Charter advocates like to say that a charter school is a public school.
Peter Greene lays out the conditions that charter schools must meet to be considered public Schools.
Here are three of those conditions. There are more.
“If it is owned and operated by the local community and their duly elected representatives. If you can call the people who run your school to talk about your school, and it’s not a long distance call, that might be a public school. If your school is run by a board of directors who must all stand for election by the taxpayers who foot the bill for your school, you are probably a public school.
“If it is operated with financial transparency. If any taxpayer can walk into the main district office and request a copy of the budget and receive a copy, that’s a public school system. If you have the opportunity to call or meet with those local elected board members t argue about how your tax dollars are being spent, it’s probably a public school.
“If it cannot turn down a single student from your community. Your school system may sort students into specialized schools, or it may pay the cost of sending Very Special Need students to Highly Specialized schools, but it cannot ever deny unilaterally responsibility for students just because they cost a lot of money or require specialized programs or just fail to behave compliantly. If your school system can’t wave a student off and say, “She’s not our problem,” your system is probably a public school system….
“You can say that a pig is a cow. You can dress it up in a cow suit and just keep insisting over and over that it’s a cow, correcting everyone who says differently. But at the end of the day, when you butcher it, you still get pork.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ed reformers are going in the opposite direction in Indianapolis- they are turning public schools over to private contractors except they don’t call them “charters” anymore- they insist they’re different somehow although it’s really just a change in branding. The charter “brand” must be damaged so they’re pulling another fast one on the public by insisting this new “sector” isn’t privatized.
Apparently they’ve dropped their principled opposition to for-profit management orgs too, since Indiana allows and even encourages for-profit management contracts.
How much does Charter Schools USA take in in revenue, I wonder? Are those “adults” self-interested or does that smear only apply to public schools? How many adults are pulling a profit out of managing “public” schools right now, today? It’s gotta be thousands.
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Peter Greene hit the nail on the head. You need to follow his rules he laid out and if the charter schools don’t meet the rules then write a letter to editor asking for accountability for your tax dollars. Copy your elected officials.
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Here’s the Charter Schools USA website. Try to find a single name of anyone who works there, what they’re paid, what the profits this year are, or anything else about where the public money goes.
Good luck! Completely and utterly opaque. They’re plowing public money into an entity who have absolutely no responsibility or accountability to the public.
The only thing “public” about this is the funding. They created a whole new publicly-funded industry.
http://www.charterschoolsusa.com/
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“it may pay the cost of sending Very Special Need students to Highly Specialized schools,”
How is this any different than charters referring students to district schools who have the staff, resources, facilities, and experts to handle Special Need students.
“it cannot ever deny unilaterally responsibility for students just because they cost a lot of money or require specialized programs or just fail to behave compliantly.”
So magnet district schools are not public schools.
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It isn’t just magnet district schools. Show me a high-performing, socioeconomically non-diverse, non-integrated traditional neighborhood elementary school in New York City, and I will show you a school with tiny or often literally zero children requiring intensive special education services.
http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/15/K321/AboutUs/Statistics/register.htm
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Tim and Cynthia are ignoring the inconvenient fact that the “magnet public schools” are PART of the public school system. It is no different than teaching children in a different classroom or on a different floor or in side by side schools. The system teaches ALL students even if they are not in the magnet program.
It’s as absurd as Tim and Cynthia saying that since they can point to a public high school AP Calculus BC class that doesn’t accept all students, that justifies charters kicking out any 5 year old who struggles with math.
In the pro-charter “logic” represented by Tim, if there is a public school AP class that doesn’t have a representative number of special needs children, then charters should be able to refuse to teach as many special needs kids as they want period. Charters shouldn’t have the obligation to teach them ANYWHERE. Not in another school. Not in another floor. Not in another room. Isn’t that what public school systems do?
No, they don’t, Tim. They don’t say “we’ll establish this magnet and the kids who don’t get in can be on the street. Or better yet, we’ll force charters to teach them all.” They teach them. Charters refuse to teach them anywhere. Pretending that is the same thing is outrageous and speaks volumes to how low the pro-charter folks will stoop to justify their refusal to teach any child they choose not to teach.
People who make dishonest arguments to justify gigantic charter chains’ refusal to teach their legally mandated number of at-risk kids are about as honest at the ones who endorse Betsy DeVos as a terrific choice for Secretary of Education.
Dishonest people should not be charged with teaching children. Can you imagine the values that get taught in charter schools that use these kind of dishonesty?
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I agree that magnet district schools wold have a hard time passing a definition of “public schools” that would exclude charter schools. Of course there are some charter schools that could pass this or any reasonable definition of “public school”.
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Sorry, but magnet schools operate under the control of an elected school board. Charters do not. The finances of magnet schools are available to the public. Charter schools’ finances are not.
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If your criteria is elected school boards, many schools that folks think are public schools would not qualify.
School boards do not generally control admission to qualified admission high schools. Are they under the control of school boards?
Of course there are many charter schools that are under the control of school boards. I would assume that they count as public schools.
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Charter schools do not have elected school boards.
Selective admission high schools in public districts are subject to democratic control.
Bronx Science is selective admission. It is not a charter school. Its finances and admissions policies are subject to state laws. Charter schools are governed by private, self-selected boards. Usually, they make their own rules about admission and discipline. They are exempt from many state laws regarding due process and state labor laws.
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Does the NYC Public School Board or NYC Public superintendent have authority over admissions to Bronx Science?
State law of course applies to all charter schools. In some states, for example, only the local school board can authorize a charter school, other states allow many different charter authorities. Here is a link to a story about the Newton Public School District’s coming vote on closing the Walton Rural Life Charter School: http://www.thekansan.com/news/20170313/decision-on-walton-rural-life-center-coming-in-may . That publicly elected school board certainly thinks it has authority over that charter school.
I think that this attempt to draw a line and say schools on one side of the line are “public schools” and schools on the other side of the line are “not public schools” is going to fail. There is too much diversity in school districts and charter schools. There will be too many schools that straddle any possible boundary.
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Is Boeing a public service? Is Harvard a public university?
There are lines that can be drawn. For example, public schools never operate for profit. About 20% of charters do.
The NLRB and federal courts have repeatedly said that charters are not “state actors.”
Public schools are.
They drew a line.
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The really important question is how many lobsters are there. How many in the whole world?
What does Boeing have to do with this conversation, or Harvard for that matter?
Has the NLRB ruled that charter schools in Kansas, Virginia, or Wisconsin are not state actors? How on earth can the Newton Public School district close a private school?
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ThecNLRB has twice ruled that charters are not state actors. Federal courts in AZ and CA have ruled that charters are not state actors. Charters sought that designation so they are not subject to the same laws as public schools.
A charter chain in NYC closes all its schools for the day to bus students, staff, and parents to Albany to lobby for more money. Any superintendent or principal in a public school who did that would be fired at once.
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teachingeconomist,
I find it odd that you claim to be an “economist” but ignore basic economic theories.
You are trying to compare a PART to a whole.
Corrupt health insurance companies drop patients who get cancer. Honest health insurance companies understand that while it does cut into their profits, part of offering health insurance means that you take on the cost of ALL patients and don’t drop them when they get sick.
Fake economists who are trying to support something that is economically unfeasible say ‘it’s okay for the corrupt health insurance companies that I like to dump every sick patient that they want to dump because that honest health insurance company over there treats patients at Sloan-Kettering but doesn’t let them go to NYU.”
Dumping is not the same as providing health care in another place. Dumping is not the same as providing an education in another place.
I suspect you know that because if you don’t, then I hope you don’t teach economics to anyone.
It doesn’t matter how many magnet public schools there are because the students NOT in the magnet schools are still being taught.
Is there ANY public school system that simply refuses to be responsible for students who aren’t in the magnets and dumps them on the street the way charters insist that they should have a right to do?
I find it very revealing that teachingeconomist is NOT arguing that charters should be able to teach their special needs students in different schools as opposed to having a class in every school.
Instead you are comparing apples to oranges in an attempt to justify why charters should be able to dump any students they want. Just like some people argue the same about health insurance companies. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to dump students or patients whom they don’t feel like teaching?
The fact that you are twisting yourself into knots to justify why charters should be able to dump kids makes me question your motives. You must know that the students who don’t get into Stuy are NOT abandoned to the streets. Just like the corrupt economist who pretends that health insurance companies who treat cancer patients at Sloan-Kettering and not NYU are no different than the corrupt insurance companies that simply dump them on the street.
If you have to use false arguments that would be laughed out of any economics class to justify why one system should get to kick out any children they wish and the other system should not, then you have no business calling yourself “teachingeconomist.”
You either don’t understand basic economists or are willfully being deceitful.
Because the fact that there is a public magnet school doesn’t mean the students not in that magnet school are refused an education by the public school system.
But you keep insisting that charters have the right to do just that. Refuse to teach kids, period.
Why?
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NYC PSP,
Do try to concentrate on the argument presented. Endless ad hominem arguments do nothing to push the discussion forward.
In your terms, my argument is that there is no “whole” when it comes to charter schools because if the diversity across the country and no real “whole” when it comes to the diversity of traditional public schools across the country. The bumper sticker binary division of schools into “public” and “not public” does not work and is not useful.
I think a good exercise would be to try and define “public” schools based on characteristics of the schools and see how that sorts schools into “public” and not “public” schools. For example, you might want to use the criteria of “largely controlled by locally elected school board”. If that is one criteria, you would have to decide if state control of admissions, like that in NYC Public qualified admission high schools, disqualifies those schools from being “public”. You would also have to include charter schools in Kansas and many in Wisconsin as “public” schools despite the charter name.
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May I suggest that there is a qualitative difference between Kansas and NYC when it comes to charter schools as well as many other topics. Your state’s ten charters do not enable you to understand NYC at all.
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teachingeconomist,
The more you post, the more I see you are quite ignorant of the issues. I didn’t realize you are using Kansas as your reference. I would never presume to make sweeping statements about Kansas charters since I admit to knowing nothing about them. I wish you would not do this with NYC charters in your attempt to support the people who promote them.
For the record, here are some things you don’t know:
Just because the state requires the establishment of magnet schools whose admission will be ONLY via a test, the decision as to what is on that test is up to the NYC Dept. of Education.
Furthermore, once the children are IN that magnet school, the magnet school is run entirely by the department of education. The magnet school can’t say “I’m choosing to suspend these kids for not being smart enough and I’m going to pretend it’s because they are all violent” like charter schools can do. Do you know why? Because a magnet school is PART of the NYC public school system and the charter school is not. The rules for how you treat a student are the same because it is PART of the system.
Stuy doesn’t get to say to the DOE — “keep away we are doing anything we want and if we decide these kids are too much bother to teach, we are expelling them and you can’t do anything about it.” Stuy’s administrators don’t get to say: “I’m hiring this nice kid who just graduated from college and won’t complain about the way we treat the kids who we put on got to go lists and we’ll fire that teacher if he complains that we are mistreating children.”
So my kindest interpretation is that your insistence that there is no difference between a magnet and charter is simply ignorance and not a blatant attempt to promote something that is untrue.
You also don’t seem to know that there are charter networks that are larger than the school systems of major cities yet they simply refuse to teach ALL the children who win their lottery as they are supposed to be doing.
Imagine if Kansas simply told some children they decided they weren’t worthy of attending public schools in Kansas anymore and they just refused to teach them. But nearby Missouri was obligated to take all children Kansas didn’t want to teach. If you lived in Kansas you’d love it (as long as your child wasn’t one of the unwanted ones). And you might be selfish enough to say that as long as your child gets the benefit of all that cost-savings, you are delighted that those other children are left to rot. But even if that is “popular” (because only 30% of the Kansas children are told they must go to Missouri if they want an education, leaving the majority to think it is just grand), it doesn’t make it right.
And there is no economic argument for why is it better for BOTH Kansas and Missouri to have this system. It is good for Kansas and very, very bad for Missouri to be obligated to teach all the special needs kids that Kansas is sending them with Missouri taking on the ENTIRE financial responsibility for their education.
That is how charters work.
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NYC PSP,
I pointed out that the NYC Public does not control admissions to the qualified admission high schools. That is controlled by NY State law. The state allows the local district to choose the test My locally elected school board does control admissions to all of its schools. Does that make my local traditional schools more “public” than those in NYC Public?
The Walton Rural Life Charter School is entirely run by the Newton Kansas Public School Board. All charter schools in Kansas are run by the local school board. If you don’t like to talk about Kansas schools, you might want to look at a list of Wisconsin Charter Schools by characteristics of the schools (here is a link: https://dpi.wi.gov/sites/default/files/imce/sms/Charter-Schools/16-17%20Searchable%20database%20of%20schools.xlsx ). All of the schools labeled “Inst” (181 out of the 237) are “instrumentalities” of the local school board. Among other things it means that all people working in a charter school are employed by the local school district and are subject to the rules and regulations that apply to any other district employee. They are part of the school district. If you want to look at a coast, what about traditional Horace Mann Charter Schools in Massachusetts? In these schools the charter school is approved by the locally elected school board, remains on the locally elected school board’s budget. There is a non-democratic aspect to these charter schools, however, as a private orginization’s approval is often required to open this type of charter schools.
The world is a messy place, with wide variation in charter laws across the country. If control by a local school board is your criteria for a “public school”, many charters are “public” schools.
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TE, sorry I don’t understand your point.
According to federal courts of appeal (just below the Supreme Court), charter schools are NOT state actors. They are contractors when privately managed. NLRB said the same.
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You argue for the sake of argument. I have kicked you out of the blog twice before for this reason. You add no light. Just argumentation.
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Dr. Ravitch,
The charter schools I am discussing in Kansas, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts are publicly managed, so a case about privately managed charter schools is irrelevant to my point.
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If they do not have private, self-selected school boards, then they are part of the public school system. That is not typical of charters. The charter chains have private boards.
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“The charter schools I am discussing in Kansas, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts are publicly managed…”
If they are publicly managed, what makes them charter schools versus magnet or choice schools?
There are schools like that in the NYC public school system. They are not called charters.
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NYC PSP,
State law determines what is and what is not called a charter school in each state. The State of New York has a different definition from the State of Wisconsin. I hope that you can forgive those of us who live in flyover states for not taking the definition of the State of New York as definitive.
Perhaps now you can appreciate the diversity of charter schools across the country and agree with me that it would be very difficult to define “public” schools in a way that disqualifies all charter schools but allows all magnet schools. That was, after all, my point at the beginning of this discussion.
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teachingeconomist,
So you are saying that in your state, magnet schools run by the local public school system are called “charters”?
The definition used by NY State is the definition used by almost every state. The charters you described would just be magnets since you claim the board of education has complete control and could shut them down in a minute if they wanted to do so.
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NYC PSP,
There are important differences in state laws about charter schools. The Education Commission of the States provides a data base of these differences. You can access it here: https://www.ecs.org/charter-school-policies/
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TE,
You come here to distract and confuse discussions. You argue the libertarian view and you contribute nothing.
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TE,
You also didn’t answer my question:
In Kansas, can the public school board of education shut down that charter if it chooses? Does it appoint the people who run it?
Don’t direct me to a link. If you can’t simply answer yes to that question, then you seem to be trying to mislead us.
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NYC PSP,
That is correct. The local school board in Kansas can close a charter school.
Recall my comment earlier in this thread (https://dianeravitch.net/2017/11/22/peter-greene-here-are-the-conditions-that-make-a-charter-school-a-public-school/comment-page-1/#comment-2760155) with a link to a news report about the Newton Public School Board’s upcoming decision to close or keep open the Walton Community Roots Charter School.
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If the local school board can close it, it is not what is generally understood as a charter.
The NYC School Board can’t close any charters. No one can close KIPP or Gulen charters except their own private board.
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NYC PSP,
This arrangement is not unique to Kansas. According to the information assembled by the Education Commission of the States, local public school boards can revoke or not renew a schools charter in Colorado (If it was the body that approved the charter to begin with), Maryland (each county school board must develop a charter policy that includes the possibility of revoking a charter), New Mexico, Pennsylvania (this appears to have been in litigation when the data was collected), Virginia, and Wyoming in addition to Kansas.
State boards of education can revoke or not renew charter schools in California, Connecticut, Georgia, and North Carolina.
Most states allow the authorizer of the charter school to revoke the charter, so if the local school board is the chartering authority, the school board can close the charter school as well.
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State boards are controlled by red state governors and by governors in blue states that support charters—Conn., NY, CA.
Read the NAACP report on charters.
Charters are unaccountable and non-transparent.
When you hand out public money without supervision, bad things happen.
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“Most states allow the authorizer of the charter school to revoke the charter, so if the local school board is the chartering authority, the school board can close the charter school as well.”
The AUTHORIZER can close it down. Not the school board.
Are you claiming that there is no authorizer other than the local school board in Kansas?
I don’t have a problem with charters that are authorized by school boards.
Will you agree with the idea that the ONLY charters we should have are those authorized by local schools boards?
If you don’t agree with that, then you are here to be deceptive.
There might be a very few instances of local boards authorizing what are, in essence, magnet schools that are called charters. And if there is absolutely no difference between that charter and magnet school in terms of who has the power to hire and fire administrators and support or close down the school, then they meet the definition of a “public” school in my opinion. But then again, those “magnet/charters” run by the local boards are not like the vast majority of charters which don’t have any local control.
Are you willing to support only locally controlled charters? If you aren’t, that means that you actually know that there are almost no locally controlled charters and your desire to see the privatization of charters is because you like that they are not locally controlled.
You can’t have it both ways. The very few locally controlled charters can call themselves public schools and stay open as long as the local board of education wants them to stay open. Other charters should close down because they are not public. Agree?
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NYC PSP,
There are no authorizers for charter schools in Kansas other than local school boards.
You are factually incorrect, however, when you claim that only the authorizers can close a charter school. If you would take another look at my post above you will note that some states, for example, allow the state board of education to close ANY charter school in the state. Also note that the states of Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Virginia, and Wyoming specifically give the local school board the right to close charter schools.
It is good that you have no problem with the hundreds of publicly controlled charter schools. Perhaps you could use the phrase “privately controlled charter schools” rather than just “charter schools” in your critical comments. It would be a more accurate reflection of your point of view and keep you from needlessly alienating the many thousands of families who send their students to these publicly controlled charter schools.
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There is a difference between a charter created and supervised by the local school board and the vast majority that are not.
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TE,
Is this better?
If there are states where the lottery schools are established and operated by the local board of education – which has complete control of how they are run – are called “charters”, then those charter/magnet schools are certainly public schools.
I didn’t realize there were a few states that called magnet or lottery public schools (as we know them in NYC) “charters”.
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To answer your question: Those charters who “refer” said students to the public schools do not pay for their education. And if they are referred after a certain date, then the charter gets to keep the full year’s amount of the very public tax monies for that student even though they are not then providing any services.
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Whenever I see pro-charter folks making dishonest arguments I always wonder what they’d do if we turned it around.
What if charter schools were for those who won the lottery plus every student referred by public schools who they decided was too much bother to handle?
I wonder how long before the number of students entering the charter lottery dropped precipitously since every charter was filled with the students whom public schools sent there because they decided they were too much bother to teach?
In fact, if the pro-charter folks believed their own rhetoric, they’d say that would be a great system because those charters have proven they could get great results with all students.
But, funny, charters aren’t fighting for that. Instead they fight to have the right to suspend as many 5 year olds as they want as many times as they want. And the right to refuse to teach kids with special needs.
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My children’s traditional NYC DOE public schools aren’t overseen by a board who must stand for election by the taxpayers, so I guess they don’t attend public schools.
I will walk over to Tweed next week and request a copy of the budget, but I suspect my kids’ district will fail on that front as well.
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Let us know how your trek for those elusive district finances go!
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Might need not be a public school if the teachers tithe to the Iman who was run out of his own country, and is now running the charter/religious schools!
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“But at the end of the day, when you butcher it, you still get pork.”
And butchering is exactly what has been happening to public schools.
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Diane, it is misleading and disingenuous to say that all charter schools do not have elected school boards when you know that in many states charters have elected boards (some even have majority teacher boards). Many also serve higher percentages of students with disabilities, minorities, and those living in poverty. Plus, it would be easier in many charters to get full financials than in a large traditional district. Diane, I have no problem with you pointing out the many flaws in the charter school movement, but you can do better than omitting facts for your own agenda.
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Got some facts to back up your assertions?
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Duane,
All the charter schools in Kansas are run by the local school board. The majority of charter schools in Wisconsin are run by the local school board.
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Unfortunately, most charter schools in the nation are not run by local school boards. The NAACP proposed that all charters should be run and authorized by local school boards, to meet their needs and to supervise them. In many states, like California and Michigan, Charter schools have no supervision and there have been numerous cases of fraud and embezzlement
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