David Leonhardt writes for the New York Times. In today’s newspaper, he writes about the miraculous results of the charter takeover of New Orleans. Leonhardt bought every phony claim made by the charter industry because he did not interview any critics. This is not good journalism.
He did not interview Mercedes Schneider, the Louisiana researcher-teacher who has written many times about New Orleans and who debunked the New Orleans Miracle here. In addition to teaching high school students in English, Schneider has a doctorate in statistics and research methodology. If Leonhardt had interviewed her, she would have explained that the average ACT scores for charter schools in New Orleans are low and stagnant.
He did not interview Professor Andrea Gabor, the Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College, who debunked the New Orleans miracle in her brilliant new book “After the Education Wars.” If he didn’t have time to read her book, he could have prepared for his trip to New Orleans by reading her article in “The New York Times” about the myth of the New Orleans “makeover.”
He did not interview Professor Kristen Buras of Georgia State University, who debunked the New Orleans Miracle in her book, Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance. Her latest article, written with veteran New Orleans Educator Raynard Sanders, is here. Its title: “History Rewritten: Masking the Failure of the Recovery School District.”
In a report published by the Council on Foreign Relations in 2012 (in which she dissented about charter school “miracles”), Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University called New Orleans “the lowest-performing district in one of the nation’s lowest-performing states.”
He did not interview the many parents who have complained about the fact that 40% of the charter schools are rated D or F, and that these failing charters are more than 90% black.
He did interview the people who have made a career selling the New Orleans Miracle. He fell for every boast they made.
Did anyone tell him that Louisiana is one of the lowest scoring states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (“The Nation’s Report Card”), and that its scores declined significantly from 2015-2017? New Orleans is the largest school district in the state. If its results are as amazing as Leonhardt thinks, why did the state drop to 48th in the nation in 8th grade reading and 50th in 8th grade math on NAEP? Maybe he can explain this in another column.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, As I read this, Seymour Hersh’s reporting on the Pentagon press corps during Vietnam came immediately to mind. The easy way is to fall for the boasts, send them to the press and go home. No investigation. Hersh’s book, Reporter, doesn’t make me feel any better about the mainstream press than I have for way too long. Kind of like the “Wiz,” when she sings, “Don’t bring me no bad news.”
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I hope knowledgeable readers are taking advantage of the comments section!
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David Leonhardt has written extensively about charters and every article is rabidly pro-charter. Leonhardt doesn’t seem to have basic reporting skills.
There are other reporters at the NY Times who do more than repeat the talking points of one side but some are as lazy as Leonhardt.
In fact, Leonhardt reminds me of some of the NY Times reporters who dutifully reported every right wing talking point during the 2016 campaign and were far too lazy to do their own reporting to see if the attacks they were making were actually true.
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Is there a contest among NYT columnists to see who can be the wrongest about education reform?
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Yes, of course. David Brooks and Nicholas Kristof both wrote about “miracle” charters that showed how to close the achievement gap without spending any more money.
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Great list of sources totally ignored in favor of press releases from the charter school propoganda machine.
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You should send a copy of your well documented rebuttal to the editor in chief of the ‘NYT.’ They should be embarrassed for reporting and widely disseminating misinformation. Leonhardt is either guilty of not fact checking or extreme bias. In either case the ‘NYT’ should take responsibility for distributing what is essentially “fake news.”
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After reading some other pro-charter article in the NY Times, I wrote an article comprehensively documenting that they are not better than public schools, they increase segregation, they don’t save money, etc.
The Times rejected it, as they have rejected whatever I have sent them for the past few years.
I then submitted the article to The Washington Post, and they published it here. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charter-schools-are-leading-to-an-unhealthy-divide-in-american-education/2018/06/22/73430df8-7016-11e8-afd5-778aca903bbe_story.html?utm_term=.de676152297f
The Times will not print rebuttals, although they do print letters to the editor. I encourage you to write them.
I am permanently banned at the NY Times op-ed page.
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Wow! So much for the fair and impartial press!
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TELLING TIMES when Diane Ravitch, a writer who does true and essential research, is the one rejected and banned…
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Diane,
Re: “I am permanently banned at the NY Times op-ed page.”
CONGRATULATIONS! And thanks for letting us know this information.
I worry for this country … now more than ever.
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Eyewitness (or is it witless) accounts are notoriously unreliable. For too many, unquestioned frameworks, ideological, cultural, etc, filter perceptions. They are so powerful that counterfactual evidence is ignored or reprocessed to explain it away. Too bad more people do not learn and incorporate more real scientific thinking into their explanations. That would mean they must always ask, “What would the data look like if my tentative thinking is wrong?” It would mean they would prepare to consider challenges to their conclusions.
Sloppy, dangerous thinking. The fog of ideology hasn’t changed since Obama’s full scale embrace of market-driven education reform. I wrote about it here (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2012/11/07/a-call-for-president-obama-to-change-course-on-education/?utm_term=.1673e835b466) in 2012. Unfortunately, nothing has changed for the enthusiasts despite a mountain of evidence. That is because equity and democracy are not their core values or goals.
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Your last sentence is a keeper.
IMHO, it is precisely “because equity and democracy are not their core values or goals” that rheephormsters of every tint and hue can fund/promote/conduct/encourage reportage & research that is not just shoddy and misleading but shamelessly false and self-serving.
Back to basics: they don’t care as long as the bottom line is served. In their eyes, $tudent $ucce$$ is its own reward and validation.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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“Too bad more people do not learn and incorporate more real scientific thinking into their explanations.”
Exactly.
Can we expect the public schools to “teach” that mode of thinking?
Or is the tide of blind religious obedience to dogma and ideology to which most students are imbued with at home and church too strong?
I hope not, and cannot bring myself to believe that it is too strong.
Excellent commentary, thanks, Arthur!
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This is a bit off-topic, but with regards to charters — the NY Post had an article about the compensation of charter CEOS.
https://nypost.com/2018/07/14/charter-school-ceos-get-massive-paychecks-thanks-to-private-donors/
There is something extremely disturbing in here: the question of who is paying the massive and extraordinarily high salaries of charter school CEOs.
It turns out that Eva Moskowitz at Success Academy is paid over $782,000. And ONLY $195,000 is from the network. The rest came from “the affiliated Success Foundation” — $255,000 in salary plus a $300,000 bonus in one year.
What is this “affiliated” Success Foundation? According to the article:
“The foundation was set up in 2012 with a mission to support the Success Academy schools. It has taken in $1 million in donations in the last two years – with the cash coming each year, ALL FROM A SINGLE UNDISCLOSED DONOR.
A Success Academy spokeswoman said the foundation’s sole function was “supplementing the compensation of the CEO.”
A SINGLE UNDISCLOSED DONOR personally arranged to have Eva Moskowitz receive $555,000 in a single year. And this donor did not just give her the money as a gift but laundered it through a non-profit foundation for which he or she likely took a tax deduction as a “charitable contribution”.
First of all, a “foundation” who spends all of its money subsidizing the salary of an already very highly paid person is not doing charitable work.
And a charter CEO who is getting nearly 3 times her salary FROM A SINGLE DONOR should reveal who is paying her. Especially when this CEO made it her personal mission to spend her time on a public relations campaign demanding that Betsy DeVos be confirmed as Secretary of Education.
If that single donor who gave Moskowitz $555,000 in 2016 has any interest in DeVos being confirmed due to his own politics, that would make Moskowitz a paid PR hack.
Who is this donor who single handedly donates money through a foundation to give Moskowitz over half a million each year? A foundation that seems to do nothing but pay Moskowitz money.
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I knew when I emailed this Leonhardt propaganda that you would see the scam.
Arthur Camins is right . Nothing has changed.
How could it. There are 15,880 separate school systems across America, and the average citizen who knows little about WHAT LEARNING LOOKS LIKE, or how to FACILITATE OR ENABLE IT, is fed a non-stop diet of punditry by the likes of Leonhardt.
Here at my series at Oped News, are many your important posts that tell the truth as the ASSAULT on the INSTITUTION OF Public Education has been privatized.
Series Page for 15,880 Districts in 50 States: already divided for conquering. | OpEdNews
https://www.opednews.com/Series/15-880-Districts-in-50-Sta-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-140921-34.html?f=15-880-Districts-in-50-Sta-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-140921-34.html
Fake news about those bad teachers, and the need to evaluate them by testing the kids, became daily fare for 2 decades as the media owned by the EIC https://greatschoolwars.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/eic-oct_11.pdf fed journalists like Leonhardt with one-sided misrepresentations.
In 1999, when I was the NYS Educator of Excellence, they came for me and tens of thousands of experienced professional practitioners, so they could replace authentic learning with teaching to a test, so they could end public education and dumb-down our future citizens.
Remember this, it is not just the enormous profits that ECOT and the other ventures that thrive as public money is diverted into private pockets. It is the loss of Shared knowledge — which MAKES DEMOCRACY POSSIBLE which is the tragedy!!
An ignorant citizenry is the goal, not just the profit made by the businesses that take over our schools.
Click to access hirsch.pdf
When the schools fail, income equality disappears too, as it has been doing for a long time now.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
When the public schools are gone, what our people know will be fed by people like this https://dianeravitch.net/2014/12/05/north-carolina-plans-to-adopt-koch-funded-social-studies-curriculum
Leonhardt is just another shill, bought by the corpocracy to fool the people.
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Well, I don’t mean to be hopeless. In fact, significant opposition has emerged since Obama doubled down on the Reagan-Bush privatization agenda: the opt-out movement and election of progressive school board and local candidates. Organize and vote!
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Susan,
Do you have a source for that 15,880? The last I had seen and was using was around 13,500. Could the difference be that in some states each charter school organization is now counted as a separate “district”? I believe in Missouri that is how they are counted.
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Follow his bank accounts and you will probably see a large chunk of money leading to Eva Moskowitz. This is capitalism at it’s best…..boast the same kind of system somewhere else to secretly boost your own. New Yorkers are starting to catch onto the scheme.
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More charter cheerleading. Ho hum. Just another day in the ed reform echo chamber.
We’ll see more and more of this one-sided marketing and promotion and less and less advocacy for PUBLIC schools, now that ed reformers have gutted labor unions.
It’ll be even worse in Congress and state legislatures, which will be inundated with charter/voucher lobbyists and no one will be advocating on behalf of public schools.
They don’t want a debate in ed reform. That’s why they work so hard to silence labor unions.
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I love to read these ed reform echo chamber pieces because there’s ALWAYS an obligatory nod to existing public schools in the last paragraph.
Regretfully, they must admit public schools exist, although if they had their druthers they would replace every single one with a charter or private school.
This isn’t about “public education”. It’s about promoting charters and private schools. They barely mention public schools, let alone offer them anything worthwhile or even interesting.
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The race is on with national media: who will the corporate education scams last mark?
There is a reason that there are 750 sysnonyms for the word “sucker” in the English language.
https://www.powerthesaurus.org/sucker
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What a shame that no one with power or influence can muster up any interest in the 90% of students who attend the unfashionable and much-maligned public school sector.
We should hire some people who support public schools, instead of continuing to pay the salaries of people who promote schools that match their ideological preference.
Once the teachers stopped the strikes public schools fell off the face of the earth again. They’ve been disappeared again.
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Above all, the eduction solutions that grow out of the market reform ideology avoid dealing with inequality, eschew democracy and the common good. They accept inequity, scarcity, and individual competition as natural givens. Many may find Trump’s survival-of-the-fittest version morally repugnant, but refuse to recognize him as a product of their ideology.
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Amen, Arthur Camins.
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Reblogged this on Cloaking Inequity.
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Well doesn’t this complicate things? So how does one confront this dynamic without challenging the legitimacy of a free press? Without reinforcing the narrative coming out of the right. Certainly, the same dynamic can be applied to other areas of the economy. Certainly, this is nothing new. Perhaps we can point out that this is not news but an editorial opinion. Which then puts the onus on the Times to cover the story from the Newsroom.
But all too often what comes out as reporting is also the opinion of the publishers and editors of the paper.
That is probably the most frustrating part of confronting the narrative of” fake news”.
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Most recommended comment on the editorial:
Liz K
Detroit, MIJuly 15
Times Pick
I taught in the New Orleans area from 2009-2012. I’ve been teaching in Detroit from 2013- the present. I’ve taught in traditional public schools, and I helped unionize my current charter school. One quick point: unionized schools do fire people. In most cases, it’s not very hard. As a previous commenter pointed out, collective bargaining agreements guarantee due process, not lifetime employment.
Given my real experience in both of these controversial systems, I’ll say this: a journalist can tell pretty much any story he/she likes about a given school system. One simply chooses his/her measures, his/her interviewees, and his/her heroes and villains to fit the narrative he/she wishes to write.
I have friends and former colleagues who work at the schools cited in this article, who will shake their heads at the absence of any discussion of special education outcomes, suspension/expulsion data, and many other important, yet nuanced pieces of the puzzle. I’ll also note that NYT published a very different (and in my opinion, better-researched) piece in 2015, by Andrea Gabor.
To the readers out there who don’t work in the field of education: please have the sense to read more than one piece on a topic like this before forming your opinion. And for the love of God, please ask a few actual educators in your life what they think, too.
Reply293 Recommend
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Second most recommended comment:
skoolmarm13
New Orleans LAJuly 15
Times Pick
I’ve taught in two charter schools in New Orleans, and the problems are huge. Many schools are founded by people with no training or background in education. Many charters close within a few years of opening, sometimes mid-year, leaving students stranded. Cheating on standardized tests has been documented. Charters are good at PR, because they are often run as a business, by business people. As an educator, I don’t want to work for a CEO. Starting a school from scratch is a monumental task. Allowing inexperienced non-profits to create their own schools just because they have a business plan that looks good on paper? Well, we are playing games with the lives of our most vulnerable students.
Reply203 Recommend
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Third most recommended:
Vesuviano
Altadena, CaliforniaJuly 15
Times Pick
A very thought-provoking column from Mr. Leonhardt. Full disclosure – I am a 21-year union public school teacher in Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest public school district in the country.
I love New Orleans, and after Katrina looked into moving there to be a teacher. I found that I would lose approximately half my salary compared to L.A., have no health insurance, which in L.A. is fully funded through my job, and have no pension. I would also lose all due process protections that come with being a union member. I could be fired on a whim.
I stayed where I was.
That said, I agree with the two main ideas of this piece: autonomy and accountability. I know what my students need, and too often am unable to give it to them.
I have seen wonderful teachers and administrators in my district, and I have also seen some of the least competent and most objectionable people imaginable in both fields. My union is currently at loggerheads with our School Board, a majority of which was elected with $15 million of outside money provided by billionaires such as Reed Hastings and members of the Walton family. They want to bust my union.
My district is a political battlefield, and the students are the losers. Much of what is happening in New Orleans in this article sounds good. Somehow, however, I don’t feel like I’m getting the whole story.
Reply192 Recommend
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Fourth most:
Bruce
MadisonJuly 15
Times Pick
I’ve become skeptical of these turn-around stories. In almost every case, we later find out that the success was primarily a result of weeding out poorer performing, more troubled students, beginning with the “Texas miracle” that lead to NCLB.
I don’t know much about New Orleans, but KIPP and some other privately run charters typically keep only about half of their students. Many have no programs for disabled children. These schools can do good job with the students they allow to remain but what happens to the students that were asked or encouraged to leave. There is an argument for these quasi-private schools but too often for every door they open, another one is closed.
Often these schools are designed to avoid unionization and typically there is high teacher turnover. The initial reorganization of New Orleans Schools was clearly driven by political not educational concerns and led to the firing of my African American teachers. Finally, there is the issue of whether students are simply becoming better test-takers.
Cutting educational bureaucracy is usually a good thing, but the real trick to improving life outcomes for these students is to eliminate the pervasive poverty and racial discrimination that affect New Orleans and so many other troubled districts. I worry that stories like this one are designed to convince affluent voters that all that needs to be done is “reorganize” schools in poorer areas and all will be well.
Reply148 Recommend
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Thank you for providing more information and for the enlightening comments from those who have been there. When I read the editorial in the NYT, I felt like I was reading a PR piece, so this helps me understand why.
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Thank you, Betty Casey, for reading.
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