I was astonished to read a post on the EWA blog today about whether charter schools reduce the funding available to public schools.
“There’s no question that the growth of charter schools presents significant financial challenges for many school systems, especially in cities where they serve a large share of students. Where researchers disagree is how great the costs to districts are, and to what extent charter schools are to blame.”
The author posed the question as a “debate” between the distinguished economist Helen Ladd of Duke University—whose bio is star studded with degrees and honors—and Robin Lake, who is an advocate for the charter industry at the pro-charter Center for the Reinvention of Public Education. Ladd is a scholar. Lake is not.
And yet they are treated as equals by this shoddy reporting.
The writer didn’t bother to contact scholar Gordon Lafer, author of the “One Percent Solution” and of a recent study demonstrating that charters diverted tens of millions of dollars from public schools in three urban districts in California.
Report: The Cost of Charter Schools for Public School Districts
When school districts cut their budgets because of charter schools, they must lay off teachers and cut programs. That affects the education of the vast majority of students. Why is that a debatable issue?
I googled the author, David Loewenberg, and saw that he was TFA and the New America Foundation (funded largely by Google), and it made sense.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Not surprising at all. I attended a recent EWA annual meeting and it felt like that a corporate education reform convention.
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EWA is funded in part (in large part) by Gates and Walton.
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Wow. This kid graduated in 2014 and was a “teacher” for 2.1 years, became an intern (probably set up by or through TFA), now is embedded as a “policy researcher/writer” for a blog paid for by billionaire philanthropy. What a waste of a career/life.
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Fast track. Sad that someone with so little experience or knowledge is advising education writers about policy.
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Your last line says it all: “I googled the author, David Loewenberg, and saw that he was TFA and the New America Foundation (funded largely by Google), and it made sense…”
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Another of Amurika’s bestests and brightestests!
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It’s dishonest and unethical to portray a pro-“reform” propaganda operation ( Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), a research and policy analysis center at the University of Washington,) as a scholarly research organization. I emailed EWA’s Emily Richmond (form at the end of that post) to tell her so, and others should too.
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Thank you.
CRPE is not neutral. It is not an independent think tank. As you said, it’s a propaganda advocacy group for charters and portfolio districts. He might as well have asked for a quote from DeVos or the Waltons.
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CRPE is best thought of as an operating arm of the Gates Foundation.
Not at my computer, but I have the grant making record and also the “commissioned papers” and projects, including the Gates Compact intrusions into local policies for charter schools.
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As a copy editor for the MSM, I often catch reporters (especially but not always young ones) doing that unknowingly — quoting some propaganda operation as though it were an impartial scholarly research source because it 1) has a name that sounds like one; 2) is quoted elsewhere in the same way; and 3) is readily available with quick sound bites. It’s often done completely unknowingly — but the EWA MUST know better about CRPE.
These operations deliberately create names that make them sound like scholarly research sources, of course. One like that, not in the education field, is the Center for Immigration Studies. It’s an anti-immigration group listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and reporters who definitely are NOT anti-immigrant have been horrified to learn that that’s what they were quoting. This just has to be called out every time it happens.
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The Center for Education Reform in DC is often quoted by reporters as an impartial source when it is a lobby for charters, vouchers, home schooling, cyber charters, etc.
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A local newspaper had an oped that claimed Lebron James’ school in Ohio was a charter school. That was an outright and convenient lie.
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Not so much biased reporting as paid advertising. Right up there with a Pepsi/Coke taste test.
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Wow, this reporter instead of connecting the dots on the ground is doing a high-wire balancing act. What is so tough about figuring out the proximate added costs of running 2 or 3 tiers of schools out of the same kitty [public taxes] as 1? Hmm, let’s see.
I’d start w/the pubsch per-pupil expenditure pre-charters/ vouchers as baseline, brought up to current $ (adjusted for signif budget adds/cuts over the yrs). I’d assess a surcharge on that for fixed costs wasted due to keeping lights on & doors open for the continual enrollment fluctuation caused by operating as no-fault back-up for folks moving back & forth between pubschs & charters/ voucherschs.
Next, comb thro charter/ voucher sch closings to tot up the unrecoverable charter & voucher amounts expended on students who returned to pubschs during schyr. Then, add in monies lost through fraud & conversion.
Next, I’d figure in the other kitties now being added to orig property tax/state/ fed tax basis, i.e., separate state funds & add’l fed grants that go directly to charters/ charter expansion.
Finally, I’d figure in taxes lost to write-offs that corps et al donors/ investors take via ESA’s or direct contributions or New Market Tax Credits.
Divide by total no of pubsch/ charter/ voucher students – and compare to baseline.
For context, I’d put results side-by-side w/NEAP score changes between baseline & present expenditures.
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He preferred to write a “she said, she said” article, which is lazy.
A real journalists would dig for facts.
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Real journalists don’t get paychecks from villainthropies. In the case of wanna-be writers, we can conclude from their bias that they are angling to qualify as intellectual prostitutes.
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Refinement to para #3: include unrecoverable charter/ voucher monies lost on other students returning to pubsch during schyr (not due to charter/vouchersch closure): they were counseled or squeezed out, their circumstances changed, whatever.
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Recent report from Cincinnati Public Schools budget chair: Dirstict lost $31 million to charter schools. Meanwhile oped a week later said charters were underfunded by over $1300. per student a clever and consistent claim of the industry.
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Back in the late 1980s -early 1990s when charters started, they promised to save money. Now they demand exactly the same funding as public schools, pay their administrators more and their teachers less.
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I’ve written on this blog numerous times that mainstream media education reporting is a problem. A serious problem. And guess what? The Education Writers Association is a big part of it.
For example, Emily Richmond, public editor of the Education Writers Association — whose self-described mission is “improve the quality of education coverage to better inform the public” — has written that “just 43 percent of U.S. eighth graders tested met or exceeded the benchmark for proficiency” on the newest NAEP test, the Technology and Engineering Literacy assessment. This is important, Richmond asserted, because “it’s one of the few means of comparing student achievement among states.”
Then Richmond posed this question, answer, and explanation:
“Why does this matter? These are skills that experts say Americans must have if they are to compete in a global marketplace. U.S. students typically have middling performance on international assessments gauging math and science ability.”
The implications are far-ranging. Emily Richmond, a national education reporter, is telling, or at the very least, strongly suggesting to readers that Americans students just can’t cut it – they aren’t “proficient” – and American economic competitiveness in the “global marketplace” is threatened.
This claim is the very same as that made for the necessity of the Common Core State Standards, which were funded by Bill Gates. Interestingly, the Education Writers Association is also funded by Bill Gates, along with conservative groups like the Kern, Dell and Walton Foundations.
But the claim is demonstrably false. America is already competitive in the global marketplace (it’s #2 in the World Economic Forum’s 2018-18 competitiveness rankings), and when it loses its competitive edge it’s not because of student test scores but because of stupid economic policies and decisions.
But Emily Richmond says nary a word about this. Zero. Nada. Does she not know? Or does she simply withhold that information from readers?
Nor does Richmond make any mention at all that there’s a glut of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) jobs in the U.S.
A 2004 RAND study “found no consistent and convincing evidence that the federal government faces current or impending shortages of STEM workers…there is little evidence of such shortages in the past decade or on the horizon.”
A 2007 study by Lowell and Salzman found no STEM shortage (see: http://www.urban.org/publications/411562.html ).
Indeed, Lowell and Salzman found that “the supply of S&E-qualified graduates is large and ranks among the best internationally. Further, the number of undergraduates completing S&E studies has grown, and the number of S&E graduates remains high by historical standards.” The “education system produces qualified graduates far in excess of demand.”
Beryl Lieff Benderly wrote this stunning statement the January/February 2012 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review:
“Leading experts on the STEM workforce, have said for years that the US produces ample numbers of excellent science students. In fact, according to the National Science Board’s authoritative publication Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, the country turns out three times as many STEM degees as the economy can absorb into jobs related to their majors.”
So why the STEM emphasis in schools, and by leading education “authorities?”
Benderly continued:
“Simply put, a desire for cheap, skilled labor, within the business world and academia, has fueled assertions—based on flimsy and distorted evidence—that American students lack the interest and ability to pursue careers in science and engineering, and has spurred policies that have flooded the market with foreign STEM workers. This has created a grim reality for the scientific and technical labor force: glutted job markets; few career jobs; low pay, long hours, and dismal job prospects for postdoctoral researchers in university labs; near indentured servitude for holders of temporary work visas.”
Benderly reports that an engineering professor at Rochester Institute of Technology told a Congressional committee last summer this:
“Contrary to some of the discussion here this morning, the STEM job market is mired in a jobs recession…with unemployment rates…two to three times what we would expect at full employment….”
As Michael Teitelbaum wrote in The Atlantic, “The truth is that there is little credible evidence of the claimed widespread shortages in the U.S. science and engineering workforce.” (http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-the-science-and-engineering-shortage/284359/)
Teitelbaum added this: “A compelling body of research is now available, from many leading academic researchers and from respected research organizations such as the National Bureau of Economic Research, the RAND Corporation, and the Urban Institute. No one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelors degrees or higher…All have concluded that U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings—the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more.”
Moreover, a look at the number of new jobs forecast for 2012-2022 by the National Bureau of Labor Statistics yields the same kind of information. Except for RNs, most of the projected new jobs do not require a college education. The occupations cited for most new job growth are personal care aides, retail sales, home health aides, food preparers and servers, customer service reps, nursing assistants, janitors and cleaners, construction laborers, freight laborers and movers, carpenters, bookkeepers, truck drivers, secretaries and clerks, childcare workers, maids, and LPNs. (http://www.bls.gov/ooh/most-new-jobs.htm)
Meanwhile, in the high-tech area, Teitelbaum noted that “Even in electrical and electronic engineering—an occupation that is right at the heart of high-tech innovation but that also has been heavily outsourced abroad—U.S. employment in 2013 declined to about 300,000, down 35,000 and over 10 percent, from 2012, and down from about 385,000 in 2002. Unemployment rates for electrical engineers rose to a surprisingly high 4.8 percent in 2013.”
This STEM focus may be trendy, but it is based on a fallacy. It’s a myth. And acting on myths can be dangerous folly.
Those who tout STEM are also (mostly) strong supporters of the Common Core. There are some (the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, for example) who allege that U.S. “economic competitiveness” is dependent on K-12 public education “reform.” The Common Core standards are predicated on this false argument. A new round of educational insanity that is subscribed to by people who should be expected to know better.
Lets consider some other examples.
A September 3, 20011 column in The Washington Post by Robert McCartney reported that he attended a half-seminar-half-vacation retreat in Florida with “award-winning principals.” McCartney wrote that among these Post award-winning-best-principals, “everybody agrees that improving education is the key to restoring the nation’s long-term economic health and international competitiveness.”
Sadly, though, those “award”-winning principals” didn’t know very much about public education. The fact is –– in spite of what gets reported in the mainstream media –– there is no general “crisis” in public education. And we’ve known that for a long time.
The “crisis” was perpetrated in A Nation at Risk, the Reagan-era screed that warned a “rising tide of mediocrity” threatened American national security. It was egregiously in error. Flat-out wrong.
The Sandia Report (Journal of Educational Research, May/June, 1993), published in the wake of A Nation at Risk, concluded that:
“..on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”
“youth today [the 1980s] are choosing natural science and engineering degrees at a higher rate than their peers of the 1960s.”
“business leaders surveyed are generally satisfied with the skill levels of their employees, and the problems that do exist do not appear to point to the k-12 education system as a root cause.”
“The student performance data clearly indicate that today’s youth are achieving levels of education at least as high as any previous generation.”
So what does it tell us when our education journalists and our eduction “leaders” are – basically – flat earthers?
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As I have written here many times, NAEP Proficient is not a passing grade. It represents high academic achievement. Most students never reach NAEP Proficient, just as most students don’t get an A. If they did, the media would complain about grade inflation, and they would be right.
In only one state—Massachusetts—have 50% of students reached NAEP Proficient.
When 43% get that rating, that is outstanding, not cause for a reprimand.
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So then, Emily Richmond, public editor of the Education Writers Association, is clueless. Or obfuscating.
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democracy,
When I read this latest post by Diane, I became depressed and disgusted again. I started to comment and my stomach churned so I just had to stop or get sicker. Decided to check on what Diane’s blog readers posted and read yours.
Thank you.
These deformers are indeed FLAT EARTHERS…well said.
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At least the group’s title doesn’t imply anything more than what that they’ve shown they are. It says they are writers, not journalists with a professional code. They could be PR writers promoting Gates for a fee? The title doesn’t suggest they have credentials nor expertise. In other words, the title claims nothing more than that they put words on paper on the topic of education.
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Conservatives have hired lots of writers and think tanks to promote their ideology. I have noticed that when I google certain topics, the conservative view, to which I am opposed, usually appears as the first five posts or so. It is the power of money.
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Yes, it is $$$$$ and power over.
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EWA’s mission, “improve the quality of education coverage to better inform the public”. They call themselves professionals who want “to get the story right.” Do they mean get the story, to the right wing, in service to Gates, Waltons, Hewlett,…?
How many of the EWA writers are pulling up, after themselves, the ladder they climbed?
Special place in hell for them.
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Paraphrasing Loewenberg: “Truth? we don’t need no stinkin truth!”
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Quoting Giuliani, “The truth is not the truth.”
&, truthfully, none of these people can handle the truth; they would rather create their own to fit their power & monetizing narrative.
Finally, if you say it long enough, it becomes…the truth!
Not.
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The Center for Reinventing Education promotes “the portfolio approach” (which is privatization with a slightly different name) and then all the other ed reformers “amplify” that promotion, which is what they’re paid to do.
They don’t have any earthly idea if “portfolio districts” work any better than ordinary districts but the ed reform multi-level marketing team are busy selling it in FORTY cities.
Ed reform is much more about political marketing than it is about education.
It’s always the same. The solution is always privatization. They change the branding occasionally but it’s the same idea. As the “movement” matures the echo chamber effect increases, too. They’re all but interchangeable at this point.
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The oligarchy wants and needs slaves…their goal.
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Exactly, Yvonne, & kids who don’t read (glued to technology; read Glen Brown’s Blog–great post on this), don’t receive a real education, because they are being test-prepped & tested to death, &, the piece-de-resistance, don’t question authority, ever.
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