Peter Greene has written a post in honor of Charter School Week. He notes that it was designated to conflict with Teacher Appreciation Week, but that strikes him as somehow apt. Charters might have been a good idea, but they fell into the hands of the wrong people, that is, people who wanted to use them to bludgeon and destroy public schools.
When Al Shanker first spelled out the idea of charter schools, he envisioned them as a way to help public schools, sort of like an R&D laboratory, using union teachers to help try out new ideas. That was in 1988. When he saw that business entrepreneurs were taking over, he turned against charters. By 1993, he denounced charters and declared they were no different from vouchers, that they had turned into something far different from his vision, and that they would be used to smash unions and privatize public schools. Yet reformers still like to point to Shanker as their founding father, forgetting that he renounced what his idea had morphed into.
Greene writes:
At first glance, putting Charter School Celebration Week O’Self Congratulations on the same week as Teacher Appreciation Week may seem a bit obnoxious, but I’ve come to see it as sort of appropriate, a symbol of how the charter business competes with public school teachers for resources and attention. Kind of like putting Fight Cancer Week and Celebration of Tobacco on the same calendar dates, it encourages people to see that there’s a fundamental conflict here.
Not that there needs to be. The irony for me is that even though I write extensively about the many ways in which modern charters are detrimental to public education and just plain bad policy, it doesn’t actually have to be that way. Charters could work. Charters could be a great addition to the education landscape. But instead, charter fans have chosen to pursue them in the most destructive, counter-productive manner possible. It’s like a landscaper says, “Your yard would look so much better with some azalea bushes,” and you think that, yeah, they would, but then the landscaper puts the bushes in by ripping holes in the front wall of the house and planting the bushes directly into the water and sewage lines for your home.
So I’m going to celebrate charter week with a little reader of posts that have run here, laying out the ways in which the charter industry has gotten it wrong.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Exactly! It irks me that the premise for allowing charters in the first place — i.e. that these are schools for trying out ideas and are not permanent entities — has been dismissed. Charters were never meant to be permanent parallel tracks. We need to revive this discussion. Perhaps Regent Judith Johnson, who was an early advocate of charters, and has seen the subsequent damage, could be a loud voice in explaining how they were meant to be and how things must change. And in any event, there is NO reason whatsoever to maintain relaxed oversight of these institutions. We’ve seen how this opacity allows the charter industry to take terrible advantage of taxpayer dollars and vulnerable chidlren’s lives
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YES: And it is a lucrative opacity which breeds so much chaos that often there is little to regulate from one year to the next. What was put into place one year becomes de-funded and unpopular and so is quickly replaced by the next funded “fixing” theory to come along.
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Brilliant.
It was fascinating to read this because so much of what Peter Greene writes mirrors my own journey from someone who believed charters were an interesting idea and doing good work to someone who realized how dishonest the entire movement had become.
The charter movement reminds me of today’s Republican Party. The people with the most power — the people with virtually all the power — are completely corrupt. There are a few decent folks in the Republican Party and the charter world who are know how utterly corrupt they are, but they are too weak and money-grubbing to speak out. Those decent folks only whisper tiny objections when they know those objections won’t change a thing, while giving their tacit support whenever they are told to shut up and support them. Like the Republican Susan Collins, their primary concern is themselves and they will look the other way at all evil as long as their own position is strong. Susan Collins, who is always willing to oppose something the Republicans want whenever her vote is not needed, and never willing to oppose what her leaders tell her to do whenever she gets her marching orders.
The “good” charters are the Susan Collins of the Republican Party. As long as they do nothing to halt the power of the bad charters to expand and hurt vulnerable students, they can pretend they are independent. But when their support is needed to allow those bad charters free reign, they shut up and do what they are told.
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^^^”Your yard would look so much better with some azalea bushes,” and you think that, yeah, they would, but then the landscaper puts the bushes in by ripping holes in the front wall of the house and planting the bushes directly into the water and sewage lines for your home.”
And the saddest part is the rest of the analogy. What would happen next is that the charter people would say that your yard is the very best yard because the only criteria they judge by is the cosmetic look of the yard and not the destruction and harm they caused real and vulnerable children to create that cosmetic beauty. After all, your neighbors with their own intact water and sewage lines are delighted they have a nice view when they look at your home and since those neighbors are rich and powerful and give that landscaper all of his business and even more in “bonus” money for his good work on your house, that is all that matters.
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I wonder where and when they went so far from how this “movement” was sold to the public, and what happened to cause that.
They’re no longer a “public education” movement. They;re charter and voucher promoters. That is very, very different from how this was sold at the outset.
Because so much of ed reform is driven not by educational leaders but instead by political leaders, I think the gradual and inexorable drift from being “public education advocates” to being “charter and voucher advocates” was ideological. It came about because a substantial segment of the political alliance fundamentally do not believe there should be public schools and those people dominated.
There’s no one at the top in ed reform who advocates on behalf of existing public schools. You wonder how that happened- at what point was the capture so complete that simply supporting an existing public school became anathema.
I noticed it with Obama’s election. I remember after ’08 listening to Duncan and the gang and realizing we had somehow hired a bunch of people who were opposed to public schools. It’s like realizing you mistakenly elected Jeb Bush as national school czar.
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I do wonder if ti’s changing, though. Ohio was one of the first states to be utterly captured by these folks. I recall exactly when they jammed thru one of the first voucher programs and it just snowballed from there.
We’re now having a governors race where politicians from both sides are frantically defending their education record and declaring their eternal devotion to our kids public schools. Obviously, I’m skeptical,but that is what they’re doing 🙂
It is NIGHT and DAY different from the political rhetoric I heard here from 2008 to 2014.
Scott Walker ( of all people) has declared himself a huge supporter of public schools.
Something has them spooked. They’re running away from privatization. Not the lobbyists and the paid privatization advocates, but those people don’t have to get elected and Scott Walker does.
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Watch what they do, not what they say.
When Scott Walker says he supports public schools, he means (like Betsy) any school that gets public money
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In theory charters sound reasonable, but in practice, they have been a political nightmare with dire consequences for public schools. Charters are the nose in the tent that continue to push public schools out of it. Our whole policy is devoted to charters and vouchers, two failing experiments.
I recall after ‘A Nation at Risk’ came out, there was the immediate cry to privatize. Unions held them off until the late eighties. I recall getting a sinking feeling in my stomach when I heard the news the the unions were going to work with the charter movement. I had fought several labor battles in the seventies and eighties, and my instincts to be alarmed were right. I had no idea that the 1% and corporations would behave like the barbarian horde. What has happened is far worse than what I imagined. Corporations and the 1% have captured our policy, and public education is only viewed only as a host to a bunch of snake oil salesmen and parasites. Our young people are given less consideration than the privateers and fraudmeisters. Our so-called representatives take the money and look the other way.
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“Sour Cream”
Nothing is ever
Quite what it seems
The selling is clever
But sour are creams
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In NY, the law that created charter schools says they must have “special emphasis” on students “at risk of academic failure”.
Few do, because they interpret “at risk” to mean students of color or students in poverty, which means the majority of students in urban NYC neighborhoods, most of whom pass their classes. So now question becomes how we define “academic failure” (and now we see why NY’s state tests have the highest bar for passing in the US).
SUNY has announced a new NYC charter school for kids in the foster care system. This to me seems okay because THAT is a more accurate predictor of risk for academic failure than the color of a child’s skin or their parent’s income.
So I would be okay with charters if they followed the law that created them and mostly enrolled the kids actually at risk for academic failure. The Success Academy model was a big bait-n-switch that was planned all along by Republicans like former Governor Pataki.
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If the SUNY Charter Institute was not so corrupt the charter movement in NY might have proceeded in an ethical manner. But ever since Pedro Noguera resigned as the Chair of the SUNY Charter Institute in disgust and the truly unethical Joseph Belluck replaced him, the oversight has been missing. From condoning high rates of suspensions of non-white poor kids in Kindergarten and first grade, to completely ignoring the complaints of parents of special needs kids, to adamantly refusing to look closely at attrition rates, to allowing charters to ignore their own applications and drop priority for at-risk kids and locate in affluent neighborhoods, the SUNY Charter Institute led by Joseph Belluck has not just condoned the very worst practices but has instead rewarded them generously.
And the SUNY Charter Institute is supposed to be the model for the VERY BEST oversight!!!
If SUNY is the very best oversight that exists, that tells us exactly how corrupt the entire system has become.
It astonishes me that no education reporter has looked more closely into the lack of oversight at the SUNY Charter Institute. Their shocking unwillingness to look closely at any charter with billionaire Cuomo donors on their board is near criminal.
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Yep, the SUNY Charter Institute has indeed been hijacked by charter industry cheerleaders. The unlicensed teacher rule was pushed through as a bald power play, and I don’t know where they ever got any legal or regulatory authority to make high Common Core test scores the main indicator of school success.
This runs counter to the legal expectation they would service high need kids, but also flies in the face of the statewide moratorium on using Common Core test scores for high stakes decisions.
Education reporting for NY is worse than absent, it’s heavily influenced by corporate sponsors. But the Times did just report on a push to make it illegal for appointees like Belluck to keep giving campaign contributions to Cuomo.
Belluck, was a $100K+ donor to Cuomo before he was made SUNY charter committee chair but kept giving, claiming he didn’t know it was prohibited to keep giving Cuomo money after his appointment. So the new bill draws specific bright lines against giving money to the governor who appoints you, including spouses and family members.
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Jake Jacobs,
Thank you for that link. That article didn’t even mention Belluck was on the chair of SUNY Charter Institute and that he personally insisted that he and his fellow non-educator board members had the right to decide that Cuomo’s billionaire funders’ favorite charter network should license their own teachers.
Both Belluck and his wife kept giving tens of thousands of dollars after their appointments and their claim that they thought it was perfectly fine rings very hollow.
The NY Times education reporters of course missed this. Not only does the SUNY Charter Institute ignore the rule that the charters they authorize serve high needs kids, but there has not been one investigation into the many complaints Belluck has received from parents of special needs kids who are drummed out of the charter network Belluck insists is so perfect that they train their own teachers.
Remember, the Belluck-led SUNY Charter Institute is the “very best” charter oversight agency in the entire country. So when Belluck says that he is absolutely confident that 18% or 20% or 23% of the non-white Kindergarten and first graders in a charter school are acting out so violently that they needed to be suspended, he is simply providing the “facts” that many racists want to believe. If Joseph Belluck says he did proper oversight and guarantees that every one of those many 5 year olds was horrifically violent, then we should all accept Belluck’s word that they are. Belluck tells us it is so.
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The original Charter School Concept was a good idea … until it was hijacked by autocratic, politically motivated, greedy, serial lying, manipulating, extremist, alt-right billionaires that think they know everything and that wants to control what everyone else thinks and how everyone else lives their lives.
In fact, the original concept is still working … but inside community-based, democratic, transparent, non-profit, traditional public school districts and most if not all of them are now called “alternative schools” that are allowed to be more flexible because they work with the most at-risk children/students.
I’m also sure that these (GREAT) “alternative schools” that were founded on the original “charter school” concept are all at risk because of the obsession with high states rank-and-punish tests that were designed to destroy the traditional public schools, teachers’ unions, and the teaching profession.
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Kind of reminds me of representative government hijacked by the French Jacobins. Soon it became the terror and Maximilian Robespierre emerging from a fake mountain as the God of Reason. Things do not often turn out like we wish they would. We should, as Candide suggested to Pangloss, cultivate our garden.
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The School District of Philadelphia had schools on Al Shanker’s model (Demonstration Schools) long before 1988. One of them, Masterman, has the highest SAT scores in the state an sometimes the nation.
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And who in their right mind cares about SAT score?
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How about the greedy individuals that care more about the profits made from SAT … aAre they insane … not in their right minds?
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Are there any current or former employees that would like to share their experiences being associated with the charter group using multiple names including, Learn4Life, Desert Sands Charter, Mission View Charter, Assurance Learning Center, Alta Vista Innovation and other names that were being listed under the umbrella of Desert Sands Public Charter School, Inc, in Lancaster, CA. We are working with major media and watch dogs legal groups to explore what we allege may be questionable operations as referenced in the “Shasta Ruling” and other incidents cited by multiple public media entities.
We are investigating their reporting systems, transparency regarding funding, teaching methodology and graduation rates.
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To respond for involvement concerning Desert Sands Charter Schools, Inc and umbrella schools, please send email to:
sophieschuylar@gmail.com
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