The editorial pages of the New York Times have been an echo chamber for school choice for years. The editorials regularly applaud charter schools as escape hatches from public schools and repeat the talking points of the billionaires and hedge fund managers who have gleefully replaced public schools with privately managed schools. I can’t recall an editorial that acknowledged the importance of rebuilding, revitalizing, and strengthening public education as a major responsibility of our society. I can’t recall one that criticized the onslaught of privatization against public education in our nation’s urban schools, where parents of color have lost not only their public schools, but their voice as citizens in creating public schools that serve the entire community. The editorial board has steadfastly ignored the coordinated and bipartisan assault on democratic governance of public schools in cities and states across the nation. The op-ed page, which was created to provide a space for views different from the editorial page has seldom challenged school choice orthodoxy. Almost every regular opinion writer has lauded the “miracle” of charter schools, including David Brooks, Nicholas Kristof, and David Leonhardt. The op-ed page recently included an article urging liberals not to give up on charters even though Betsy DeVos likes them too, even though they are segregated and non-union.
But now comes a new and welcome voice.
Erin Aubrey Kaplan writes that school choice is the enemy of justice. She has been selected as a regular opinion writer, which is more good news. She writes about her personal experience as a child in California, a state that is controlled by Democrats but purchased by the billionaires who sneer at public schools and want to replace them with charter schools. She reminds us that school choice was the battle cry of segregationists. In many states and cities, it still is.
Her article poses an essential question: Is public education, democratically controlled, still part of the social contract? And she writes that many white liberals, including Jerry Brown (and in New York, Andrew Cuomo) have said no.
She writes:
“LOS ANGELES — In 1947, my father was one of a small group of black students at the largely white Fremont High School in South Central Los Angeles. The group was met with naked hostility, including a white mob hanging blacks in effigy. But such painful confrontations were the nature of progress, of fulfilling the promise of equality that had driven my father’s family from Louisiana to Los Angeles in the first place.
“In 1972, I was one of a slightly bigger group of black students bused to a predominantly white elementary school in Westchester, a community close to the beach in Los Angeles. While I didn’t encounter the overt hostility my father had, I did experience resistance, including being barred once from entering a white classmate’s home because, she said matter-of-factly as she stood in the doorway, she didn’t let black people (she used a different word) in her house.
“Still, I believed, even as a fifth grader, that education is a social contract and that Los Angeles was uniquely suited to carry it out. Los Angeles would surely accomplish what Louisiana could not.
“I was wrong. Today Los Angeles and California as a whole have abandoned integration as the chief mechanism of school reform and embraced charter schools instead.
“This has happened all over the country, of course, but California has led the way — it has 630,000 students in charter schools, more than any other state, and the Los Angeles Unified School District has more than 154,000 of them. Charters are associated with choice and innovation, important elements of the good life that California is famous for. In a deep-blue state, that good life theoretically includes diversity, and many white liberals believe charters can achieve that, too. After all, a do-it-yourself school can do anything it wants.
“But that’s what makes me uneasy, the notion that public schools, which charters technically are, have a choice about how or to what degree to enforce the social contract. There are many charter success stories, I know, and many make a diverse student body part of their mission. But charters as a group are ill suited to the task of justice because they are a legacy of failed justice.
“Integration did not happen. The effect of my father’s and my foray into those white schools was not more equality but white flight. Largely white schools became largely black, and Latino schools were stigmatized as “bad” and never had a place in the California good life.
“It’s partly because diversity can be managed — or minimized — that charters have become the public schools that liberal whites here can get behind. This is in direct contrast to the risky, almost revolutionary energy that fueled past integration efforts, which by their nature created tension and confrontation. But as a society — certainly as a state — we have lost our appetite for that engagement, and the rise of charters is an expression of that loss.
“Choice and innovation sound nice, but they also echo what happened after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, when entire white communities in the South closed down schools to avoid the dread integration.
“This kind of racial avoidance has become normal, embedded in the public school experience. It seems particularly so in Los Angeles, a suburb-driven city designed for geographical separation. What looks like segregation to the rest of the world is, to many white residents, entirely neutral — simply another choice.
“Perhaps it should come as no surprise that in 2010, researchers at the Civil Rights Project at U.C.L.A. found, in a study of 40 states and several dozen municipalities, that black students in charters are much more likely than their counterparts in traditional public schools to be educated in an intensely segregated setting. The report says that while charters had more potential to integrate because they are not bound by school district lines, “charter schools make up a separate, segregated sector of our already deeply stratified public school system.”
“In a 2017 analysis, data journalists at The Associated Press found that charter schools were significantly overrepresented among the country’s most racially isolated schools. In other words, black and brown students have more or less resegregated within charters, the very institutions that promised to equalize education.
“This has not stemmed the popular appeal of charters. School board races in California that were once sleepy are now face-offs between well-funded charter advocates and less well-funded teachers’ unions. Progressive politicians are expected to support charters, and they do. Gov. Jerry Brown, who opened a couple of charters during his stint as mayor of Oakland, vetoed legislation two years ago that would have made charter schools more accountable. Antonio Villaraigosa built a reputation as a community organizer who supported unions, but as mayor of Los Angeles, he started a charter-like endeavor called Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.
“This year, charter advocates got their pick for school superintendent, Austin Beutner. And billionaires like Eli Broad have made charters a primary cause: In 2015, an initiative backed in part by Mr. Broad’s foundation outlined a $490 million plan to place half of the students in the Los Angeles district into charters by 2023.
“I live in Inglewood, a chiefly black and brown city in Los Angeles County that’s facing gentrification and the usual displacement of people of color. Traditional public schools are struggling to stay open as they lose students to charters. But those who support the gentrifying, which includes a new billion-dollar N.F.L. stadium in the heart of town, see charters as part of the improvements. They see them as progress.
“Despite all this, I continue to believe in the social contract that in my mind is synonymous with public schools and public good. I continue to believe that California will at some point fulfill that contract. I believe this most consciously when I go back to Westchester and reflect on my formative two years in school there. In the good life there is such a thing as a good fight, and it is not over.“
I just about snorted coffee out of my nose when I read this op-ed this morning.
Baby steps, baby steps.
Diane Public education, though not perfect, is our best hope at getting there, and at keeping all sorts of ideologies out of education.
The best example of how private institutions differ from public institutions is the prison system. That is, when prisons go private, stockholders and ceo’s have an automatic financial stake in building and maintaining prisons–AND all aspects of the social-political situation that keeps the prison population coming, or even increases those situations. And when your very income depends on supporting an unjust system, it’s just that more difficult to be anything but unjust.
But for education, IF we want to maintain a vibrant democracy and pass it on to our children, then public education for all harbors the best way to do that, as has rightly been explained on this site over and over.
Ooops . . . I forgot, . . . we can assume no longer that our legislators actually want to maintain a vibrant democracy to pass along to our children–all of them. CBK
As usual Catherine, excellent analysis.
Erin Aubrey Kaplan better watch her back, she could be whisked away in the dark of night to the charter school reeducation camp and see the “error” in her ways. Amazing, a non charter cheerleading Op ED in the NYT. Great, kept it up! This is the time of year when all the pro charter glop goes into high gear. This OP ED is a refreshing fly in the ointment.
It is good. I just can’t help but think that the ed reform marketing pitch- that education is the great equalizer- ends up letting everyone off the hook on anything ELSE that might be a good “equalizer”
It’s like we got charter schools and education reform INSTEAD OF getting anything that might upset the powers that be or wealthy people.
It’s just such a bad trade. It’s a horrible DEAL for the public. They lose existing public education systems and what do they get in return? They get a collection of government contractors designed and managed by free market zealots? How is that a good deal?
I know they will lose. There will be no net gain and an enormous potential loss.
They also won’t ever get them back. If public education systems are eradicated we will never, ever get them back, even if the privatized systems are worse.
This error will be irreversible.
It’s also SUCH an echo chamber. They absolutely dominate policy. They’ve now taken over apprenticeships and vocational education. It looks exactly like everything else they do- deregulated, mostly geared towards what powerful people demand out of employees, and riddled with opportunities for corruption because it’s a collection of private contractors with no serious oversight or regulation.
The midwest had this long tradition of apprenticeships and it benefitted THE APPRENTICE and the employer- both. The ed reform version benefits ONLY the employer. Their plans are a bad deal for the young person who is the apprentice.
It’s another rip off. It was written BY employers FOR employers.
You watch. In five years the ed reform apprenticeships will be discredited and young people will abandon them as a rip off. They managed to take a 500 year old idea and ruin it in 5 years.
“They managed to take a 500 year old idea and ruin it in 5 years.” Most frightening truth.
College ‘apprenticeships’ (internships) already took this turn over a decade ago judging from my sons’ experiences. This is anecdotal – seemed to be universal among their acquaintances but those who know different, pls correct me. They were studying audio engrg, & the internships were pot luck; most of them just threw college kids at a biz w/o guidance or oversight. The biz usually used them as gofers; one friend was even pressed into free manual labor for a studio reno! The ‘training’ consisted of reading manuals solo (when they weren’t gofering). The only worthwhile apprenticeships I knew of were at big engrg co’s; they needed people & used the oppty to train potential recruits. I expect the same pattern will develop w/hisch apprenticeships. If the biz can get their hands on school tax revenue for free labor, many will sign up, but only some actually need recruits & will train accordingly.
Media coverage of ed reform can change. I watched it happen in Ohio. Ohio happens to (still) have several large newspapers in major cities. They ALL cheerled charters. That went on for a decade. Then the results started to trickle in – first it was just one paper who jumped off the bandwagon and now they’re all looking at it critically.
It’s a HUGE change. The rubber stamp is gone.
The last people to get it will be Congress and the US Department of Education. They’ll still be cheerleading this long after states have started to jump ship.
New York has not had a charter scandal on the scale of ECOT. Yet. Our major media are owned by billionaires who only talk to other billionaires. They live in a bubble. At some point the scandals will be too big to ignore.
I wish I could agree. The Cincinnati Enquirer oped have been open to charter pushers who lie about state funding, success, and demean govm’t run monopoly schools. William L. Phillis, Ohios expert watchdog for public education responded to one of these opeds a day or two ago, but this morning there was an attack on him and whining about charter schools, kids trapped in failing schools and charters getting only “half the funding” going to public schools.
The Enquirer covered the opening school year moves of our public schools planned for press coverage and participants representing the school board’s aspirations for students: a) college preparation–with brief presentation from a university president, b) entry into the military service with a pitch from recruiters, and c) getting a job in the local economy with pitches from several large employers. A bit of irony in this: the Superintendent was a graduate of our public school for the creative and performing arts, taught in the city schools before rising to the role of Superintendent. There is no room for a vision of education for civic competence with students’ knowledge and interests untethered to three post-secondary options.
I imagine one of the ways that Aubry Kaplan became a good writer was by attending an integrated public school. We know that integration is a powerful way to provide minority students with a quality education, and I believe it is an expression of the “social contract” in action.
After California passed Proposition 13, schools were cash strapped. Privatization appeared to offer “innovation and choice” at a lower price. The reality of privatization tells a different story. Innovation is rarely an element of privatization, and those type of experiments are in small schools serving mostly affluent students. Choice is one of the big lies of privatization. Parents often do not get to choose the schools. The schools do the choosing, and this so-called choice has led to enhanced segregation.
Today privatization is funded by billionaires and dark money. The entrenched charter lobby controls legislators and governors by campaign contributions. As a result many states are refusing to accept the evidence based failure of privatization, and they keep demanding more laws to destroy public schools and a bigger slice of the budget pie. Students, particularly black and brown ones have become monetized, and the goal of many charter operators is not improve education. The goal is to improve the size of their bank accounts.
The goal of “choice” is not equity. At best, charter schools and their close cousin, vouchers, avoid systemic solutions to promote equity. More often, they actively set out to undermine equity and the bedrock value of the common good.
Jim Crow…today.
There is a fundamental dilemma within the public v. charter debate: should “we” support the public good or the personal good.
This is a no brainer for parents who will always seek the personal good for their own children. Supporting a charter school for your child as the best perceived educational option is understandable from the parent’s viewpoint. The fact that money and human resources (motivated students with supportive parents) have been siphoned away from the local public school, leaving a needier population and less money takes a back seat to their children’s best chance for a bright future.
This leaves us with a question for the policy makers: Do you support the public good: well funded schools with highly qualified teachers and small class sizes – for ALL? Or do you support the personal good: school choice for parents with the motivation and where with all to seek the best option for their child?
The political strategy is to make the former the best route to the latter.
RageAgainstTheTestocracy says: “There is a fundamental dilemma within the public v. charter debate: should ‘we’ support the public good or the personal good.”
Well, that’s how THEY would express the situation (especially if we accept their propaganda). And I think I understand your meaning here; but I also think it puts forth a false dilemma.
The dilemma for policy makers, is indeed a crisis: but it is between short-and-long term vision; and between listening to the propaganda against “bad schools and bad teachers,” OR understanding the principles of democracy and the intrinsic need for public education, then giving them their ongoing developmental support–that’s why they were elected–to understand such things and act on it in their policy-making.
A vibrant public school complex, with such adequate support (etc.), IS not opposed to the personal good of ANY student, but rather is exactly correlate with it. CBK
In a perfect world, you are absolutely correct. As a matter of public policy, you are absolutely correct. As a matter of concerned parents in the here and now, not quite.
The issue here cannot be solved by equitable funding, highly qualified teachers, and smaller class size (not that these shouldn’t be the norm).The issue is a climate of chaos and dysfunction that is brought into schools by children from dysfunctional families; children who suffer the pscholgical stressors of neglect and abuse; children who understandably are apathetic, undisciplined, and unable or unwilling to work. Supportive and engaged parents aren’t running away from bad teachers – they’re running away from a relatively small but overwhelming number of chronically disruptive, rude, and defiant students in schools that have few viable disciplinary options – schools hamstrung by law, by policy, and by state ed pressures.
Take some time to visit a high needs middle school or high school in a crime ridden, impoverished neighborhood if you don’t believe me. Then explain to the parent who just opted for the new charter school that they should support the “vibrant public school complex” coming to them . . . when?
So yes it is a fundamental dilemma that can only be solved on a long term basis. And it starts with economic reform; meaningful work at a living wage. Putting and end to institutional racism would help too, as would hell freezing over. But for now, time waits for no parent.
Rage AgainstTheTestocracy says: ” But for now, time waits for no parent.” I understand.
However, it’s the policy-makers that were the point of the discussion. And apparently, so many charters are not doing well either. If so, then parents’ choosing charters over public school is pot-luck at best; and at worst, potentially upsetting for students when they close; and it feeds the long-term problems anyway. And again, I’ve see the “choice” based not on the reality of a specific school, but rather on out-and-out racism, or current propaganda about bad schools, bad teachers–starve the beast so that parents
can say: “See how bad it is–let’s get rid of it!” And don’t forget those horrible unions–typical neo-liberal robocall-like rhetoric for parents too busy to understand the details. Wow–are they good at THAT. CBK
I am a strong supporter of public schools and as a teacher, I oppose the privatization/charter school movement. I am well aware of the damage inflicted by shifting public dollars away from the neediest children. Charters offer no long term solutions to the large scale problems of income inequity, institutional racism, and the debilitating effects of generational poverty and dependence.
School can only do so much in the struggle with societal ills and the incredible range of abilities that children bring to the classroom. However, moving to a very limiting, standards based, test-and-punish model has exacerbated the problem.
Rage tells the inconvenient truth: many majority-minority schools are chaotic –an empirical fact that few of my fellow liberals will admit—and, therefore, repellent to concerned parents of all races. And they’re chaotic not because any race is inherently unruly, but because of the residue of centuries of racism and poverty. How do we fix this mess? Lifting up the poor. But also changing the curriculum to give poor k-8 students the intellectual capital that wealthier kids get. If poor black kids get a robust foundation of knowledge in K-8, they’ll be much less likely to give up and resort to socializing in high school classes. Our curriculum now is impoverishing the minds of our kids, as ED Hirsch cogently explains in “Why Knowledge Matters”. Let’s examine the roots of the misbehavior. Part of it is lack of proper academic preparation in the early grades.
Ponderosa “Let’s fix public schools” is the main point. “Replace with charters and put “Public Schools” in parentheses is not the answer. Apples and oranges.
American public schools serve millions of disadvantaged LIM children.
They come to our classrooms tired, hungry, stressed out, and insecure. They come to our classrooms largely unprepared for the challenges we present them. They come to our classrooms from unstructured chaotic homes where neglect, food insecurity, violence, drug and alcohol abuse are not uncommon. They come to our classrooms with limited vocabulary, limited knowledge, limited experiences, and limited expectations in comparison to their privileged counterparts raised in affluent two parent families. By kindergarten, the knowledge and vocabulary gap is unimaginably wide and deep.
And the amateur reformers who dared to call the schools that serve these children, “failure factories” had one answer, one solution for these struggling children: let’s test them – and lets make the tests harder than ever. Let’s narrow the curriculum; let’s limit their school experiences; let’s ignore content knowledge and vocabulary; let’s ignore history, geography, science, and the arts; let’s give them but one very small and specialized pathway to success; and let’s ignore their cognitive disabilities and psychological trauma. Let’s fail them into oblivion to prove how bad their teachers are. And once we prove to everyone that the schools and their teachers that serve the most underprivileged and disadvantage children in the land are lazy, burned-out. abject failures, let’s play savior.
Excellent summary of the problems, Rage. Ed-reform ‘solutions’ reveal they’re looking to ‘solve’ something else entirely.
“In a 2017 analysis, data journalists at The Associated Press found that charter schools were significantly overrepresented among the country’s most racially isolated schools. In other words, black and brown students have more or less resegregated within charters, the very institutions that promised to equalize education.”
Ms. Kaplan really hit the nail on the head. This phenomenon of racial separation is strongly evident in Oakland charters. Virtually all charters here (40+ and counting, can hardly keep track) are nearly all Hispanic. Ironically, the one charter school that had a significant number of African Americans (reflecting the demographic of the city) is BayTech, and that’s not going so well. Two of our school board members are constantly feeding the narrative of how public schools haven’t served African Americans, so all this choice is a good thing. They are blind to the fact that that charters aren’t serving them well, either and yet they continue to champion these schools as a way out. Tell that to the kids at BayTech that were stolen from right under the not-so-watchful eye of our corporate-bought school board.
Jim Crow ….
and there is this… The Court Nominee’s Hint on Tax Dollars for Religious Schools
Brett M. Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court could advance efforts to make publicly funded vouchers available to students attending religious schools,.
Betsy Devos, and Kavanaugh–what a team
PUBLIC SCHOOLS are under attack. Defunded at every level, and now, OUR TAXPAYER MONEY is being is used to support everyone except those most vulnerable and needy.
We are a shameful nation.
The privatizers don’t want the competition from religious schools, so they are attacking vouchers.
The “enemy of justice”- we know that’s true when Betsy DeVos hired a group of all White faculty from public universities to create a better product for charter schools to sell. The grant was given to the private Tulane University.
As often times in the past, I am not quite as enamored with what and how the writer goes about her chore. While I believe her intent is good she falls into the trap of much of the writing coming out of the “left” these days that has to be “softened” so as to not offend anyone. Not only that but she has repeated some of the basic fallacious talking points of the charter school supporters, thus reinforcing their false discourse.
“There are many charter success stories, I know, and many make a diverse student body part of their mission. But charters as a group are ill suited to the task of justice because they are a legacy of failed justice. . . It’s partly because diversity can be managed — or minimized — that charters have become the public schools that liberal whites here can get behind.”
Many??? How about “There are very few charter success stories” since in the next sentence she contradicts her statement with “charters as a group are ill-suited to the task of justice.” If charters as a group are “ill-suited to the task of justice” how can there be “many success stories”? Are there editors at the NYT?
And in repeating the charter lovers” mantra “charters have become the public schools” she totally ignores that they are in actuality PRIVATE schools. Again, more of the namby pamby horse manure softening language that only serves the privateer and edudeformer agenda as she keeps calling private charter schools public.
“Choice and innovation sound nice, but they also echo what happened after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, when entire white communities in the South closed down schools to avoid the dread integration. This kind of racial avoidance has become normal, embedded in the public school experience.”
NO, it’s not that “racial avoidance has become normal, embedded in the public school experience”. That’s a bunch of malarkey. Where that racial avoidance in many different fashions has occurred, by design is in the private charter school sector. To assign that culpability to the public sector is disgenuous at best, downright lying at worse.
I smell a rat. I see a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I can’t accept this as much more than more public school bashing and a subtle apologia for the private charter school sector.
I agree. She does seem to gloss over how truly nefarious privatization is. She claims to support public education. I would have liked her to have mentioned that privatization is an assault on democracy. Market based education is intent on destroying a key public institution that is transparent and accountable to the communities they serve. Public schools are a democratically governed public asset. Corporate schools benefit a few at the expense of many.
“School Choice is the Enemy of Justice” is a great headline and the main idea is correct, though, as much as I agree that some of the language within the article is overly charter apologist. They are not public schools. That the Times hired Kaplan to write for them regularly is a huge step in the right direction, so I would personally give a general two thumbs up.
Why is “school choice the enemy of justice”? There has always been school choice as many parents have decided in the past where they chose to live with the schools in mind. I know I did. And as with my parents who chose a Catholic education for us kids, there was/is that kind of choice. And other kind of choices, homeschooling being one.
So it is not just the concept of “school choice” that is not just. For me that choice actually is as it allows for individual liberty and expression of the parents. Where the “school choice” mantra intrudes into issues of justice is when the term is misleadingly used to suggest a certain false set of choices, i.e., the edudeformer and privateer agenda of private McCharter Schools that come and go depending upon how much the owners can wrangle out of the public tax monies. Bottom line profit taking, many times by “managing” the student population and other policies, cannot be compatible with maximizing the teaching and learning process for the students.
Which “industry’ has reaped the most profit from school choice?
Hint: It’s not the charter industry.
Realty.
The number one selling point of every suburban realtor?
Great (public) schools!
And no one faults parents for deciding where to live based on the school system their children will attend.
Yet many here seem to be faulting the inner city parent, unable to move to the cushy suburbs, for choosing the charter option as their best bet.
As public educators we must change our selling points.
“Charters are bad policy” is not and should not work.
“We are as good as or better than charters in test prep”
is also a failed selling point.
Time to re-message what the public school experience
offers kids, and their parents, who having nothing else.
Correct, Rage. School choices for those whose local pubsch is overcrowded & unsafe: (1)move to a nbhd w/a good school – for people of fair means. (2)pay for Catholic sch – for people of modest means & those who can get scholarships. (3)go to a charter school – for those among the rest who can get their kids to the location – whose kids get in – & don’t get squeezed out. (4)everybody else: stay in local pubsch as its funds are siphoned off by charters, services dwindle, & it’s finally closed as punishment for being “bad.”
retired teacher says about dark money funding: “The goal is to improve the size of their bank accounts.”
And THAT’s how ideology gets its nose under the tent; its how ideological echo-chambers (like those of Fox News’s or the Koch’s or the Walton’s, or Putin’s et al.) come into being; and it’s why education in a democracy should remain open and PUBLIC and should have one overriding purpose and one only: education of everyone; and where the stream of children’s questioning, understanding, and knowledge-building, and everyone’s general well-being, remains unimpeded by some owner’s or banker’s or private board’s or oligarch’s narrow self-interests.
Also, ideology is as much the omission of questions and “certain” curricula as it is active propaganda. CBK
“Also, ideology is as much the omission of questions and “certain” curricula as it is active propaganda.”
Exactly, CBK!
Much more so than the vast majority of folks understand.
Charter schools aren’t even “technically” public schools: Supreme Courts in states like New York, Washington and elsewhere are catching on to the scam and have ruled that charter schools are really private schools because:
They aren’t accountable to the public because they are run by private boards that aren’t elected by voters, and;
They don’t file detailed, annual, audited, public domain reports to the public about what they’re doing with the public’s tax money.
Just because charter schools allow a select, ability and racially segregated portion of the public through their doors doesn’t make them genuine public schools, not even technically.
The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a report which warns that, because of their lack of financial accountability to the public “CHARTER SCHOOLS AND THEIR MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATIONS POSE A POTENTIAL RISK TO FEDERAL FUNDS, EVEN AS THEY FALL SHORT OF MEETING GOALS” because of financial fraud and the artful skimming of tax money into private pockets.
If nothing else is required of charter schools, there is one thing that must be required so that charter schools are accountable to taxpayers and inform taxpayers as to where taxpayer money is actually going when it’s given to charter schools; that one key thing is this: Charter schools must be required to file the SAME detailed, public domain financial reports under penalty of perjury that public schools file.
Charter schools will cry that this is “too burdensome” — yet public schools file such reports. What would the outcry be if public schools were “freed” of this “burden”? Why, the outcry would rattle the very heavens! So, why is it that private charter schools are allowed to get away with taking public tax money and not have to tell the public on an annual basis how those public tax dollars are spent?
Charter schools bill themselves as “public schools”, but Supreme Courts in states like New York, Washington and elsewhere are catching on to the scam and have ruled that charter schools are really private schools because they aren’t accountable to the public because they are run by private boards that aren’t elected by voters and don’t even have to file detailed reports to the public about what they’re doing with the public’s tax money…especially since genuine, unbiased data that’s not paid for by the charter school industry shows that they perform no better than less expensive truly public schools.
The ACLU, MALDEF, and NAACP should immediately join together in a public information/action campaign to require charter schools to file the same, exact public domain financial reports that genuine public schools file. Compelling charter schools to file comprehensive public domain financial reports will end the charter school scam because it will expose charter schools for what they are: A scheme by billionaires to skim public tax money into their own pockets.
Refreshing change for the Times. Thanks for posting this.
I just have questions:
By “charter success stories” does she mean the success of individuals, not necessarily schools?
And does white flight, as a form of racial avoidance, not precede the charter movement?
I get what she’s saying. White people (collectively) have never integrated willingly; it seems to have always been forced upon them. If they don’t like it, they “choose” to avoid it.
I think I will use this editorial in my class next week, for we will be discussing the term, social contract. Conservatives are fond of going back to the original uses of a phrase to claim its original meaning, especially if the original intent fits with their political aims. Perhaps we should review the social contract and its evolution.
The idea of social contract was a term imbedded in English contractual law that Thomas Hobbes borrowed to describe the relationship of the king to the people. People, he thought, were basically evil. Thus they must give up their freedom to get safety from an absolute monarch. Nonwithstanding the periodic movement back toward some form of authoritarian government, we have, since Hobbes wrote Leviathan in the mid seventeenth century, been moving toward a social contract that involves what this author seems to envision. Inclusion of all parties in the idea that the state should reflects the greatest desires of all of the people has guided western democratic thought since Hobbes.
Rousseau famously warned that a populace which saw no future in participating in the democracy would doom the experiment altogether. This places urgency on the idea of education as a part of social contract, just as Kaplan argues. She appears to argue that the exclusive nature of charters when it comes to the re-segregation of schools indicts charters as institutions which move us away from the social contract of a promised participation for all.
So, with an eye out for some of the objections raised above, I will hope the the Times, it is a changin.
Nice! Any Poets out there who might happen to catch this want to do a little Bob Dylan riffing? I love Bob Dylan. He, unlike Bill Gates, deserved the Medal of Freedom.
“6-year-old boy with dreadlocks banned from private school in Orange County”
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/education/school-zone/os-private-school-boys-hair-20180814-story.html
Here’s an interesting story. Given that the school is majority black, I don’t think the hair policy is racist. However, I still bemoan the fact that these private schools can have strict policies in areas that public schools CANNOT institute (even something as simple as uniforms), then claim that they are better if they their test scores averages are better than the public schools.
I think you will really like the last two paragraphs in the article.
“Given that the school is majority black, I don’t think the hair policy is racist.”
Black people/institutions can still perpetuate colonialist values and mindsets.
Why would anyone want to be poor and black anyway? CBK
University faculty churning out marketing research for privatizers, which is funded by DeVos’ department of ed. is the enemy of justice and democracy.
The 2018, summer grant to private Tulane University shows a lot of White academic photos and no Black faculty photos. the same was true of its predecessor group at Vanderbilt. The Tulane group, in addition to Mich. State’s Katherine O. Stark, who raked in grants from the Waltons, John Arnold and Gates, includes Julie Marsh. She’s at Rossier’s (which was Pahara’s first incursion into a university deanship-USC). Marsh worked at the Rand Corporation for a long time then decided to take taxpayer money as an employee of a PUBLIC university. She’s raked in grants from Edison Schools ($1,392,000), almost $2,000,000 from William and Flora Hewitt ,…,and, money from Arnold and the Waltons.
Weaponizing government against the common good
Another guy in the Tulane REACH group who is cashing paychecks from a PUBLIC university while assisting privatizers with their marketing is Joshua Cohen at Michigan State, who raked in grants of $2,587,000 from the Arnold Foundation. What would citizens think if an Arnold grant ran concurrent with the REACH mission? The Waltons conferred about $263,000 in grants to Cowen.
AEI’s Frederick Hess and an external affairs manager for a Gates group understood working the game. In Philanthropy Roundtable, they recommended money to higher ed schools in their article, “Don’t Surrender the Academy”. It was offered as an alternative to the rich “…blowing up the ed schools.”
Betsy’s Ed Department gave $10 mil. to the private,Tulane University, “to pay for research on choice programs to help disadvantaged students…the center will study…marketing…” (MRT.com, July 23, 2018)
Douglas Harris of Tulane, a REACH group member has similarities to a number of his fellow participants in the grant. His photo matches the racial demographic of the photos of all of his fellow colleagues- White.
(Was Roland Fryer considered?) Harris is also similar to several of the group in receiving grants from Arnold ($4.3 mil. from Smith Richardson, Arnold, William T. Grant). Like one of the others in his group, he got a Gates grant . Unlike the others, he got Lumina money.
Harris is the Schleider Foundation Chair in PUBLIC Education. We can ask him to pose the profound question, “Why does the REACH market research/study to develop a better product for disadvantaged students exclude public schools and limit itself to privatization?”.
The NYT editorial was a rambling, incoherent conflation of failed desegregation policies, school choice, and social justice. If Kaplan had a point to make, she missed her mark by a mile. In reading the comments here, the general focus seems to be about discrediting the charter school movement. Haven’t we beat this dying horse long enough?
Cherry picking students. Test-prep factories. No-excuses discipline: eye tracking and mouth bubbles and posture policing. Astronomical suspension and expulsion rates. Unconscionable attrition rates. Tilted playing field, Unfair comparisons. Publicly funded private schools. CEOs and hedge funders pillaging and plundering the public school coffers. Siphoning valuable resources. Unqualified teaching staffs. Sudden closures.
Yet, parents continue to opt out of their troubled inner city public schools in droves, desperate for better, safer, more orderly learning environments for their children.
And what’s the best we can offer kids who have nothing but their schools?
Crowded classrooms.
Disorder and chaos.
Dilapidated facilities.
Math and ELA (very narrow versions of)
Math and ELA benchmark testing
Math and ELA standardized tests
Math and ELA support classes (AIS)
Math and ELA summer programs
Math and ELA data walls
Math and ELA chants, songs, and slogans
Math and ELA bulletin boards
Math and ELA till their heads explode
When the public schools offer what the children of poverty desperately need and their parents desperately crave, then maybe the charter school migration of the inner cities will reverse itself.
RageAgainstTheTestocracy A few notes ago, you wrote that bettering the public schools might be good in the long-term, but in the present, parents make more pragmatically-present decisions (choices).
Of course they do, even if they know enough to hold their noses when doing so.
However, and again, (a) the point was about policy-making; but more importantly, (b) all of the problems you write about, that PUBLIC schools are presently experiencing, like the testing mania, only reveal deep-set and sometimes very old problems and oversights that remain present deep in the under-life of all that we name “education,” but that, like the democratic culture itself, we can still slowly work through to create and become a “more perfect” system (as in “a more perfect union”).
You are right that parents cannot fix that by carrying the long-term burden and so failing their own children in the present. The “however,” there, however, (and back to policy-making and the philosophy of educatoin) is that the institution of charter schools (with all their hidden poisons to a democracy) coupled with loss of the long-term ideal of public education for all in that democracy, only hastens the death of the goose, so to speak, that, if left alone in the nest, and even with those present problems you speak of, has the potential to continue to lay those golden eggs.
About that long-term nest and its goose, there is lots presently going on in research and theory-formation in education that is finally ridding itself of the centuries-old problems of trying to copy the natural sciences methods and outcomes (various forms of positivism)–all good for new movements in education that will lessen the problems you speak of that are so pervasive to the present. (Some of our present children will become policy-makers and parents in the future, so the circle of influence continues.)
But nothing good can happen if educators now (especially those like Diane who has great influence in the best directions) give up that ideal to short-term gains, pseudo education (ideologies of every stripe, bells and whistles, propaganda aimed at religious and/or oligarchic or even fascist ends) or to low-life criminals who claim to have an education but who know nothing and care less about children. CBK
The policymakers like Duncan, Spellings, John King, etc. have inflicted this nightmare on public schools. Public schools are subject to federal law. The law must change. The best way to do that would be if every parent opted out of mandated testing.
Agreed. But schools need to get back to providing a high quality, holistic education. – the tests be damned. Stop the benchmark testing, Stop the double periods of math and ELA. Stop the close reading and endless search for supporting evidence. Stop the over-complication of simple arithmetic in elementary school. Bail out of any NGSS commitment. Forget the tests and make teaching and learning interesting and meaningful again. Restore recess, Restore social studies and geography. Restore basic science. Restore content knowledge. Restore field trips. Restore the arts, music, and other special area subjects. Be better – especially for the kids who have nothing else but what the schools provide.
Diane and Rage From reading these posts for awhile, I don’t think most here think public education AS IT IS PRESENTLY is a panacea of excellent education. I certainly don’t.
But that’s not the same thing as destroying the foundations of public education, which are intimate with democracy; and must remain that way if democracy is to maintain and, under the longer arch, continue to reach for its excellence, its freedoms and, yes, its movements towards justice.
Education in a charter school may do well here and there (and I’m sure it does). But the whole idea of charter schools, especially as a replacement for public education, CANNOT, on principle, take that place. It will be like Trump the President of the United States: does not, cannot, is not, fit.
As a political aside, however, ANY criticism from within the anti-charter movement is seen from the “other side” as adding to the argument for the dissolution of K-12 public schools. But that’s usually the case for cheap and shallow thinking, which also stands dumb and speechless against mounting criticisms of the charter movement and their well-funded bells and whistles. CBK
Parents opting out their children is one way. But. . .
. . . wouldn’t it be great if the administrators and teachers actually led the way and refused to give in to those standards and testing malpractice mandates that they know harm the students?
Ooooops, there goes old Alonzo talking again. Does he have a fever? Mr. Quijano just can’t understand why those who charge is “to promote the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry” would implement educational malpractices that harm so many innocents. “I must go polish my armor and lance. . ., and my dear Sancho, get me Rocinante for the battle must still be engaged.”
Realistically, you will never see a wholesale testing mutiny by administrators and teachers. The next best thing would be to opt out of everything associated with the tests. Give up the Common Coerced standards, quit the test prep, stop the scripted lessons, no more test rallies, songs, or chants, end the misplaced obsession with math and ELA, even ignore the scores! That’s right, bring all of it to a fast and fatal close. Then treat the two days of testing in each subject just like my teachers (circa 1965) treated the test of Iowa Basic Skills. End of story. For the “I just can’ quit you” crowd might I suggest hypnosis or therapy. Nearly 20 years of test-an-punish has done way more harm than good. If you really can’t give up the ghost, consider yourself professionally negligent.
“Professionally negligent is being very nice, Rager!”