Alan Singer did not like the editorial in the New York Times declaring that certain charters with high test scores should be allowed to hire uncertified teachers.
If only they read the news stories in their own newspaper, he writes, they would have known better.
He writes:
“Do the editors of the New York Times read their own newspaper? The opening line of their pro-charter school editorial offered faint praise for charter schools. Apparently, “New York City is one of the rare places in the country where charter schools generally have made good on the promise to outperform conventional public schools.” If the statement is true that New York City charter schools “generally” outperform conventional public schools, what about the rest of the charter school industry in the United States?
“According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, “In 2016-17, there are more than 6,900 charter schools, enrolling an estimated 3.1 million students.” In New York City there are only 227 charter schools that enroll a little over 100,000 students. That means 97% of charter schools in the country and 97% of the children attending charter schools are outside New York City and many do underperform. In Michigan, 70% of the charter schools score in the bottom half of the state’s school rankings. As a result of “charterization,” Michigan declined from being an average performing state on math and reading tests to one of the worst. These do not seem like a reason to endorse an expansion of charter schools in New York City or to advocate for removing regulations from the existing schools.
“I visited two excellent New York City charter secondary schools, one in Queens and one in Brooklyn. Neither is part of a “not-for-profit” charter school network or a private for-profit charter school company. Part of what makes them good schools is that they function just like regular public schools, educating diverse young people without making exaggerated claims for student performance or lobbying state officials for extra privileges and waivers.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Like the LA Times, the NY Times editorial board supports the charterizing of the American school system. Facts, even those reported by their own staff, do not matter.
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I gave the nY Times a piece of my mind! already!
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This is exactly why I am delighted that Bill de Blasio won.
For 12 years the reformers could make whatever claims they wanted with the NYC Dept. of Education — those who oversaw public schools — basically cheering on the false claims made by charters.
The reformers and their enablers just about popped a gasket when de Blasio won the first time and they started the very successful campaign to undermine him.
But without a complicit NYC DOE promoting the charter agenda — as Bloomberg’s did — the NY Times reporters started to notice what was really going on in charters.
Unfortunately, the editorial side is still in the tank for them.
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“But without a complicit NYC DOE promoting the charter agenda — as Bloomberg’s did — the NY Times reporters started to notice what was really going on in charters.”
Change that to some NYT reporters. If you remember our discussion earlier in the week .
“SUNY is one of two entities in the state that can grant charters, and the charter schools it oversees include the state’s highest-performing ones. This year, 88 percent of SUNY-authorized charter schools outperformed their districts on the state math tests, and 83 percent outperformed their districts on the state reading tests. Students at Success Academy, which is authorized by SUNY, outperformed not only students in New York City’s traditional public schools but those in every other district in the state.” Kate Taylor OCT. 11, 2017 NYT
This was a News article . Flash Notice any editorial bias in this statement .
Decades ago I remember a Congressional hearing on upgrading our forces in Germany to meet the threat from the Eastern Block .
The General is making all sorts of alarming statements as to Soviet capabilities. . At some point the Congressman asks would you trade forces with the Soviet General . The answer was “HELL NO!!!!!!!!” .
Forget the lack of discussion about sample bias in the article .
Where would Kate Taylor send her children to school . Chappaqua school district or Success Academy. “outperformed “
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And this from the Daily News .
“Six students out of 54 Success Academy eighth-graders who took the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test were offered seats in 2016 at one of the elite high schools that rely on the test, like Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech or Bronx Science, Moskowitz said in a wide-ranging interview with the Daily News Editorial Board.
That’s up from zero kids who gained seats in 2014 and 2015.
The performance is below the city average acceptance rate of nearly 19%. However, all of the Success Academy kids who took the test and gained acceptance are black or Hispanic, making her acceptance rate of 11% about twice the citywide average for students of color. Only 4% of black students and 6% of Hispanic students who took the test got offers in 2016.”
So we qualify the fact that they under-perform the average by 50% by
pointing out that they are all minority students. Yet we neglect again to mention that the selection bias and attrition rates may be responsible for the better performance.
So sick of “fake news”
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The NY Daily News has long been the PR arm of Success Academy.
Whenever there is a SA press release touting some “newsworthy” event, the NY Daily News transcribes it posthaste. One of their reporters – Ben Chapman – is an especially embarrassing shill for the charter network. Even when he reports a news event where a parent is criticizing the charter, Chapman goes out of his way to find “random” parents (which he obviously found by asking his pals at SA to provide them) ready with praise for their child’s experience. And he loves to hype “scandals” to denigrate any public school like the Bronx Science off campus Fight Club that he wanted readers to know was all the fault of the crummy public school administrators who should have stopped it but they were far too inept or corrupt or whatever Chapman’s attack of the week is.
Kate Taylor at the NY Times does a far better job in questioning the PR. However, since the powers that be at the NY Times are the tank for charters, I imagine there is pressure for her to be “fair and balanced” in the Fox News sense. That is, make sure the most powerful charters are always given every benefit of the doubt and treated with kid gloves.
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NYC public school parent
“However, since the powers that be at the NY Times are the tank for charters, I imagine there is pressure for her to be “fair and balanced” in the Fox News sense”
So we agree again the problem is the oligarchs who own the media .
Let me go vomit now because for you education is the central issue For me it is the clearest example of how the oligarchy maintains control . Something about that word makes me feel like an early 20th or late 19th century socialist . Perhaps there are striking similarities to the age of robber barons.
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Joel,
For me, it isn’t that education is the central issue. It is that there is absolutely no reason that I can see why anyone who opposes the oligarchy should not also be opposing the movement to privatize public education.
You never believe me when I tell you I voted for Sanders in the primary, but I have no reason to lie to you. I did. And the reason I did is because I believed his message was as important as you do. And he was able to get that message out despite what you believe is a media controlled by oligarchs. It’s funny to me when I see some Sanders supporters who felt the NY Times was as biased against their candidate in the primary as I thought they were biased against Hillary during the last 5 months of the campaign.
I read the NY Times every day and I voted for Sanders and so did many people I know who read the NY Times. The ones who didn’t had what I felt were legitimate reasons to vote for Hillary that weren’t based on false characterizations from the media. It wasn’t so much anti-Bernie as simply believing that Hillary had traits that would make her a better leader. Ironically, I didn’t see those traits myself until I watched the convention and the debates and was thrilled at how she was embracing the progressive movement and not running away from it. I’m pretty cynical in politics, and I never found Hillary’s embrace of the progressive ideas phony as many Bernie voters did. I keep posting that video of her talking about education because it is so obvious to me that she isn’t listing talking points — she knows the issue and gets it. I am full aware that Hillary is willing to make more compromises that Bernie would, but everything about her life told me that her compromises would be made for decent reasons and not just to please some big donor. (I know we probably disagree on that). And since the election, I came to be frustrated with Bernie’s position on public education in which I just couldn’t understand why he could not just straight out support it. It reminded me of Obama where I didn’t think either of them was intentionally corrupt but there seemed to be a determined obliviousness that eventually made me – as you would put it – vomit.
I do worry when the entire media becomes painted as simply a corrupt tool of the oligarchs because we lose a valuable safeguard of democracy. By all means call out when a specific thing is wrong, but don’t simply dismiss the entire media as corrupt. It’s what happened with the Democrats where the entire party was painted as so corrupt that the good people in it get thrown out with the bad and the winners are the Bannon/Republican forces of chaos which does no good.
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If these charters “function just like public schools,” why have them?
The duplication of services means that children in both systems are not getting the full amount of funding they need.
WHY have two separate and parallel systems?
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Bingo!
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“Charter but Equal”
“Charter but equal”
Is just what they need
The logical sequel
To earlier deed
Cuz charter is legal
But “separate” is not
A way to inveigle
A dastardly plot
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New York IS one of the rare places in the country where charter schools “outperform” public schools.
Which is why it’s so baffling that every single ed reformer pushes charter schools from NY down to Florida and across to California.
We’ve had charter schools in Ohio for 15 years. They’ve gotten ENORMOUS support from state politicians, pretty much non-stop cheerleading from the US Department of Education and a whole bevy of private lobbyists and marketers and they STILL don’t “outperform” public schools.
Ohio urban charters pull 50% of their students from outside areas served by urban public schools and even with that, they still don’t do better.
I can read the NYTimes editorials cheerleading charter schools and compare that to ANY Ohio urban newspaper’s substantive coverage of the facts on charter schools and you would not believe the two newspapers are talking about the same policy. It’s like two trains running – the national hype on ed reform and the local coverage and- these two trains never intersect. One doesn’t inform or in any way influence the other.
It’s amazing. Not only do the NYTimes editors not read their own newspaper, they never read any other local newspapers.
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I can listen to a national ed reformer pushing charter schools on National Public Radio and immediately after that, I can listen to the local NPR coverage of Ohio’s charter reality and the 2nd report will almost completely contradict the first.
This is fine in ed reform. They see no problem at all with this inconsistency with reality.
It happens all the time. The national lobbyists insist these schools are non-profit yet I know the charter school in the county over is NOT a non-profit. Doesn’t matter. Next week I’ll hear the same claim. As long as there is ONE nonprofit charter school anywhere in the country everyone in the country will be told these schools are non-profit. That’s close enough to “true” for ed reform.
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Here’s ed reform’s big contribution to public schools this year:
• Moving state tests to the last four weeks of the school year to give teachers more time to teach—and reducing dead time at year’s end. (The previous state testing window started in March.)
• Requiring that teachers receive the scores of their incoming students before the next year starts.
• Including in the score reports that are sent home to parents:
• Information about students’ strengths and areas for improvement
• Specific suggestions for actions parents can take on their child’s behalf
• Data on proficiency and growth over time, over multiple years
• When available, projections of how students with scores like theirs are expected to score on the ACT or SAT
• Returning the results from any formative assessments, like the MAP or iReady, to classroom teachers within one week and to parents within thirty days.
• Publishing the statewide testing schedule two years in advance to give districts maximum flexibility to plan their calendars.
100% testing. I know these people never enter a public school but would someone inform them kids in public schools do other things besides testing?
This is the sum total of the value they add. Testing Tips. I’m fairly confident the adults in my son’s school can handle the mechanics of standardized testing. We really need 50,000 highly paid lobbyists to scold public schools on proper testing techniques?
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I went to public schools and I have had 4 children thru Ohio public schools and I have yet to see a single improvement that can be credited to the ed reform “movement”
What value have they added to PUBLIC schools? There are tens of thousands of them. Surely there’s something they can point to. I should be able to walk into any public school in the country and say “THAT- that’s the improvement”
We have a great music program. Not only did ed reformers not build it, they don’t even support it. If it were up to them it would have been cut long ago. The ONLY reason it still exists is the local public supports it.
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The Times editor probably goes to cocktail parties in the bubble with the “reform” crowd.
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That bubble appears to be growing rapidly as public education money is opened up to yet more scammers, schemers and opportunists: Can we hope that one day the originally small bubble will stretch itself so far that it bursts?
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I like Alan Singer’s opinion article on Huffington Post. But I have noplace to say so at HuffPost: the few articles they have on ed have… no comment threads. Same w/ many other articles at HuffPo. HuffPo always has come in like a staticky shortwave station for me, w/many resets in order to view& respond to comments, but now comment threads themselves are sparse. And the platform– at least as it displays on my IPad– has become so inscrutable that I can find neither a menu nor a place to send this critique. So I have stopped reading HuffPo!
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NYC Public School Parent: as to your 4:30 PM comment–exactly what I was thinking! Bill’s (overwhelming, to boot) re-election should give Eva & her ilk some food for thought.
Take those deformers & charter charlatans down, NYC, & congratulations on re-electing your mayor.
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The NY Times editorial side is already trying to undermine de Blasio.
Did you know that despite de Blasio’s nearly 40% margin of victory, the NY Times editors wrote this in Thursday’s editorial:
“Before leaving the New York City elections behind, let’s note a few things the voters did not do.
For starters, they did not necessarily give Mayor Bill de Blasio the mandate he repeatedly proclaimed after winning 66 percent of the vote on Tuesday. “Mandate” can be an abused word in American politics. Winners have a way of claiming it even without a majority or even a plurality (see: Bush, George W., and Trump, Donald).”
Say what??? Talk about the most absurd false equivalency. Trump and Bush lost the popular vote. Mayor de Blasio won the vote by nearly 40 percentage points. And the NY Times grasps at straws pretending there is no difference. Because of the low turnout.
When Mayor Bloomberg ran for his second term he had a margin of victory half the size of de Blasio’s margin with a turnout just a bit higher than de Blasio’s. And the NY Times was awed at his huge victory and made no effort to undermine it the way they did both elections with de Blasio.
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Tough luck, New York Times.
The people voted with their feet.
And THEIR voices have been & will be heard.
Yes, WE can!!!
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This seems to be true at The Post too, where Fred Hiatt endorsed the war in Iraq even though The Post news pages reported that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and where Jo-Ann Armao has not only written – falsely – the American public education is broken, but also has defended the Michelle Rhee-DC schools cheating scandal, which involved HUGE numbers of changed test answers, always wrong to right, by opining that there were “many innocent explanations for changed answers.”
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This pro-charter candidate told voters he was an “agnostic” and would work for all schools:
“I feel good about the substance of what was accomplished, but I also feel good about the process,” school board member Nick Melvoin said after the meeting. Melvoin, who ousted the previous board president in the spring elections with support from charters, took a leadership role in getting the two sides to reach an agreement. The negotiations were conducted between the charter school operators and the Charter Schools Division staff and the superintendent’s office.”
Have they done ANYTHING to benefit or improve existing public schools since they got there? Can any public school family point to one improvement or benefit since they took over the board?
Once again, the entire focus is on opening as many charter schools as quickly as possible.
Now the superintendents office ALSO spends all their time on charters. In a place where something like 60% of families use the unfashionable and neglected public schools.
That’s what “collaboration” means in ed reform- charter promoters don’t just work exclusively for charters, public school superintendents also work exclusively for charters.
Public schools are never even mentioned in these glowing articles- it’s as if those families don’t exist. The only way an outsider reading this stuff knows public schools still exist in LA is I assume they are the existing schools in the buildings where charters will be “co-located”.
https://www.the74million.org/article/la-charter-schools-win-policy-changes-that-give-them-more-clarity-avoid-most-denials/?utm_content=bufferdcfe2&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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The new pro-charter board carefully excluded the public school advocates from the decisions, decisions which obviously effect every student in the district:
“Notable Tuesday were the unanimous votes on all charter decisions, including three charter petitions that were denied. It was the first time since the new charter-backed majority took over in July that a board meeting was not marked by a 4–3 vote.
“I was not included nor asked for any input, and I encourage my colleagues to be inclusive and transparent so that all board members have input into this process,” McKenna said.
Melvoin said the involvement of other board members was limited because of the Brown Act, the state’s open meeting law.”
Unanimous votes are the goal. Thank goodness they’ve purged the dissenters so the agenda can roll along unimpeded by a real debate.
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Evidently not….
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“The Times they are a changin'”
“All the news that’s counterfeit
To print” is what you’ll find in it
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