Sarah Lahm is an independent journalist based in Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in The Progressive, In These Times and other local and national publications. She blogs about education at brightlightsmallcity.com.
Should progressives embrace charter schools?
This question came up again recently when Teach for America alum and apparent expert on school choice, Conor P. Williams, landed an op-ed in the June 3 New York Times. Williams, who is now an education policy analyst with the New America Foundation, used Minneapolis’s Hiawatha Academies charter school chain as a key example of why, in his opinion, liberal and progressive activists should indeed be pro-charter school.
In 2017, Hiawatha Academies, which operates five highly segregated charter schools in Minneapolis, received a federal school choice expansion grant worth over $1 million dollars, courtesy of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. The money has likely been absorbed into Hiawatha Academies’ expansion plans, as the charter network seeks to enroll “6.2% of the Minneapolis student population” in the coming years.
Being affiliated in any way with DeVos and her devotion to accountability-free school choice schemes is probably uncomfortable for a charter school network like Hiawatha Academies, which likes to bill itself as progressive. DeVos continues to not only staunchly defend a Wild West-style approach to public education, she is also heavily engaged in rolling back many federal education policies that are there to protect the nation’s most vulnerable students.
Frankly, it is becoming harder and harder to separate, or pretend to separate, school choice and the spread of segregated charter schools from Betsy DeVos.
Perhaps that is why many of the links in Williams’ op-ed are as stale as the very premise underlying his piece. His first paragraph includes a description of an elementary school in the Hiawatha Academies’ chain, complete with a charming image of a teacher standing before students in a colorful kindergarten classroom. This, Williams proclaims, is one of “Minnesota’s best public schools.” To support this, he links to a celebratory 2012 PR-laden article written by Minnesota based education writer, Beth Hawkins.
Hawkins’ piece was published in MinnPost, a local online news outlet. Here’s why that matters: Hawkins’ stint as an education reporter at MinnPost was funded by the Bush Foundation, one of many local philanthropic groups that has bestowed money, clout and endless public relations support on the growth of charter schools in Minnesota. Oh, and MinnPost was started and run for years by former Minneapolis Star Tribune publisher, Joel Kramer. (Hawkins has since become the national education correspondent for the reform-funded outlet, The 74.)
Here’s why that matters: Kramer’s two sons, Matt and Eli, are both heavily invested in the national and local education reform movement. While Matt was serving as the co-CEO of Teach for America, Eli was busy “growing” the Hiawatha Academies charter school network, which serves mostly Latino families in south Minneapolis. It would be fair to say that the Kramer family has close political and financial ties to elite education reform policy makers and financiers, in Minnesota and on the national stage.
Eli Kramer is leaving Hiawatha Academies. The charter school chain’s new executive director is Colette Owens, another Teach for America acolyte who received her administrative training through a reform-funded venture, the School Systems Leaders Fellowship. Kramer made over $170,000 annually as head of Hiawatha Academies’ five school sites; Owens’s salary has not been publicly disclosed. (For comparison purposes, Ed Graff, superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools and its 60+ sites, has a contract worth $225,000.)
The Hiawatha Academies’ site (Morris Park) profiled by Williams sits in one of the two Minneapolis Public Schools buildings purchased by the charter school chain nearly ten years ago, on its path to grow its market share. “Hiawatha schools should be easy for the left to love,” Williams insists, before promising (without any evidence) that the schools are “full of progressive educators helping children of color from low-income families succeed.”
Beneath the wince-worthy white savior aura of this argument lurk some actual facts worth exploring further. First, Minnesota’s charter schools do not have to follow the same desegregation laws as public schools. This means highly segregated charter schools, like Hiawatha Academies, have been allowed to flourish, creating artificially isolated sites that cater to one particular demographic. If this is progressive, it sure smacks of age-old segregationist policies that allowed for school vouchers and, eventually, charter schools in the face of federal desegregation lawsuits.
Hiawatha Academies’ Morris Park location, for example, sits in a south Minneapolis neighborhood where over 75 percent of residents are white, and the majority do not live in poverty. But you would never know this by reviewing the school’s demographic data.
According to the Minnesota Department of Education, 91 percent of Hiawatha Academies’ Morris Park students are Latino, and 88 percent live in poverty. Still, Williams insists that the charter network is “successfully” meeting these kids’ needs, and so, presumably, should be excused for being unnaturally racially and economically segregated. But what is the definition of success? If it is standardized test scores, then no, Hiawatha’s Morris Park students are not receiving an education that is “beating the odds,” as education reformers like to say.
Data actually show that test scores at Hiawatha Academies-Morris Park dropped in 2017 and are lower than those of a nearby Minneapolis public school site, Northrop Elementary. Another neighborhood public school, Lake Nokomis Community School, serves almost as many students in poverty and special education students as the Morris Park charter school, but also has twenty-four homeless or highly mobile students on its roster. The charter school had zero.
In his New York Times piece, Williams does acknowledge that Hiawatha Academies schools are staffed by non-union teachers. He also notes that many progressives may also “worry that charters foster segregation, siphon funding from traditional public schools and cater to policymakers’ obsession with standardized tests.” Rather than addressing any of these very real concerns, however, Williams continues on with his fantasy-like defense of charter schools in general and of Hiawatha Academies in particular.
Hiawatha Academies schools are staffed and run by progressives, he assures readers, and they are determined, in the words of outgoing director Eli Kramer, to “elevate the importance of identity, race consciousness” and “pride in self.” Williams then describes taking a walk through the charter chain’s high school, which will relocate this fall to a newly-built campus that has been funded in part by wealthy, Republican-aligned local venture capitalists and philanthropists, not to mention the Walton Family Foundation.
How progressive is that? Many Walmart employees live on food stamps, leaving plenty of profit left over for the Walton family to pour into the promotion of non-union charter schools.
To wrap up his defense of Hiawatha’s privately run, publicly (and privately funded) charter schools, Williams revives yet another stale debate. In trying to prop up Hiawatha’s racially and economically segregated charters, Williams mentions Robert Panning-Miller, who was president of the Minneapolis teachers union from 2007-2009. (Michelle Wiese, the current head of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, is a Latino woman who has helped push the union in a more progressive, social justice-oriented direction. Perhaps her brand of union leadership doesn’t fit into Williams’ narrative.)
Panning-Miller once called Eli and Matt Kramer emblems of a kind of “educational apartheid” for allegedly sending their own children to a private Montessori school (the Kramers’ alma mater) full of wood blocks, natural play areas and hands-on learning, while simultaneously profiting from a test score-driven charter school network for students of color who live in poverty (Hiawatha Academies). Panning-Miller also documented the tightly woven, Kramer-Teach for America cabal that has drawn attention nationwide, and received PR support from, again, Beth Hawkins.
Maybe Williams had to harken back to Panning-Miller’s 2014 critique of the Kramers and Hiawatha Academies because there are so few of them. There is almost no counter-narrative out there for anyone, progressive or not, who would like a more realistic examination of the role Hiawatha Academies and other such narrowly marketed charter schools are playing in the systematic attacks on public education in the United States. As I mentioned, the Kramer family once employed an education writer who continues to serve as a philanthropist-funded champion of school choice.
It is impossible, then, to join Connor P. Williams’ in his unbridled praise for charter schools without fully examining the “ecosystem” of funding, hype and political support that prop up such “schools of choice.” To embrace the racially and economically marginalized population of the Hiawatha Academies charter chain, which Williams tries but fails to defend, would be to also, presumably, embrace the nearly all-white charter schools that also exist in the Twin Cities.
Among these are the Twin Cities German Immersion School, Nova Classical Academy and Great River Montessori School. Is it somehow right for public dollars to be diverted from the public school system (both Minneapolis and St. Paul are facing double-digit deficits for the upcoming school year) to create portfolios of niche charter schools that selectively serve segregated populations of students?
Is that what it means to be a progressive or a liberal? No, it is not. Don’t let the kind of propaganda peddled by Williams and the Kramer family convince you otherwise.
Great job Sarah Lahm. Been looking at Hiawatha’s test score proficiencies – not quite what Conor Williams reports: http://www.edhivemn.com/active/actions/viewrecipientprofilepicture.php?recipientProfilePictureID=221
Anyone have the URL for this piece?
It’s really a “trust” argument. We are supposed to discern motives, and if the motives are pure, we must embrace.
It’s REALLY odd. Ed reformers tell us again and again that they are good people and this is supposed to be enough. But it’s not enough. They are redesigning public systems- completely eradicating them and replacing them with their chosen schemes, and we’re supposed to go along with this because they “mean well”?
What is that? What am I supposed to do with it? I don’t know any of these people personally. I have no idea what their motives are, and even if I did there’s absolutely no guarantee that a privatized system will live up to this endless hype.
What if we blindly follow all these good people and they’re just wrong? Then what? Public schools will be gone and we will never, ever get them back. “Good and also wrong” is a possibility. Happens all the time.
This is a REALLY radical. They are working to go from a public system to a contractor system, and I’m supposed to buy it based on their individual and personal inner beliefs?
Fundamentally, these “good progressives” have never justified why they need to insert a financial management corporation in between the government money & the school. How does siphoning public ed money off the top and away from schools improve educational outcomes for anyone?
If Hiawatha is so darn innovative can’t they replicate its magical success without the management company?
The most crucial question: “What if we blindly follow all these good people and they’re just wrong?”
Nobody needs Williams to tell progressives what they should believe. Progressives should believe in the common good as represented by public education. Progressives should believe in unions and the right of labor to engage in collective bargaining. Under no circumstances does it make sense to destroy the common good at the expense of many to benefit a few.
It is fully illogical when the “progressive” party sells out unions and public services of any kind. To do so is REgressive.
It’s very revealing that a non-union charter school that siphons money from the (unionized) public schools, should want “to elevate of race consciousness, identity…”
Somehow I get the feeling the “progressive” teachers at these schools would get a strict talking-to if they ever had the nerve to mention “class consciousness,” let alone try tpo organize a union at these sweatshops.
Lahm’s article touches on a nuance that is not mentioned enough:
the two categories of charter schools.
Robert Skeels often writes about how — just as Minneapolis does, as pointed out by Lahm — Los Angeles has the “99 Cent Store Charter Schools” for low-income minority students, and the “Saks Fifth Avenue Charter Schools” for upscale whites (with a few token minorities whose parents are college-educated and upscale themselves).
Often the “Saks Fifth Avenue Charter Schools” — whose student body is white as Sweden — co-locates on a low-income traditional public school campus. At the “Saks Fifth Avenue Charter,” the kids are served gourmet catered lunches, and have every amenity and full curriculum, white the traditional public school on the same campus has none of that, and much larger class sizes to boot. In their initial charter petition, the charter operators said that everyone in the community has an equal chance of attending.
Oh really? Then how come the community is 90% Latino poor, but the charter’s kids are 99% white and upscale? They defend this by saying that the makeup of the student body occurs because of the random lottery. However, their outreach is only to those upscale whites — i.e. none of the promotional materials are in Spanish, or distributed anywhere to the low-income Latino community.
Furthermore, they lottery is not conducted by an independent third party. The charter schools honchos are the ones who determine which kids names get in the drum from which the winners are picked. Who gets in that drum? Well, the charter’s application includes questions about: 1) parents’ marital status; 2) parents highest level of education attained; 3) language spoke in the home; and 4) parents’ income level.
If all kids in the community truly have an equal shot at the Saks Fifth Avenue Charters, then why are you asking all that on an application — questions which the traditional public schools never ask At a traditional public school, any student/parent who shows up at the Main Office with proof that they live in that school’s attendance area is immediately admitted … no discriminatory questions asked.
Well, we want to know how to best meet those students needs, is the response as to why they’re asking for that info. If that’s the case, you should ask those questions AFTER the lottery names are picked. It’s essentially a rich kids’ private school funded with public money, money which is drained from and diminishes the quality of the existing traditional public schools.
Anyway, here’s Robert’s article:
http://rdsathene.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-99-cents-store-school-brought-to.html
Sunday, July 07, 2013
The 99 Cents Store School… brought to you by the lucrative charter school industry!
ROBERT SKEELS:
“Lalo Alcaraz’s La Cucaracha strip often features pro-public education items, which are also typically sensitive to ongoing attacks on the teaching profession and the difficulties of teaching. This particular strip is a favorite of mine, highlighting both the institutional racism and profit motive behind the neo-liberal school privatization project.
“In Los Angeles, the 99 Cents Store School model is reserved for impoverished children of color at centers of creativity culling and cultural sterilization like Green Dot, CNCA, ICEF, KIPP, and Alliance.
“Wealthier white parents, send their kids to boutique charters — essentially private schools where the public foots the bill. Larchmont, Los Feliz, Gabriella, CWC, and Mike McGalliard’s Metro Charter are all examples of the “Saks Fifth Avenue School” discussed in the comic strip. Bear in mind that children with special needs aren’t welcome at either type of privately managed charter school.”
http://rdsathene.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-99-cents-store-school-brought-to.html
For more on the two tiers of charters sharing the same campus, read here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130720011346/http://fryingpannews.org/2013/07/17/why-charter-schools-are-tearing-public-campuses-apart/
Since this was from an archive, with the original website defunct. Since it may soon disappear completely, I’m going to move it here to preserve it: (Skip it if you don’t want to read it.)
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
Why Charter Schools Are Tearing Public Campuses Apart
by Gary Cohn
on July 17, 2013
Illustration: Lalo Alcaraz
For more than 30 years each, Cheryl Smith-Vincent and Cheryl Ortega have shared a passion for teaching public school in Southern California. Smith-Vincent teaches third grade at Miles Avenue Elementary School in Huntington Park; before retiring, Ortega taught kindergarten at Logan Street Elementary School in Echo Park. Both women have been jolted by experiences with a little-known statewide policy that requires traditional public schools to share their facilities with charter schools. Ortega says she has seen charter-school children warned against greeting non-charter students who attend the same campus. Smith-Vincent reports that she and her students were pushed out of their classroom prior to a round of important student tests – just to accommodate a charter school that needed the space.
“It was extremely disruptive,” Smith-Vincent says of the incident.
The practice of housing a traditional public school and a charter school on the same campus is known as “co-location.” Charters are publicly funded yet independently operated, and are intended to encourage innovation and improve student performance. Under Proposition 39, a school-funding ballot initiative adopted by California voters in 2000, charter schools were given the right to use empty classrooms and share in underutilized public school facilities.
Proponents of the measure, including the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA), claim that it ensures that all public school students, including those enrolled in charter schools, share equally in school district facilities. But critics contend that co-locating siphons key resources from the already-underfunded traditional public schools, depriving students of playground space, library time and other resources.
Co-Location Is Everything: Gabriella Charter at Logan Street School.
“One of the difficult things about having a charter school co-located on a district public school campus is that . . . the two schools end up competing for those things that are necessary to provide a quality education for the students,” says Robin Potash, an elementary school teacher and chair of the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) Proposition 39 Committee. “That includes competing for the same students.”
“We’ve collected lots of anecdotal stories [about] the inequitable use of space, disparity of resources, use of school personnel, lack of services for special education students and English-language learners, and the meals that are provided – pre-packaged versus hot gourmet,” Potash continues. Her last point refers to some charter students receiving their lunches from Whole Foods.
Though the practice of co-location is little known to the general public, it is not uncommon in California. Co-locations exist or have been approved in San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego and in Kern County in California’s Central Valley. In the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) alone, there are 65 co-locations involving traditional public schools and charters, with the district’s charter schools typically requesting space for about 25,000 students to be co-located.
“That’s the equivalent of finding space for the entire Pasadena Unified School District,” says Jose Cole-Gutierrez, LAUSD’s director of charter schools.
Charter Host: Banner for Logan Street School.
It’s not easy to house two separate schools on the same campus and it can be particularly difficult when the schools have separate and disparate cultures, educational philosophies and traditions. Charter school students sometimes wear uniforms, traditional public school students do not. Sometimes all of the students come from the neighborhood, other times many of the charter’s students are from different parts of Los Angeles. Sometimes the administrators at the schools cooperate; other times they compete. To be sure, some co-locations operate smoothly, with teachers, administrators and parents working together to minimize disruptions, although co-locations have also become controversial in New York City, for similar reasons as in California.
Ricardo Soto, the CCSA’s senior vice president for legal advocacy and general counsel, defends co-locations as a way to ensure that all public school students have access to facilities. He says that in many cases co-location makes sense because of declining enrollment in traditional public schools and increasing enrollment in charters.
Asked whether the co-locations set up a two-tier system, Soto says that “too often [traditional public schools] try to cordon off students from the charter school . . . Our experience is that charter school students at [co-location] sites tend to get the leftover space,” and that their access to amenities such as bathrooms, playgrounds and cafeterias is an “afterthought.”
News that a charter school is going to be sharing a traditional public school campus often provokes protests and hard feelings. Last year the Silver Lake community became divided after the Citizens of the World Charter was allowed to share the campus of the Micheltorena Elementary School.
“It was terrible,” says Kurt Bier, the father of a student at Micheltorena. “People didn’t want the charter to co-locate because it would draw resources away from students [already] attending Micheltorena. It divided the community. It pitted people against each other.”
The two schools are not scheduled to share space this fall, with Citizens of the World acquiring co-location status at Stoner Avenue Elementary School in Culver City.
This past June, parents and teachers at Boyle Heights’ Lorena Street Elementary School held a protest after it was announced that Extera Public Schools, a charter operation, would be sharing the campus for 2013-2014. The announcement was made five days before the end of the last school year, and protesters said this didn’t leave enough time for rational planning of how to share the space.
Extera was founded by former Hollywood talent agent Tom Strickler and is headed by veteran LAUSD educator Jim Kennedy; one of its stated goals is to introduce children to nature.
Eddie Rivas has taught at Breed Street Elementary School for the past three years, the last two of which was shared with an Extera charter. His fears of co-locations creating two-tiered systems are based on experience.
“The charter kids sense they are better than the public school kids,” says Rivas. “I’ll say good morning to charter school kids. They don’t know if it’s okay to say hello to me. The message is that they are better than us.”
Rivas’ worries are well-founded, according to Cheryl Ortega.
“I was walking my children up the ramp to go to recess and we were passing by the Gabriella campus,” says Ortega, recalling an incident she witnessed at Logan Elementary when she was subbing at the school not long after her retirement. Logan shares its campus with Gabriella Charter School under a lease agreement.
“One of my little girls called out to a little girl [from the charter]. A teacher told the little girl in the charter to come away and said, ‘We don’t talk to Logan.’ It was as sad as could be. They are telling children they can’t mix or even speak to each other!”
Others say the problems of co-location involve more than snobbery.
John Rogers, a professor of education at UCLA, worries that Proposition 39 creates conflict and derails sound public planning.
“One of the consequences of Proposition 39 is that it prevents thoughtful public planning about how to make use of public space,” Rogers says. “There’s a strong incentive for charter schools to use co-location as a way to get less expensive facilities.”
The CCSA’s Soto doesn’t dispute the charge that charter schools can often get less expensive facilities by co-locating.
“We believe charter school students are entitled to have equitable access to public school facilities,” he says.
Cheryl Smith-Vincent says that construction repairs forced her to move out of her third-grade classroom at Miles Avenue Elementary School in April and relocate to a new room. She says that the repairs had long been needed, but were only scheduled once a decision had been made to give that space to a charter school co-locating at Miles in the fall.
“The classroom lost instructional time the week before testing,” Smith-Vincent says.
Smith-Vincent expressed her concerns in a letter to L.A. schools superintendent John Deasy and instructional area superintendent Robert Bravo.
“Our students lost six days of instruction and valuable final preparation time for testing,” Smith-Vincent wrote. “Instead of learning and teaching, teachers and students were moving materials up and down stairs from one building to another . . . It is inconceivable that the week before the administration of the STAR [Standardized Testing and Reporting] test that is so valued by this district, that students and teachers would be uprooted and moved with minimal assistance from the district.”
The letter continued, “Initially we could not understand the urgency . . . It then occurred to us that our original rooms were in the building that is slotted to be given to a charter.”
Bravo replied that he had asked an aide to look into Smith-Vincent’s concerns and that the aide “could not find any connection between the timing of the repairs in question and the selection of Miles for a charter school relocation.”
As Miles Elementary prepares for a co-location with a charter school this fall, Smith-Vincent and other teachers are worried. In a list of talking points titled, “Potential Negative Impact of Charter Co-Location,” they say that playground space is limited; that the custodial staff is currently insufficient for the current school population and that co-location would result in unclean bathrooms and unswept classrooms; that computer labs and library space is already full, and that Miles students will have reduced access to books and library staff; and that parent volunteers will no longer have full access to the school’s Parent Center.
“It undermines what we can and should be doing for traditional schools,” Smith-Vincent says of the scheduled co-location. “It takes resources away and prevents us from being able to meet all the needs of our students.”
Thanks for the discussion of the two tiers of charter schools. Also look at the August 2018 marketing of Charter Schools Deserts, with maps and zones in each state designed to encourage charter expansions in census tracts selected by measures of “levels of poverty.” These levels are conjured to rationalize the movement of charters into suburbs said to have “insufficient” choices in schools. The expansion scheme is from the Thomas B Fordham Institute and also circulated by the Heartland Institute. https://edexcellence.net/publications/charter-school-deserts-report
posted at https://www.opednews.com/populum/comments.php
with Peter’ Greens Peter Greene’s response to Conor Williams’s loopy claim that progressives should defend charter schools even though they are segregated and non-union. Peter notes that Conor’s teaching experience was limited to a couple of years at the “no-excuses” Achievement First Charter School in Brooklyn.
He adds:
“Williams shows his bias right off the bat, saying that Hiawatha runs “some of Minnesota’s best public schools for serving such students.” The link takes you to a six-year-old article, and as usual, “best” doesn’t mean anything except “high score on the Big Standardized Test.” And Hiawatha does not operate public schools– it runs a charter school chain, and charter schools are not public schools. Calling charters “public” schools continues to be a way to obscure the problems of a privatized education system while giving charters the gloss of public school values which they do not possess. If “financed by public tax dollars” is the definition of “public,” then Erik Prince operated a public security company and most defense contractors are public corporations. Charter schools are not public schools; their leadership is not publicly elected, their finances are not publicly transparent, and they do not take every child that shows up on their doorstep (which is one way they are able to achieve outstanding test results).”
There is nothing progressive about opposing the NAACP (which called for a moratorium on charter expansion) by supporting segregation. It’s not liberal, it’s not progressive, it’s not even moderate or centrist. It’s closet racism, paternalism, and oppressive to all, plain and simple. The political word closest to charters is fascist. That’s why charters are supported by KKK groups. That’s why charters are supported by Trump and Trumpists. That’s why charters are supported by the Walton and Bush families. That’s right, fascist. Not liberal.
” Hiawatha Academies schools are staffed and run by progressives, he assures readers ..”
Too many readers failed to see this was a farce when a bit later the article states, ” … a newly-built campus that has been funded in part by wealthy, Republican-aligned local venture capitalists and philanthropists, not to mention the Walton Family Foundation.
“How progressive is that? Many Walmart employees live on food stamps, leaving plenty of profit left over for the Walton family to pour into the promotion of non-union charter schools.”
Folks, that’s not and they AIN’T progressive.
The term ‘progressive’ was merely used as a selling point by the sales staff.
The regressives have created their own publications, reviewers and of course, curriculum.
The anew York Times op-ed page editors fell for the story Hook, line, and sinker.
Just because he says it’s so, doesn’t make it so.