty is not a challenge to teach.
In every class I taught there were students that worked hard to learn but also many students that did not work hard to learn. Since I corrected the work and computed the grades for report cards, I know that the children that worked really hard to learn came to about 25-percent of the total students I taught. The students that failed my classes (about 35-percent on average) didn’t fail because they couldn’t learn, but because they wouldn’t do the work and reading that led to learning. The students that failed had more zeroes for grades than points for work done and zeroes could only end up in the grade book if no work was turned in.
Corporate Charters cherry pick the students they take and refine that cherry picking for the students they keep. In the end, those corporate charters end up with the same students that worked hard to learn in the classes I taught.
FACT: There are 227 corporate charter school in NYC teaching 114,000 students.
Click to access NYC-Charter-Facts.pdf
The New York City Department of Education reports that there are 888,517 students in the NY City public schools.
http://schools.nyc.gov/AboutUs/schools/data/stats/default.htm
Conclusion: The corporate charters have a lot of flexibility to cherry pick the students (even minority students and students that live in poverty) that will earn the highest test scores. There is a huge pool of students to cherry pick, but what will happen when the NY City’s public schools are gone and there is only choices between corporate charter chains?
The answer can be found in New Orleans where the private sector charters do not have to report or track students that drop out and stop coming (traditional public schools are required to do this BUT not corporate charters) and thousands of children are now on the streets getting their education because the charters got rid of them.
The United States cannot be allowed to have two publicly funded K-12 school systems … one that must follow all the legislated rules through total transparency that came about through the democratic process as spelled out in the U.S. Constitution and state constitutions and a separate, opaque, publicly funded, private sector K-12 education system that doesn’t have to follow any of that legislation.
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Tim says: “Most of their families live in highly segregated neighborhoods and are zoned for traditional public schools that no one reading or commenting on this blog would for even one second consider sending their own child or grandchild to.”
Tim’s comment explains WHY Success Academy now provides special charters for just the kind of parents that Tim just described — where there are at least twice as many white students as the NYC average and only a small fraction of the poor students! Just come to Success Academy Upper West, says Tim. All you people trying to avoid those public schools please come to Success Academy Union Square and Success Academy Cobble Hill says Tim! After all, Tim says those parents being recruited want to avoid the population in their public schools and here is Success Academy promising just that!
That’s why it was so important to have a co-opted SUNY Charter Institute board so that Success Academy could open just those kind of charters for the parents who “wouldn’t consider” sending their own child to those public schools.
Tim so helpfully explained why the SUNY Charter Institute kowtowed to Eva Moskowitz’ demand that she be allowed to establish schools in very wealthy neighborhoods AND that she could drop priority for at-risk kids so that the affluent parents that Tim describes in his post above won’t be scared to come to their charter.
Thank you, Tim, for explaining how you believe charter schools must act to achieve their goal. Keeping the number of poor children to a minimum in schools in order to attract the parents that you keep insisting would not attend a school with too many poor children. You could not have explained it better than you did. Thanks!
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Lloyd, your reply to Tim was absolutely correct.
There is something truly appalling about charters patting themselves on the back when they are doing less than public schools.
In 2017, there were OVER 148,000 students in grades 3 – 8 who were proficient on the state math exams. 148,000!!!
More than 87,000 of those proficient students in grades 3 – 8 were economically disadvantaged.
An enormous charter network like Success Academy manages to have something like 6,000 students who are proficient and a significant number of them are NOT economically disadvantaged.
You compare 6,000 to 148,000 and you think “why is this charter acting as if those 148,000 public school students in grade 3 – 8 doing well on state tests do not exist?”
Tim likes to act as if the 87,000 economically disadvantaged students in NYC public schools aren’t proof that there are plenty of high achieving low-income students for his favorite charter to cherry-pick. As long as they drop lottery priority for them so they don’t have to teach too many as they expand.
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The NY board of regents is authorized to monitor and oversee every charter school that they authorize.
And they have the ultimate say in whether a charter school’s charter is renewed.
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I wish this were true. There is a carve out in the law that gives the SUNY Charter Schools Committee full oversight of the schools assigned to it, which include Success Academy and the newly proposed Success knockoff, Zeta Academy. Unfortunately, the Board of Regents (which under Betty Rosa’s leadership is on the right track) has no authority over the SUNY-authorized charters.
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This is why I believe the focus should be on SUNY Charter Institute. They have done NO oversight for years. No response to complaints. No response to charters suspended over 20% of their kindergarten children and claiming it isn’t the teachers but the naturally violent children who get lucky and win the lottery.
SUNY Charter Institute has not once done proper oversight. They oversee the equivalent of two large cities of students and their sole criteria is: as long as 3rd grade test scores are decent, you may do anything you want and if you get caught and tell us it is an anomaly, we promise to ignore every complaint by parents.
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Thanks Lisa
I looked up the law and the Regents are highly restricted as far as what constitutes a valid reason for revoking a charter.
There are only a few reasons for which they can revoke a charter and lack of teacher cert is not among them.
The wording of the charter law basically exempts charters from most regulations applying to public schools.
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This is really insulting to teachers who have the proper credentials, and insulting to the children who are expected to be taught by less than qualified teachers.
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The billionaires behind privatization have nothing but contempt for teachers.
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The state is making it very difficult for current teachers to remain certified. So many hoops to jump through. So much BS to contend with. In some ways I am looking favorably on fewer hurdles to the profession.
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I finished reading “Empire of the Summer Moon” yesterday, and I thought that public school teachers are the native Americans of today. They are under attack and everything the greedy autocratic billionaires from Gates to DeVos and many others do is designed to destroy their lives, their families, the nation’s community based democratic, transparent, non-profit public schools.
The power-hungry rich and powerful are no different today then they were in the 19th century as the nation wages genocide against native Americans as they chases Manifest Destiny.
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Privatizing critics of US education have long argued that teachers are the most important factor in explaining varying levels of student achievement, often conveniently leaving out the modifier “in-school” before the word factor and ignoring that struggling students are often assigned to the least experienced teachers. The same critics lament comparisons between US students and those in higher-performing countries. Similarly, they ignore research that shows that poverty explains more differential between students in the US than in other developed countries. They ignore that fact that better-performing countries have stronger so-called safety nets, including universal health care. They ignore the fact that teacher development is frequently more rigorous in higher performing countries than in the US.
Their solution: lower teacher credentialing standards! This sounds just plain stupid– except when we recognize that systemic improvement is NOT their goal. Rather, they have three other goals: (1) undermine public sector unions; (2) provide a new avenue to invest private capital; (3) provide an escape hatch for a few “deserving poor” kids.
In fact, the privatizers are not stupid. They are strategic. They’re just dishonest and want to hide their real values and goals.
Can US university-based teacher preparation be improved? Certainly. But turning it over to private charter schools (some of which are out to make a profit) with little or no oversight is surely not the answer.
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I was alternatively certified. Many years later I have returned to school to compete a real master’s degree in education. The classes I am taking at the university are much more thorough and, oddly enough, focused on the practical side of being an excellent teacher. Also, the amount that I am learning is significantly more because the class time and research/reading/writing responsibilities in the master’s program are an order of magnitude greater (10x) than the amount of work that I did in the alternative certification process. I am a better teacher because I have chosen to return to school to really learn pedagogy. It is a terrible mistake to short circuit the teacher training process.
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Sorry to be the puzzled antipodean here, but in Australia (and I believe New Zealand) you can’t step in front of a class by yourself unless you are registered by a CENTRALISED body, generally a state body (in Australia). Doesn’t matter WHICH type of school – public or private (we don’t have anything like charters or UK “free” schools – yet!), you need to have the same type of qualifications signed off by a GOVERNMENT body. However, the benchmarks set by each state are, I believe, designed to a standard established by the Federal (national) government.
That’s why I’m completely amazed as to how things could reach this situation in the US.
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Sounds rational, David. In the US, every state sets its own standards.
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Yeah, this doesn’t sound good. Count me as skeptical.
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I was reading the exchange between Diane and Tim…I might be off the mark, here…but I believe it might be a clue to the huge and ever growing influence of Dianeravitch.net. Tim sounded not exactly programmed, but possibly fulfilling an assignment….sort of a delicate one. The charter industry does not like to respond to criticism…they feel the “try something different” thing takes care of itself. I have to wonder if Tim is either connected to the industry, or was contacted by them to recite what arguments they have. I cannot be sure. My apologies, Tim, if I am reading things incorrectly.
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Tim often posts here spouting the pro-charter line.
Whether he is an ideologue or a paid flack is not clear. But he has never criticized a charter except (years ago) to mention that he thinks they should backfill more but he completely understands why some may not want to and he is certain that not backfilling has nothing to do with their high test scores as they are wonderful and deserve nothing but praise (except maybe for backfilling, although Tim says that’s really okay, too).
I mention the backfill because Tim likes to point to the one or two times over the past 3 years that he mentioned backfill to show how unbiased he is when he posts how terrific and perfect the charters and the SUNY Charter Institute are.
My opinion is that Tim is a flack because regular people who support charters actually believe in more regulations and more oversight and don’t mind criticizing the most powerful ones. They don’t embarrass themselves by defending them (or disappearing whenever someone mentions a negative because they are forbidden to acknowledge any negatives.)
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Joe,
Thanks for being so super polite when asking me if I’m a liar or paid to comment!
I’m a parent of children who attend traditional public schools operated by the NYC DOE. I have visited several charters out of curiosity and made small donations to the outstanding Icahn network, but my kids have never attended charters, and I have never worked for or received any money from any charter school or entity or anything related to education. Hope this clears things up.
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Tim,
Very sorry. I don’t believe you. Your email claims you are somehow part of the Shanker Institute, but that’s not true. No one there ever heard of you.
I don’t believe you are a parent of children in public schools.
Your passion for charters spells shill or troll.
Since you are not a teacher, you have no reason to be anonymous.
Unmask yourself or stop posting here.
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The only real question left here is when the rules/laws will allow public schools in the districts throughout the state to begin hiring these sub-qualified teachers. Charterland is charterland and in spite of all of the correct evidence and proof about their failings, the charter lobby/industry will continue to remain and grow. The question is about the rest of the public schools in the state. Once they get allowed to hire these lower-cert teachers that’s when the drama happens. Mix that with the inevitable Supreme Court decision that will allow free-riders, and we will have one big step towards really undermining once and for all us organized NY public school teachers
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Here’s a relevant story.
It’s from Colorado, but the issues are the same.
For an understanding of SUNY’s reasoning, here’s a long post about the “allternative” to university teacher training that the corporate ed. reform world is trying to replace university training with. This alternative, or so corporate ed. reformers claim, is actually better for training teachers who serve kids from minority or low socio-economic backgrounds — i.e. the kids in the SUNY-authorized charter schools.
It’s long, but worth reading for its insight into the corporate ed. reform mindset:
x x x x x x x x x x x x
Low socio-economic kids “need a different type of teacher”… i.e. a graduate of programs such as the Relay G.S.E. (Graduate School of Education) …
That’s according to one of the proponent of Relay. In fact, contrary to the school’s name, Relay G.S.E. is not, in fact, “a Graduate School.”
Instead, it is a totally unlicensed, unaccredited school taught by unaccredited, unlicensed, pseudo-teachers, where, after this short crash course, students earn bogus “degrees” that are not recognized as degrees by any licensing authority in education anywhere.
Sometimes it is within an article’s COMMENTS section that corporate ed. reformers reveal themselves “not wisely but too well,” to quote The Bard.
(In one COMMENTS section, Dmitry Melhorn owned up to the fact that, yeah, we ARE, IN FACT, out to wipe out all traditional public schools .. something denied repeatedly by corporate reformers such as Secretary Devos, who instead lie their heads off and claim that they seek an idyllic “family of schools” — private, traditional public, public charter — all co-existing in peace and harmony. Yeah, right. You mean like they have in New Orleans?)
For example, a Relay G.S.E. supporter got into it with Denver’s Jeanne Kaplan — and one other person calling himself “CONCERNED EDUCATOR” — in the COMMENTS section of an article covering Relay’s expansion into Denver. Alas, this Relay person deleted all of his/her COMMENTS before I arrived at the article and its COMMENTS section.
This article included quotes from both Relay G.S.E. supporters and opponents:
http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/co/2016/09/13/new-teacher-training-favored-by-charters-comes-to-denver-as-critics-sound-off/
First of all, in the COMMENTS section, this “Relay Proponent” kind of let some cats out of the bag with what he/she posted, then deleted everything that he or she posted (with quote remnants present in the Comments responding to him or her. I’m calling this poster “Relay Proponent” as her or she deleted her on-line handle along with his/her posts.)
Check out this doozy (an actual quote) that includes Relay Proponent’s claim that Relay pedagogy should only be used in poor, minority communities, not in wealthy white communities (this just drips with racism and classism):
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
RELAY PROPONENT:
“Kids from less affluent areas are typically raised in a much different household than those in affluent households. Moreover, those kids raised in affluent households in most cases need less teaching and structure and more flexibility.
“If they’re in an affluent family, they likely have educated parents, and are being afforded opportunities in their family life to learn.
“Kids from impoverished areas? Not so much. They need structure in their classroom. They need to be reminded to track and listen to the teacher most likely.
“They need a DIFFERENT type of teacher.”
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Oh boy, this got a Relay critic named CONCERNED EDUCATOR riled up:
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CONCERNED EDUCATOR:
“I want to just point out that, by placing students of low socio-economic status in this light, you have highlighted a very important gap that we are perpetuating by allowing the language of RELAY (G.S.E) to continue.
“Yes, students who grow in homes with severe trauma need specific psychological structures and interventions in place, because their brains function differently, and have been altered by the toxic stress.
“However, NOT ALL STUDENTS IN POVERTY HAVE GROWN UP IN TOXIC STRESS ENVIRONMENTS. Making this assumption lowers our expectations, and devalues those students. You are making assumptions that devalue children, and RELAY perpetuates that.
“We can value the culture of our students without assuming that culture is negative.
“In addition, assuming that our impoverished children ‘need’ a negative, controlling structure creates prison-like environments, where we do not teach critical thinking skills or self-awareness, but lock children into negative patterns of thought and behavior.
“We also perpetuate the opportunity gap, because we are denying students the opportunity to have the education that wealthy white students have, simply by making the assumption that ‘those students need structure.’
“ALL CHILDREN NEED STRUCTURE. ALL children also deserve the opportunity to have an education that prepares them to excel to their greatest potential, which does not mean treating them like prisoners.
“RELAY perpetuates this cycle of creating sub-par education for students, based on the excuse of ‘those kids’ (always meaning children in poverty and non-white children) *needing more ‘structure’. SOME students with trauma need more specific interventions, but ALL children deserve the chance to be a child.”
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RELAY PROPONENT, in another deleted COMMENT of his/hers, then incorrectly claims that Relay students attend Relay G.S.E. “to earn their Master’s Degrees.”
Jeanne Kaplan’s replies that Relay G.S.E. most certainly does NOT award accredited “Master’s Degrees” or anything of the kind.
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JEANNE KAPLAN:
” ‘To earn their ‘Master’s Degrees’ …’
“Teachers attending Relay G.S.E. cannot acquire a ‘Master’s Degree’ because the ‘RELAY Graduate School of Education’ is NOT a certified Graduate Program.
“The (RELAY G.S.E.) ‘degree’ is bogus.
“Students are being taught by unlicensed people.”
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In another deleted comment (which I’m reconstructing, using inferences drawn from Jeanne Kaplan’s reply to her … sorry no exact quotes this time) RELAY PROPONENT replies to Kaplan’s accurate statement
— Kaplan’s claim that Relay G.S.E. is not accredited, and thus can issue not legitimate “degrees” —
… by saying that traditional teaching programs — the ones with genuine recognized accreditation, and that grant genuine degrees one can post in, say, one’s resume or c.v — are all failures according to the data, and that research proves that Relay alone works with low income children. RELAY PROPONENT further claimed that Kaplan has “no research” proving the efficacy of traditional teaching programs, and that any data that Kaplan could offer to the contrary comes from “biased resources”, again, from the Gospel according to RELAY PROPONENT.
Again, from Kaplan’s response, it can be inferred that, in making his/her point, RELAY PROPONENT also called Kaplan names, and insulted Kaplan (again, no quotes, just reasonable inferences from what Kaplan replied … I’d love to know exactly what “names” that RELAY PROPONENT called Kaplan… if you’re reading this, Jeanne, please chime in.)
At this point, Jeanne Kaplan simply ain’t havin’ it.
Kaplan also wants to know if RELAY is paying rent at the Denver public school building where it holds it courses:
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JEANNE KAPLAN: (to RELAY PROPONENT)
“Who are you?
“Identify yourself, at least. I could say the same about you. I could also call you names. That is the M,O, of most ‘debates’ in America today.
””‘Biased resources.’
“Only you ignore data that shows repeated failure.*
“As for ‘no research’ — I beg to differ. I have actually talked to people who have undergone the Relay (G.S.E.) indoctrination. Some have quit. Many have ended up
in great debt.
“I ask again: is Relay paying rent?
“And please don’t take the chicken way out and not identify yourself. Transparency is another trait lost in ‘education reform.’”
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Relay Proponent didn’t just “take the chicken way out” and not identify himself/herself. He/she deleted everything which he/she had earlier posted.
Reply
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Ever wonder what goes on in a closed-to-the-public meeting of the SUNY Board of Trustees — the group that authorizes NYC charter schools such as Eva Moskowitz Success Academy Charter Schools?
Well, hey, now’s your chance!
Somebody secretly videotaped a meeting of the SUNY Board of Trustees meeting — a meeting where the controversial measure to allow uncertified teachers to work in SUNY-authorized charters was discussed.
It’s now on YouTube.
Included in this meeting was a community leader not happy with the proposed new regulations — one Maria Bautista.
This is truly explosive stuff, and should be posted on your blog ASAP, and please feel free to use the TRANSCRIPT I just made.
SUNY Board Chairman Joseph Belluck claims that he is livid at the tweets and overall “smear campaign” that has been portraying him as “racist.”
In response to this, Afro-Puerto Rican activist Maria Bautista of the Alliance for Quality Education is not buying Belluck’s attempt to fabricate victimhood for himself. She then proceeds to unload on Belluck, saying that his new policy is most certainly “racist” in its effect, if not intent.
Would you want YOUR OWN kids taught by these uncertified teachers? Bautista asks him, and this sets Belluck off. Unfortunately, this is when the video cuts out.
Enjoy!
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TRANSCRIPT
( 0:13 – )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c-DGC1L0jc
( 0:13 – )
MARIA BAUTISTA: “Well, I just want to clarify that this ISN’T a smear campaign against you. Right?”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: “Okay.”
MARIA BAUTISTA: *“That this has EVERYTHING to do with black and brown children – ”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: “Right.”
MARIA BAUTISTA: ” – and THEIR access to high quality education, and second of all, if the teachers’ union wanted to be here and talk for themselves, they WOULD be.”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: “Okay.”
MARIA BAUTISTA: “So I’m here to talk about the Alliance for Quality Education.”*
JOSEPH BELLUCK: “Well, I’ll just, I’ll just* … *I’ll just say to you that, when I look at my phone, and someone tweets the following:
” ‘ @JoeBelluck is willing to allow this RACIST policy to persist.’”
MARIA BAUTISTA: “That’s RIGHT!”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: “I take – ”
MARIA BAUTISTA: “Cause you ARE!”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: “I take umbrage at it.”
MARIA BAUTISTA: “‘Cause you ARE!”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: “Okay?”
MARIA BAUTISTA: ” ‘YOU”RE the Chair – ”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: “I take umbrage at it.”
MARIA BAUTISTA: ” ‘YOU”RE the Chair, and you’re allowing it to proceed – ”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: “Well -”
MARIA BAUTISTA: ” – so that’s NOT a smear campaign.
JOSEPH BELLUCK: “Well -”
MARIA BAUTISTA: ”It’s ACTUALLY WHAT’S HAPPENING, and whether or not you feel defensive about that – ”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: “I’m NOT defensive about it.”
MARIA BAUTISTA: ” – but this is YOUR responsibility.”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: “I’m NOT defensive about it.”
MARIA BAUTISTA: “Exactly. You ARE defensive about it. You’re saying that this is a SMEAR campaign, and it’s NOT. We’re calling … we’re calling the cards for what they ARE.”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: “What I’m suggesting to you is that – ”
MARIA BAUTISTA: “THIS is the card that YOU are ALLOWING to move forward — THIS idea …THESE regulations for people to give comments on, when we know that they (classes taught by uncertified teachers) are going disproportionately impact black and brown children.
“You would NEVER have uncertified teachers teach YOUR children, so WHY is it okay for black and brown children? Why is THAT okay?”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: “Okay – ”
MARIA BAUTISTA: “It is NOT okay!”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: “What I’m suggest – ”
MARIA BAUTISTA: “That is the point.”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: “What I’m saying to you – ”
MARIA BAUTISTA: “This is NOT a smear campaign.”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: ” “What I’m suggesting to you is that the things that are going to MOVE this committee to ACT are going to be the SUBSTANCE of the regulations, and WHETHER OR NOT they are the BEST for educating the kids who are in our schools.”
MARIA BAUTISTA: “Would you want THIS for YOUR children? No.”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: (angry) “I’m not going to speak to you about MY children -”
MARIA BAUTISTA: “I would love that -”
JOSEPH BELLUCK: ” – because frankly .. because frankly – ”
MARIA BAUTISTA: ” – because what you would want for YOUR children is what you should want for EVERY child in this city.”
MALE SUNY BOARD MEMBER: “Alright. Can I just – ?)
x x x x x x x x x x x x
Video CUTS OUT
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“The State University of New York charter committee, which contains no educators…” Strategically leaving educators out of the conversation while methodically denigrating a true profession.
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One educator has been added to the SUNY charter committee: Meryl Tisch, former chair of the State Board of Regents, very enthusiastic about charter schools and high-stakes testing. She earned an Ed.D. at Teachers College.
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Someone should really get in touch with Meryl Tisch to get her to explain how she plans to do oversight on those untrained teachers and can we expect the same level of “oversight (ie. none) that SUNY did when they received reports of high suspension rates for 5 year olds and got to go lists and videos.
Tisch may not be quite as willing to abase herself to billionaires as Joseph Belluck is and she might not be nearly as willing to look like a fool to please billionaires. She might find it hard to justify SUNY putting their entire faith in uncertified teachers on the word of the woman who so strongly demanded that Senators MUST vote to approve Betsy DeVos because she was a terrific choice.
It is important to force Tisch go on record as to why she doesn’t have any problem with the same person who claims that over 20% of the at-risk kindergarten children in certain charters are acting out violently being allowed to train her own teachers with no oversight from SUNY.
It is important to force Tisch to go on record as to why the SUNY Charter Institute has put their full faith and trust in a woman whose judgement is and continues to be that Betsy DeVos is a terrific person to oversee education.
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There are some pretty smart people on this blog. It’s disappointing how rarely people choose to debate Tim on the merits, and how often they (including our host, perhaps the smartest and certainly the most articulate of any who comment here) resort instead to ad hominem attacks. I suppose I get the impulse to go ad hominem: Tim is whip-smart and writes on-the-spot prose as well as anyone here with the possible exception of Diane. As a result, he rarely loses an argument here on the merits. But he’s not the kind of commenter (see, e.g., the Trump trolls) who merits the kind of responses that he too often gets.
I’ll stop now, lest people conclude that Tim has hired me out as a subcontractor.
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FLERP,
I don’t think it is unfair to ask Tim to post his real name. Most of those on this Blog who use pseudonyms are teachers or administrators who are afraid of losing their jobs. Tim says he is a parent of children in a traditional public school. He has nothing to lose by using his name. Tim has one point to make, and he makes it almost every day: charters are fabulous and unions are awful. He never concedes any wrong-doing by charters. I spent years in the Choice camp. I know all the arguments well, having heard them from the tip-top right wingers at the Hoover Institution. I changed my mind. I realized I was wrong. Tim is a zealot and an ideologue. I don’t understand why his own children are not in charters, given his tenacious advocacy for them.
We have and have had many people on the Blog who disagree with me. I think it is good for the Blog for you and me and us to be challenged.
But dogmatism is tough to argue with because it suggests a closed steel trap mind.
Look, I’ll be frank. My goal in spending several hours a day on the blog is not to have a debate but to organize and energize a movement to fight back against those who want to privatize public education and destroy the teaching profession. I want to wake people up to the National nature of the attacks and give them hope that we can organize and fight back. I want to celebrate our victories, small and occasionally large.
Frankly, it is a waste of my time to argue daily with Tim, whose role is to say, give up. I have been more than generous, but frankly the stakes are high, and we are in a major battle for survival. Now is the time to understand the threat and join together, not to be squabbling with those who oppose the very concept of public schools and a teaching profession.
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I wouldn’t post mine. It may be difficult for you to understand, given how you make your living. But when your livelihood isn’t based on expressing your opinions about education or politics, it doesn’t pay to have those views broadcast on the internet in your own name and etched in stone forever.
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That is a separate issue from my having to fight a battle against a rigid ideologue inside my tent
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FLERP! often disappears when challenged the way Tim does.
It is astonishing that FLERP! claims that Tim makes brilliant arguments that are going unrefuted. On the contrary, whenever there is a post they can’t refute, they simply disappear.
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Flerp, sometimes it is justified to apply the Ad Hominem in a debate. I’ll let Scientific American explain what I mean.
“Regarding the ad hominem, Walton contends that although such attacks are usually fallacious, they can be legitimate when a character critique is directly or indirectly related to the point being articulated.” … “Walton argues that an ad hominem is valid when the claims made about a person’s character or actions are relevant to the conclusions being drawn.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/character-attack/
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FLERP!
Here is what Tim posts:
“The network of schools I’m referring to is elite private schools like Dalton, Calhoun, and the like—the $50,000 / year private schools that don’t require their teachers to have a master’s in education or even a master’s degree, period.”
Tim argues that charters should be free to use uncertified teachers because private schools that Dalton and Calhoun do. As if the students at Dalton and Calhoun don’t have an entire safety net of tutors to compensate. As if either of those privates cannot simply counsel out any kid who struggles to learn. As if the private schools that spend well over $40,000 per student are even teaching students who are no different than the at-risk students in failing public schools.
Here is what FLERP! posts:
“Tim is whip-smart….he rarely loses an argument here on the merits.”
I suppose it depends what FLERP! means by “on the merits”. And what “argument” FLERP! seems to believe Tim is making so brilliantly that he isn’t losing.
But yes, it does seem as if you are grading Tim’s arguments on a very large curve. And it does beg the question as to why you are so impressed with Tim’s arguments that he has not defended in any substantial way at all.
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The elite private schools don’t counsel out struggling students. They don’t accept them. If a student can’t keep up, parents hire tutors. Elite private schools are not comparable to public schools that take all children. No way.
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Here are a few quotes from an interesting piece that was published by the Guardian.
“This push from wealthy parents probably derives from many sources. These parents work long hours, and the school is the biggest source of emotional feedback the kids get. Paid caregivers, too, are understandably reluctant to set boundaries that might risk them their jobs. Paradoxically, though, these parents’ desire to buy a no-bad-things-happening-ever experience for their kids, will incapacitate them in the long run.
“Children raised this way are often very nice; but they are notably passive and indecisive. Many parents in this demographic can attest to how hard it is to get such a child off the couch, or to initiate an activity that is not presented to him or her intact. Many college administrators describe the vacillation and need to text parents constantly, that such children, now young adults, display. I was personally shocked to see several hundred University of Arizona students, children of wealth, rampaging, noisy and drunken, through the corridors of a Mexican hotel at 2am. When I asked the fraternity and sorority leaders to take some kind of action, I was told – nicely and sincerely – by each student “leader” I contacted, “So sorry, there is nothing I can do; I am just one person.” This passivity and powerlessness fit the pattern: if everything is handed to you, you won’t develop the skills and muscles required to initiate, find inner resources, or experience mastery.
“This no-bad-thing educational agenda is new: US elites used to expect hardships as well as educational excellence for their kids. The novels Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace attest to the fact that the American elite, until recently, understood that character-building, challenging experiences in high school were part of training “masters of the universe.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/mar/22/pampered-private-school-elite-us-decline
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^^And since this discussion is about the SUNY Charter Institute deciding that charter networks should be free to train their own networks, I challenged Tim to provide an example of how the SUNY Charter Institute has dealt with the myriad of complaints parents have made about charter practices that target low-performing and any “not ready to learn” students for removal. He was silent.
I also challenged Tim to explain how the SUNY Charter Institute addressed a charter network that was sometimes suspending over 20% of the Kindergarten children and claiming that it was because all those children were acting out violently. He was silent.
Instead he constantly contradicts himself. As in:
“The student population served by NYCcharter schools is 95% black and Latino and 80% low income……..
The primary purpose of NY’s charter school law was to give children like these additional public school options.”
But Tim, if that was the case then why did SUNY let those very same charters drop priority for exactly those students ?
Silence.
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Diane,
I agree with you about the elite private schools not accepting struggling students, but since they accept them at age 5, they can’t be 100% perfect in choosing them.
Therefore, yes, they do counsel out those few students who are obviously struggling with those uncertified teachers Tim adores who aren’t very good at dealing with students who don’t learn quickly and easily.
And for the generally gifted students who are just stuck with an uncertified lousy or inept teacher in those privates, there are tutors. Anyone who denies the common use of tutors in elite schools — especially in classes like physics — is simply making up their own reality.
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Some are accepted at age 3, but they are screened beforehand. These are kids whose parents pay $40-50,000 a year. They have had great medical care, nutrition, the best of everything. Not everyone in private schools is smart. But they have small classes and all kinds of advantages.
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I agree!
But the incredible thing is that with all those advantages those private schools still counsel out students! Not often, but it happens.
They have over $40,000 year to spend on students who have had great medical care, nutrition, and the best of everything and even with that enormous advantage, there are still students their supposedly superior teachers are not able to teach even in class sizes of 12.
That why I found Tim’s argument to be so suspect. If he was going to use what happens in Dalton as evidence for anything, it would be that we need to double public school budgets because they are spending half that amount and dealing with students with far more learning issues. That would be an argument someone who cares about public education would make.
It also astounds me that FLERP! characterizes Tim’s arguments as having so many merits when readers can see for themselves how little merit they have.
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It’s beyond just “understandable” that we want our children to be safe and able to receive a quality education at a school that’s nearby. So when a charter starts up in a poor neighborhood, there are going to be a lot of prayers for those sought after lottery spots.
But where did this idea that the ONLY institutions/actions that are available to “save the day” come in the form of privately run schools? This assumes and perpetuates the myth of our “failing” public schools and their uncaring, lazy, selfish, union teachers. A massive propaganda campaign that’s been waged for decades.
In order to establish this myth, the public school is still subject to the same rules, regulations, oversight, enrollment mandates (aka: everyone and anyone), and transparency that they’ve always been required to follow while the charter or private school is NOT (though they are receiving taxpayer dollars. What a deal!). There is no “competition”, here. It’s like putting handcuffs on one of the participants in a tennis match. “See…I told you! He’s old and washed up!”.
Like Lloyd, I’ve taught children and adolescents from extremely poor and violent inner city neighborhoods for decades. We work very, very, very, very, VERY hard to make a difference in these kid’s lives under extremely difficult circumstances. We are not slackers. DeVos, along with her colleagues and predecessors want to run us out of town, calling this a “civil rights issue”, as though poorly qualified teachers in a pretty new building will be a superior alternative. It’s a divisive system (only some are chosen, the rest are turned away) for the community and for us, as a society, in general.
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This is it in a nutshell.
I have been waiting for years for all the journalists to call out this idiocy. It’s almost so obvious that they believe it needn’t be mentioned. While the right pushes the narrative that these charters work miracles.
By the way, this is what Trump’s new “Obamacare replacement” plan is all about.
Now there will be low-cost insurance that offers only coverage for the mild health problems the healthiest Americans have.
Of course, if you need more, you won’t get it. You will be pushed out.
But the low-cost plans will crow about how healthy their patients are and they spend less on them!
Like charter schools, allowing corporations to pick off the healthiest Americans to insure with no obligation to the others (nor any obligation to their own patients should they need more expensive treatment) should be considered the most ridiculous thing in the world.
In a less co-opted democracy, where the thoughtful people in journalism are MIA, the idea that there is a “cost savings” if we allow private insurance companies to profit from only insuring the healthiest Americans would be laughed out the door. We would debate the pros and cons using facts and not lies.
Same with charters. Allowing charters to profit by only teaching the cheapest students should be discussed. With honest.
And maybe the answer would be for public schools to develop their own two-tier system where every district has a dumping ground warehouse school for the kids who are more expensive. Lots more resources to attract parents to the better schools, while the dumping ground schools — who serve the least politically connected families — get as little as possible.
Charter schools are doing this, but lying about it. If public schools started copying their reprehensible practices, the charters would be forced to admit what they did. They could not survive the competition.
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“I have been waiting for years for all the journalists to call out this idiocy.”
We only see the truth on the comedy shows and education journals that the public never reads. The mainstream media is owned and/or heavily influenced by people who are heavily involved in the reform movement. The newscasters and journalists aren’t going to bite the hand that feeds them.
We did have a bit of media involvement when DeVos came aboard, though. She’s so out of her league, it’s impossible to ignore. But more importantly, her voucher/religious school for the masses plan was a direct threat to the charter school investors. Haven’t heard much on that front recently, though. Wonder if they made a deal.
Speaking of the comedians: I think they’re great but am concerned that their message will never get through to the people who need it the most due to their use of profanity on the shows. Doesn’t bother me but I know more than a few people who are completely dismissive, saying they’ll never watch them because of that.
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Yes, working 60-to-100 hours a week and arriving at school when the gates to the parking lot are unlocked at 6 AM and not leaving until after 10 PM while using every moment when your not teaching to correct student work is not the definition of a slacker. That was only Monday through Friday on school days. I also worked at home weeknights and on weekends planning lessons, computing grades and correcting stacks of student work that never ended until the school year came to an end.
In addition to being a classroom teacher, I was also the co-advisor to the student chess club, the student environmental club, and the student journalism club. Where did these clubs meet? In my classroom during lunch or after school. The chess club met every day at lunch. The other clubs once a month.
Then we teachers had unpaid after-school duties to supervise sports competitions held on campus. This kind of supervision had nothing to do with being a coach or umpire. We were there to protect students from bullies and gang bangers so they could watch their friends play soccer, football, baseball, basketball, track and other competitive sports.
You see teachers are not paid overtime. We earn a monthly salary that covers the 10 month school year. Some districts divide that salary up into 12 checks, one a month or 10 checks with no checks arriving during two of the summer months between school years.
If we earn $56,383 (this is the average teacher salary in the United States — but that isn’t what teachers take home. Money is deducted for retirement, union dues, taxes, and whatever else the contract calls for to be deducted.) a year and only worked for the 25 hours of class time with students (five classes a day for one hour each class adds up to about 25 hours of class time instruction a week), our hourly earnings would be so much more but when you are working before school, at lunch, after school and at home seven days a week and that adds up to 60-to-100 hours a week, that $56.383k ends up spread pretty thin.
Here a piece that appeared in Ed Tech that answers How Many Hours Do Educators Actually Work?
The first sentence asks another question: If you were offered a job that paid an average annual salary of $49,000 and required you to work 12- to 16-hour days, would you take it?
This piece comes with a detailed infographic that goes into great detail. And teaching is the profession that greedy, power-hungry corporate reformers of public education like Bill Gates, the Waltons, ALEC and many other billionaires and multi-millionaires are demonizing and attempting to destroy. The average corporate charter teachers work even longer hours for less pay and no benefits and no job protection at all. They can be fired for no reason — for instance complaining about the low pay and long hours in a profit motivated corporate charter school that abuses and bullies both teachers and children.
https://edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2013/08/how-many-hours-do-educators-actually-work
PS: I forgot all the mostly useless meetings before school and after school.
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“PS: I forgot all the mostly useless meetings before school and after school.”
Lol…
Lest we forget those golden moments of inspiration!
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I always took a stack of student papers, a clipboard, and supply of pens with red ink, and I spent the meetings correcting papers.
No administrator ever tried to stop me but then I always sat in the back behind a much larger teacher to shield what I was doing … my real job.
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Lloyd,
I should have added in my charter school analogy to Trump’s new health care plan, the healthiest Americans will buy low-cost private health insurance for the healthiest Americans and have their strep throats treated by physicians’ assistants. And their sprained ankles. And their ear aches. “Look how healthy our patients are with our marvelous self-trained PAs!” the pro- “charter health insurance” promoters will say.
“Our Physician Assistants are so superior to the MDs at that public hospital where we dump our cancer patients who just aren’t nearly as healthy as the patients we allow to remain in our private health insurance system. It’s the superior training our Physician Assistants get that makes all the difference.”
That this is our public policy debate about education shows you how dishonest the privatizers are.
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Under the GOP and Trump, health care means hospitals will be installing body chutes that are similar to laundry chutes so they can dump the bodies into the basement furnaces as fast as they die and then charge the families a few grand for each cremation and when the families don’t pay, they will sick the bill collectors on them.
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What a shame for the students in the charter schools. Not that I agree with charter schools, but I do agree children need competent teachers. First we lowered the standards for kids, now we are lowering it for teachers. What a terrible idea!
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