In a somewhat ambivalent article in the New York Times, Jennifer Medina and Dana Goldstein write that the L.A. teachers’ strike was a setback for charter schools. They say that in the age of Trump, charters are no longer popular with the Democratic Party, which is moving left. They point out that the teachers held a massive rally in front of Eli Broad’s museum to express their displeasure with his support for charters.
The ambivalence in the article comes in two parts. First, they treat somewhat skeptically the union’s accurate portrayal of the link between charters and billionaires. Second, they stress that charters are popular and have long waiting lists. They are wrong on both counts. The charter “movement” is a billionaire obsession. Think Waltons, Gates, Broad, DeVos, Koch brothers, Hastings, Bloomberg, Anschutz, etc. Read the NPE report, which the reporters obviously have not read, called “Hijacked by Billionaires.” Without the billionaires, there is no charter “movement.”
Second, they are peddling charter lobby propaganda when they write about the public demand for charters.
Why would unions support charters? Nationally, 90% are non-union. In L.A., 80% are non-union. Moreover, they drain $600 million a year from the L.A. public schools, which are underfunded already.
Contrary to the report in the Times, LAUSD board member Scott Schmerelson wrote on his Facebook page this week that 82% of the charters in L.A. have vacancies.
But the main point of the article is heartening: Charter Schools have become toxic for most Democrats. They even list Senator Booker as a supporter of the striking teachers, which is odd, as he announced his run for the Democratic nomination in 2020 at a charter rally in New Orleans. Maybe he whispered his support. The Democrats will have to choose: unions or charters.
The article begins:
LOS ANGELES — Carrying protest signs, thousands of teachers and their allies converged last month on the shimmering contemporary art museum in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Clad in red, they denounced “billionaire privatizers” and the museum’s patron, Eli Broad. The march was a preview of the attacks the union would unleash during the teachers’ strike, which ended last week.
As one of the biggest backers of charter schools, Mr. Broad helped make them a fashionable and potent cause in Los Angeles, drawing support from business leaders like Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix; Hollywood executives; and lawmakers to create a wide network of more than 220 schools.
Mr. Broad was so bullish about the future of charter schools just a few years ago that he even floated a plan to move roughly half of Los Angeles schoolchildren — more than 250,000 students — into such schools. In 2017, he funneled millions of dollars to successfully elect candidates for the Board of Education who would back charters, an alternative to traditional public schools that are publicly funded but privately run.
His prominence has also turned him into a villain in the eyes of the teachers’ union. Now Mr. Broad and supporters like him are back on their heels in Los Angeles and across the country. The strike is the latest setback for the charter school movement, which once drew the endorsement of prominent Democrats and Republicans alike. But partly in reaction to the Trump administration, vocal Democratic support for charters has waned as the party has shifted further to the left and is more likely to deplore such schools as a drain on traditional public schools.
When the Los Angeles mayor, Eric Garcetti, announced a deal between the teachers’ union and the school district after the weeklong strike, it became immediately clear that the fate of charter schools was part of the bargain: The union extracted a promise that the pro-charter school Board of Education would vote on a call for the state to cap the number of charters.
It was the latest in a string of defeats for a movement that for over a decade has pointed to Los Angeles and California as showcases for the large-scale growth of the charter school sector.
Backers of charter schools argue that they provide a much-needed choice for parents in poor neighborhoods, where low-performing schools are often the norm. Many supporters expressed frustration that student achievement had not been a focus of the debate around the Los Angeles strike. Overall, the city’s public school students tend to perform worse in reading and math than their counterparts in many other large urban school districts across the country, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The low performance of district schools, charter supporters say, has led to about a fifth of the district’s students being enrolled in charter schools…..
But the defeat in the court of public opinion is clear: After years of support from powerful local and national allies — including many Democrats — charter schools are now facing a backlash and severe skepticism.
Over the past two years, charter school supporters were dealt painful political defeats in California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and other states.
As the push for alternatives to traditional public schools has come to be more associated with President Trump and his secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, the shift in Democratic Party politics has been especially pronounced. President Barack Obama supported expanding high-quality charter schools, and pushed teachers’ unions to let go of some of their traditional seniority protections and put more emphasis on raising student achievement.
But after a wave of mass teacher walkouts across the nation, and with a noticeable shift to the left in the party, ambitious national Democrats now seem more hesitant to criticize organized labor. Senators Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were among those who said they supported the striking teachers in Los Angeles. The city’s charter school leaders couldn’t help but notice that no equally prominent elected Democrat rose to the defense of Los Angeles charter schools as union leaders attacked them.
Corey Booker says whatever is convenient at the time. Booker is similar to his friend, RI Gov. Raimondo. Both are owned by hedge funds and tech monopolists.
Don’t donate to the Democratic Governors Association. Raimondo chairs it. Give directly to the governors’ campaigns and don’t use ActBlue. It allows DFER to raise funds at the site.
Diane is a significant part of the reason Democrats are backpedaling on privatization and trying to hide their former support for it.
Sunshine. Is a powerful disinfectant but it sets the stage for action. Action is when teachers and parents demonstrate in front of Eli Broad’s museum-50,000 of them. Sunlight and action.
Good ADVICE. Thank you, Linda and Diane.
Maybe it’s time for New York teachers to picket on Wall St. to bring attention to the corrupt dirty, dealing hedge funds that are pulling the strings in Albany and NYC.
Good idea, retired teacher.
an essential understanding: Don’t give through ActBlue which is complicit with DFER (and be wary of all official Democrat organizations for the same reason — whenever possible let Dem organizations complicit with DFER know WHY they are not receiving your donation)
A common refrain describes neolibs: run from the left but govern from the right.
“and have long waiting lists”
I’ll need to see more than the claims of charter operators and charter promoters before I accept that, and so should a news reporter.
Show us what backs up this constantly recited claim. The one time I saw it genuinely challenged in Massachusetts with a real audit it fell apart. That should be a clear indication more information is needed.
I had to dive 10 paragraphs into an article about Chicago charters and wait lists until it was revealed that certain PUBLIC schools in Chicago have longer wait lists than charters. Seems like that’s important to mention, since we’re using the near-mythical “wait lists” claim to justify closing public schools and opening charter schools.
Let’s get a real independent analysis of the wait list claim like we got in Massachusetts. Surely there’s one or two university researchers left who haven’t been completely captured by ed reform donations.
Claims about waiting lists must be audited. A reporter in Boston told me he reviewed its celebrated waiting list for charters and found the names of kids who had already enrolled in a charter, duplications, etc.
The state auditor checked the numbers when they were making inflated claims in the political campaign to open more charters:
“Auditor Suzanne M. Bump today released an analysis of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s (DESE) updated charter school waitlist data. It follows an audit released by Bump’s office in December of 2014, which examined DESE’s oversight of charter schools and made recommendations about how to improve the accuracy of its data.
“When elected officials make decisions impacting the education of our children, they must do so based on complete, accurate, and reliable data,” Bump said of today’s report. “Our analysis found that, while some progress has been made, significant issues with data collection and rollover wait lists remain. If this discussion is to be based on facts, rather than philosophy, these issues must be further addressed.”
And Massachusetts is supposedly the national leader in charter regulation and quality. They’re the gold standard and they had phony wait list numbers. Imagine the unregulated charter sectors in the other 30 states.
The article is not ambivalent, it is a clear propaganda piece masking as journalism. For example, the performance data is phrased as “48 percent of charters outperformed traditional schools in reading and 44 percent of charters outperformed traditional schools in math; the rest of the charter schools were either similar to public schools or lower performing.” Anyone who can subtract 48 from 100 can see that 52% of charters are NO BETTER, but the phrasing gives weight to the positive numbers. There is a heartwarming picture of kids sitting in a class in a charter school. There are quotes about healthy competition.
The ending is meant to stick in the mind and reverberate: “We all want good schools,” Ms. Ponce said. “We’re all public schools.”
And of course, Democratic Party is said to have moved to the left, this “information” is given three times in case someone missed it. Some recent articles on NPR also claim that the Dems shifted to the left, in fact “further to the left”, which seems to me like an orchestrated campaign to paint Dems aligning themselves with unions and non-unionized workers. Hmm.
Eli Broad also has a museum at Michigan State University. I’ve joked about it ever since I visited a couple of years ago. The museum employees, bored to tears, followed us around. Apparently we were the first visitors they’d seen in a while. Later we laughed about the unnecessary expenditure for employees, given our assumption that the art was stolen before we arrived.
One art installation was this canvass tent in one of the galleries that was supposed have something to do with crickets and their chirping. Museum staff warned us that the project was a failure but, still led us into the tent to observe nothing. Again, making the most of the very little that they had.
One wall placard bragged that Eli Broad attended a public school. I guess it was his private joke.
Maybe it’s not Arnold, nor the Waltons who funded MSU’s EPIC center (in the Dept. of Ed.), maybe it was Broad? If the center matches Broad’s museum at MSU…..
By the way, it’s just becoming apparent that the charter loving L.A. County Office of Education (LACOE) might be planning a takeover of LAUSD. https://www.dailynews.com/2019/01/29/lausd-tackles-teachers-agreement-charter-resolution-today/ We cannot let them take over our democracy.
I often wondered about the mindset of journalists that have been covering education for many years. People like Dana Goldstein and Eliza Shaperio who should understand by now what is going on. They should, by now, understand the privatization game, that charters do not have any special sauce, that poverty is the problem, that the vast majority of people would choose a reasonably resourced public school to any other “choice”. That “choice” itself has racist roots dating back millennia.
Diane, I assume you speak with these people every once in a while. Why can’t they ever seem to get it right? I always assumed it was because journalist must write in a way that compels people to keep reading. To create a narrative of struggle or conflict and report on it. This removes themselves from the story and allows them to act like a casual observer. It also keeps the story going, so they have volumes to constantly write about. Am I close? The obvious argument to my assumption might be Valarie Strauss.
Very disheartening to read anything from Ms. Goldstein. In the end, she almost always dissapoints.
I have never been called by Eliza Shapiro. Dana Goldstein interviewed me for a magazine feature about eight years ago and I haven’t spoken to her since.
Are they naive? Misinformed? Why do they think there are waiting lists for LA charters when 82% have vacancies?
“I have never been called by Eliza Shapiro. Dana Goldstein interviewed me for a magazine feature about eight years ago and I haven’t spoken to her since.” – This tells me everything I need to know. Thank you for the response Diane.
Eliza and Dana should talk with the charter operator who was quoted in the Detroit News. He said most charters fail due to lack of enrollment.