I wrote this article, which was posted just online by the Washington Post.
Charters are not “progressive.” They pave the way for vouchers. They divert funding from public schools, which enroll 85% of American students. They are more segregated than public schools. Ninety percent are non-union. The far-right Walton Foundation is spending $200 million a year on charters and Betsy DeVos is currently spending $400 million, which may soon increase to $500 million. The vaunted “high performance” charters have either higher attrition or cherry pick their students.
Our nation is evolving a new dual school system, with one system choosing its students and the other required to find a place for all who apply.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
RELATED: This just in from EdWeek:
Senate Draft of Career and Technical Education Bill Would Let Secretary Withhold Funds
By Andrew Ujifusa on June 22, 2018 1:58 PM
An early bipartisan draft of a Senate bill to reauthorize the federal law governing career and technical education would allow the secretary of education to withhold funds from CTE programs if they fail to meet certain performance targets for two straight years.
The Senate draft would also require school districts receiving money through the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act to make “meaningful progress” towards improving the performance of all CTE concentrators.
Discussions about how to reauthorize the Perkins Act, which is the single largest source of federal funds for American high schools, have ramped up recently as the White House—including Ivanka Trump, a senior adviser to her father President Donald Trump—has put pressure on lawmakers to reauthorize the CTE law. The Senate education committee is set to hold a hearing on Perkins legislation on Tuesday. Congress last reauthorized Perkins in 2006.
The House passed a bipartisan reauthorization of Perkins last summer, called the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act. (Click here to read more about that bill.) That legislation had broad support among lawmakers, passing the House easily. However, the Senate has struggled to reauthorize the law since 2016 over disagreements about how much authority to give the secretary.
The House legislation does not specify that the education secretary can withhold money from districts and other agencies receiving CTE money over performance targets.
Like the House bill, the Senate bill establishes a definition for a “CTE concentrator” that isn’t a part of the current Perkins law. However, the House and Senate definitions differ. The Senate version, for example, defines a concentrator as a student at the secondary level who has completed at least two courses in a single CTE program or program of study. The House has a more expansive definition, saying that in addition to that Senate definition, a CTE concentrator can also be a student who has completed three or more career and technical education courses.
In addition, the Senate bill mirrors the House legislation in that it allows states to keep 15 percent of their money for their own “leadership activities” for CTE. States can in turn decide if they want to distribute at least some of that money competitively. Several elements of the draft could change before Tuesday’s hearing.
Photo: Benson Tech High School junior Major Jimmerson learns about the surveying as a career during a summer session of the PACE mentoring program. Run jointly by the district and local leaders in the building trades, the program exposes students to careers in plumbing, air conditioning, carpentry, and electrical fields. (David Pascual-Matias)
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2/3 of the Dutch pupils are educated in private schools. I wonder why this system works in Netherlands and cannot work in the U.S.?
“Public-authority schools are open to everyone and teaching is not based on a particular religion or belief. They are set up by the local authorities.”
So, the Dutch solved the problem that bothers so many opponents of American charter schools rather elegantly: public schools are open to everyone (just like the American ones), while private schools are open to those who subscribe to their worldview (again, similar to American private schools and selective charters). The Dutch do not make a problem out of this, instead they make it a feature of their school system. Why then it is a problem for the U.S? I guess, the major differentiator is this: “Under article 23 of the Constitution, local authorities must ensure there are sufficient publicly run schools in their municipality. If there are not enough schools locally, they are obliged to provide access to public schools, for instance by arranging a bus service to a public-authority school elsewhere.” – https://www.government.nl/topics/freedom-of-education/public-authority-and-private-schools
So, as long as there are public schools nearby that accept students, there should be no problems, at least this is what the Dutch would say. Maybe the U.S. should simply fix the zero-sum approach to public and charter schools, and provide as much funding as needed per each school, not per district? It will be a drop in the ocean compared to military spending.
Just make it a level playing field, have the same rules for everyone, and ensure accountability – oh, yes – not for testing and grades, but for the money spent. Thieves must get proper jail time.
Also, the racial/ethnical statistics should be abolished.
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“Our nation is evolving a new dual school system, with one system choosing its students and the other required to find a place for all who apply.” – wow, this is like the Dutch system works.
I am sure, the answer will be: “Our country in not the Netherlands.” Yeah, it is different. Special. Unique.
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To BackAgain: No–the Dutch are probably “special” because, generally they have a more singular ethos born of a relatively shared (story) history.
Whereas OUR story and history is divided and, in many cases, conflicting between people’s from different continents who were either here already (the native Americans and many Mexicans); who came (immigrated) here on their own (mostly Europeans); or who were brought here under slave conditions (mostly black Americans). That doesn’t make us “bad,” but “special” in the sense of what and how we must CONSCIOUSLY work things through to fulfill the promise of our Founding Documents centered on “The People” as ONE OVERALL IDENTITY (good luck with that while Trump is in office).
Another great difference has to do with size and hugely different numbers of people and State divisions with the similar (creative) divisions and flows of power.
Finally, I wonder how much of the narrative, at either the local or national level in the Dutch culture, is saturated with the Orwellian Doublespeak, hate-speech, and coded messages we find here in the US; as well as the intention by powerful and monied people to destroy the very fabric of democratic culture? Are they fast-becoming a fascist state? Hmmmm…… like us, or so it seems? CBK
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“we must CONSCIOUSLY work things through to fulfill the promise of our Founding Documents centered on “The People” as ONE OVERALL IDENTITY” – would not this make us a singular ethos like in the Netherlands? I said multiple times, that the whole mentioning of racial or ethnical composition of schools, colleges or movie studious must be abolished if the country wanted to have one overall identity. These petty percentages of whites vs blacks vs Asians only put one group against another, keeping the fight going on the lower levels, while the powers at high places keep pulling the strings.
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BackAgain says: “whole mentioning of racial or ethnical composition of schools, colleges or movie studious must be abolished if the country wanted to have one overall identity. These petty percentages of whites vs blacks vs Asians only put one group against another, keeping the fight going on the lower levels, while the powers at high places keep pulling the strings.”
Avoid “whole mention”? I think that’s rather an abstract and un-realizable way of understanding the problem? Things will have improved when we all celebrate what is best about each tradition and culture. When that happens, the tension between my history, gender, race, ethnicity, etc., and all the bad things we all are guilty of, won’t automatically go away (we have to live in a many-tensions world, don’t we?) “mentioning” will not only be okay, but will be expected as everyone is also one of “The People” of the United States who, in turn, is a member of a world community of also-mentionable countries and cultures.
A little trip into educational theory on your part might help? But briefly, culture counts.
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“Charter schools drain resources and the students they want from public schools.” – this is not a problem of charters per se, but of zero-sum (actually, fixed-sum) funding. This system must be changed.
“In 2016, the NAACP called for a moratorium on new charter schools until charters are held to the same accountability standards as public schools” – this makes total sense. Just establish the same rules no matter the school type.
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I just read an article about Dutch education. The article said that schools there are lenient on punishment, have an egalitarian, not top down climate, no testing until age 12, no teaching standards [sic], reflect low economic inequality and little unemployment, and have the happiest, healthiest, least likely to harm themselves or others children of any OECD country. It is a lot like Finland. They have a social safety net, they pay taxes, and they have a high functioning democracy. Their only concern is segregation. Yes, the publicly funded private schools and heavy tracking have caused a segregation problem between native Dutch and minority ethnic Dutch students. Almost as good as the public education system in Finland, but not quite.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/17/why-dutch-bring-up-worlds-happiest-teenagers
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Finland has school choice but no charters or vouchers. Choose any public school you want. They are all good!
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Aha! So the students and their families do the choosing, no exclusion. Real choice. Freedom — and equality. Teachers have financial support and truly collaborative academic freedom. Now that’s what I call reform. Love it.
Okay, time for quote of the day: “From Catalus, [I learned] not to be indifferent when a friend finds fault, even if he should find fault without reason, but to try to restore him to his usual disposition; and to be ready to speak well of teachers, as it is reported of Domitus and Athenodontus; and to love my children truly.” Marcus Aurelius
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Here is a different view of the role of testing in the Netherlands. A couple of decades ago there was an arts and humanities test for the upper level students. It was designed for presentation on television and with ingenious uses of contemporary and historically important literature, works in museums, national landmarks and the like. The test became so popular that adults were viewing and taking it. Here is one take on current testing. CITO is the national testing authority. https://www.expatica.com/nl/education/Explaining-the-Cito-exams_100820.html
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BackAgain, the Netherlands system is quite different from school choice as we imagine it in the US. I learned about it a while back, starting w/wiki, then going on to source docts (their edgov has a lot online even their natl stds). They have had the system well over a century. It is very interesting & worthy of study but so much of how it works would not go over well here – it would seem ‘socialist’ & heavy-handed fed-wise compared to what is palatable to Americans.
They have an equal national per-pupil $ allotment, except that they supplement it in pockets of high poverty &/or high disability. Anyone may start a school – except a private interest. No corporations may be involved, nor even individual owners. All schools have to follow the national stds & take the natl exams. They have a general inspectorate which meet with & guide school boards of every school, inspects them annually & reports to public on their quality/ adherence to stds/ financial mgt etc [substd schs are closed]. The ‘special’ schools are generally religious or have certain pedagogy (Montessori etc). The only schools outside this regime (a very small %) are truly ‘private’, & they get no govt subsidy at all.
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Rosa Parks (I mean the civil-rights heroine), supported charter schools. Here is an article from the New York Times:
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Charles, that is really pathetic. You dig back to 1997, twenty years ago, to say that Rosa Parks supported charter schools in Detroit. If she saw that right-wingers like Betsy DeVos had foisted for-profit charters with no accountability on the children of Detroit, she would not likely support them today.
I used to support charter schools too. But now we know that charter schools are not a fix. I changed my mind.
In Detroit, charter schools have been a terrible disappointment. More than half the students in the city attend charters, and Detroit is the lowest performing city in the nation.
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Diane, you see a wrong implementation of charters – you think they do not work. You see a botched implementation of national curriculum – you think it does not work in general. You seem to not be willing to think more broadly, neither you consider working examples of charters and national curricula implemented in other countries. Unless, of course, you believe that American politicians are inherently less honest and less caring about public interests than their European counterparts.
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BackAgain,
Think again. When you give public money to private individuals with minimal or no oversight, you can expect massive graft and corruption, especially when those schools are free to choose their students.
When you allow for-profit charters to buy favors from politicians, they have no oversight or accountability.
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Al Shanker supported Charter schools too! Instead of condemning the concept, how about coming up with a solution?
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Charles,
Al Shanker denounced charter schools after he saw business moving in to make a profit. Did you read the article?
Yes, I have a solution. Stop funding privatization and fully fund our public schools, where the experienced and certified teachers are. They already have 85% of America’s students. They should have 90%.
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Of course I am aware that the late Mr. Shanker changed course. That does not make the concept bad or evil. It just means that the charter concept needs repair, not to just condemn the idea outright.
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“When you give public money to private individuals with minimal or no oversight, you can expect massive graft and corruption, especially when those schools are free to choose their students. When you allow for-profit charters to buy favors from politicians, they have no oversight or accountability.” – This is not a problem with charters as independently founded and managed schools, it is a problem with funding and accountability.
Let me quote the NAACP position again: “the NAACP called for a moratorium on new charter schools until charters are held to the same accountability standards as public schools.” Which means that NAACP is not against charters IN PRINCIPLE, they just ask for the same rules for everyone. I totally agree with them. Same rules, full transparency, non-profit, limit for salaries and bonuses (say, 100K/year). It is very easy to come up with a sensible set of rules. And provide money to everyone instead of pulling from the fixed public school budget.
What you are saying is that it is not that the charters are a problem per se, but the whole political system is rotten in this country. And this is a much bigger problem than charters.
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When a fraud like Trump gets elected president, when billionaires can buy elections, yes, there is something very rotten in our political system.
No one voted to abandon public schools and hand public money to entrepreneurs and con men.
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It’s good to see we’re all in agreement that publicly funded schools need a great deal of public oversight and strict regulation. (We forgot to mention real estate deals, nepotism in spending, and for profit CMOS, though.) Heck, with all the regulations needed, we might as well save all the trouble and just fund only public schools with public dollars. That would solve the problem of corporate charter chains.
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“What you are saying is that it is not that the charters are a problem per se, but the whole political system is rotten in this country. And this is a much bigger problem than charters.”
I don’t agree with you, BackAgain.
If we continue to undereducate or poorly educate children as a result of greed, avarice and corruption and a destruction of the public commons, then our children will grow up to be deficient in critical thinking and knowledge, which in turn will keep the “whole political system rotten” . . . . Which is EXACTLY what the ruling class in America want and demand.
AND slowly, they are getting their way more and more.
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“with all the regulations needed, we might as well save all the trouble and just fund only public schools with public dollars.” – No, it is not the same. For example, in my district the math program is crappy; the history books are laced with religious propaganda; algebra would start from 9th grade if it still were around, but it has been replaced with integrated math; physics is an elective, as is chemistry; no foreign language in middle school, the school is fenced, the breaks are as short as four minutes, etc. Instead of fighting, it may be simpler just to start one’s own school. This is what charter school were supposed to be about: to try different methods and programs, which hopefully would be picked up by public schools if proven successful.
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But that’s not what happened re charter schools. It is now an industry.
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Yes, Diane.
Charters are indeed a money making scheme, a way to bust collective bargaining (which is linked to having the taxation system be far more progressive in so many other countries), and last but not least, charters are a way to dumb down the population so that the oligarchy can maintain power, plain and simple.
Connect the dots.
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Looks like back again’s district is the victim of decades of neglect because of corporate greed, competition for funding with winners and losers, and the prison mentality of neoliberalism. Charters exacerbate the problems mentioned. The only solution is active citizenship and democratic oversight.
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Diane: I have always thought Charles is a troll. How ANYONE continue on that trail of distortions can only be answered by: either the presence of a HUGE learning deficit, or because he is a troll. He’s always “back again.”
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I am not a troll.
I am an engineer, and I have no learning deficit.
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You never seem to learn anything on this site. That’s why some might conclude you don’t learn.
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If C is not a troll, then he is “contrarian.” . . . that is, just disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing and, therefore, with no insight in sight. CBK
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Hoping to read this soon – they usually let the paywall down after a day or two.
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You should not have to wait.
Here is the article. All you don’t get are the links.
Diane Ravitch is a historian of American education at New York University.
In 1988, teachers union leader Albert Shanker had an idea: What if teachers were allowed to create a school within a school, where they could develop innovative ways to teach dropouts and unmotivated students? The teachers would get the permission of their colleagues and the local school board to open their school, which would be an R&D lab for the regular public school. These experimental schools, he said, would be called “charter schools.”
Five years later, in 1993, Shanker publicly renounced his proposal. The idea had been adopted by businesses seeking profits, he said, and would be used, like vouchers, to privatize public schools and destroy teachers unions. He wrote that “vouchers, charter schools, for-profit management schemes are all quick fixes that won’t fix anything.”
Shanker died in 1997, too soon to see his dire prediction come true. Today, there are more than 7,000 charter schools with about 3 million students (total enrollment in public schools is 50 million). About90 percent of charter schools are nonunion. Charters are more segregated than public schools, prompting the Civil Rights Project at UCLA in 2010 to call charter schools “a major political success” but “a civil rights failure.” They compete with public schools instead of collaborating. Charter proponents claim that the schools are progressive, but schools that are segregated and nonunion do not deserve that mantle.
The charter universe includes corporate chains that operate hundreds of schools in different states. The largest is KIPP, with 209 schools. The-second-largest has 167 schools and is affiliated with Turkish preacher Fethullah Gulen. About one of every six charters operates for profit; in Michigan, 80 percent are run by for-profit corporations. Nationally, nearly 40 percent of charter schools are run by for-profit businesses known as Educational Management Organizations.
The largest online charter chain, K12 Inc., was founded with the help of former junk-bond king Michael Milken and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The biggest single virtual charter was the Ohio-based Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, which collected $1 billion from Ohio taxpayers from 2000 until its bankruptcy earlier this year. The charter’s 20 percent graduation rate was the lowest in the nation.
Charter schools pave the way for vouchers. More than half of states now have some form of public subsidy for religious and private schools. Voucher schools are not bound by civil rights laws and may exclude students based on religion, disabilities and LGBT status.
Charters are publicly funded but privately managed. They call themselves public schools, but a federal court ruling in 2010 declared they are “not state actors.” The National Labor Relations Board ruled in 2016 that charters are private corporations, not public schools. As private corporations, they are not subject to the same laws as public schools.
The anti-union Walton Family Foundation is the biggest private financier of charters. The foundation in 2016 unveiled a plan to spend $200 million annually over five years for charter schools, and the organization claims credit for opening one of every four charters in the nation. The Waltons and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, using both public and private funds, are pouring hundreds of millions annually into what amounts to a joint effort to privatize public education. The federal government spends $400 million annually on charter schools; a congressional budget proposal seeks to increase that amount for fiscal 2019.
On average, charters do not get better academic results than public schools, according to the National Education Policy Center, except for those that have high attrition rates and that control their demographics to favor high-scoring groups. The lowest-scoring urban district in the nation is Detroit, where more than half the children are enrolled in charters. The highest-ranked charters in the nation are the BASIS charters in Arizona, where 83 percent of students are either Asian or white, double the proportion of these students in the state.
Charter schools drain resources and the students they want from public schools. When students leave for charters, the public schools must fire teachers, reduce offerings and increase class sizes. Some districts, such as Oakland’s, teeter on the edge of financial ruin because public funds have been diverted to charters.
In 2016, the NAACP called for a moratorium on new charter schools until charters are held to the same accountability standards as public schools, until “public funds are not diverted to charter schools at the expense of the public school system” and until charter schools “cease expelling students that public schools have a duty to educate.”
American education seems to be evolving into a dual school system, one operated under democratic control (overseen by a board that was either elected by the people or appointed by an elected official) , the other under private control. One is required to find a place for every student who shows up, no matter that student’s academic skills, language or disability. The privately managed charter sector can limit its enrollment, exclude students it doesn’t want and accept no new students after a certain grade level. Charters can even close school for the day to take students to a political rally for the school management’s financial benefit. That is not fair competition, and it is not healthy for democracy.
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Many thanks, Diane! Terrific article.
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One of the reasons that “choice” has failed in our country is we have one of the highest income disparities in the industrialized world. Part of the problem is the zero sum aspect of way in which public funds are distributed. Lack of accountability and oversight are also issues. In the Netherlands schools that use public money must also be not for profit. So called choice in the US has resulted in increased segregation, and we know that separate in never equal. Waste, fraud and embezzling have led to a chronic misuse public funds here. In this country today most parents are not campaigning for more choice. Today there are more parents campaigning against “choice” than for it because they have witnessed the devastation it has caused. The “choice” agenda is led by billionaires and corporations that want to crush organized labor more than they want to improve education.
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Well said.
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Am I right in guessing that the Dutch also do not have separate management companies that can allow their nonprofit charters to warp the meaning of nonprofit? Nonprofit can mean nothing in this country.
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Exactly. American privatization is a run away train of endless profiteering and corrupt politics to ensure that the public money flows freely without the constraint of regulation.
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I am coming to this debate from northwestern Montana, where we watched a school bus pass by on a national forest road yesterday. June 22 is pretty late to have a school in session, but I bet that bus was not taking children to a charter.
The debate is over an idea that does not make sense. Why would we fund any parallel system to what we have now without increasing taxation in a massive way. It will always be more expensive to fund two systems instead of one. Public magnet schools cost more than regular schools. That is why they exist in urban areas. The more you try to do, the more it costs.
So why do we not hear the advocates of charters and vouchers asking for more taxes? Why is school choice seen as a way to keep taxes low? The answer is pretty simple. Choice advocates want the system to benefit a small part of the population so that that small part will be able to rule the rest. They want to be seen as egalitarian, but they are advocating schools that only teach a very small (in their eyes deserving) part of the population. This is the only way we can afford them.
Real choice would be a voucher large enough to buy tuition at an elite private academy. And even at these places, there are just a few teachers who have been there for years and are paid well. Most private school teachers are teaching at their institutions because they like the working conditions or because their families have bequeathed them enough money to do anything they want. Most young private school teachers go on to other jobs in a few years. This is why the TFA attitude is that anybody can teach. The purveyors of education in the private sector had some good instruction at the hands of good smart young people in schools where only a few children were troubled and these soon were purged.
Who wants to pay for a private system? Ready for your taxes to go up?
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True. Actually most comprehensive have far more options for students of varying needs and interests than any “one size fits all” charter run by amateurs. Public education is far more efficient and effective than most private schools, particularly for states handing out low value vouchers.
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So TRUE!
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