Shawgi Tell, a professor of education at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York, says that charter schools areprivate schools and should not receive any public funding.
Efforts to make them accountable and transparent are a waste of time, he argues.
if the billions wasted on charter schools had been spent on public schools, they would be well funded, and society would be far better off.
He writes:
“The notion that thousands of charter schools engaged in all sorts of fraud, corruption, waste, and other serious problems can be fixed by implementing “smarter” policies, laws, or regulations that somehow “rein them in” ignores the fact that charter schools are deregulated and have loopholes by conscious design. The “Wild West” feature of charter schools is deliberate, inherent, and directly related to their “free market” underpinnings. This is not some aberration, oversight, or the result of poor thinking and planning. Far more importantly though, such a notion ignores the fact that charter schools have no legitimate claim to public funds or assets because they are not public entities in any way, shape, or form. Charter schools are not public schools; they never have been. Public funds belong only to public schools, no one else. To funnel public wealth to private competing interests under the banner of high ideals is irrational, destructive, and unethical.
“A school cannot be public in the proper sense of the word if its structures, functions, aims, practices, policies, owners, and results differ significantly from public schools that have been around for generations. Furthermore, something does not become public just because it is blindly called public over and over again, or because it is supposedly “tuition-free,” or because it receives public funds.
“Charter schools fail and close for a variety of reasons all the time, namely financial malfeasance and poor academic performance. Thousands of charter schools have closed in under 25 years, leaving many families abandoned and betrayed. “Here-one-day-gone-the-next” is not unusual or shocking in the unstable charter school sector, which is heavily dominated by wealthy private interests. Of course, churn, volatility, instability, and upheaval are the opposite of what a modern education system in a society based on industrial mass production needs. Modern society does not need any more chaos, anarchy, and violence….
”Government is not serving the best interest of the people when, with or without oversight, it annually funnels billions of public dollars to privatized, marketized, corporatized charter schools. Public funds belong to the public, not private competing owners of capital. Charter schools, whether they are transparent or not, have no valid claim to public funds, wealth, and property.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Exactly right, end all funding to charters, private units looting the public schools. Keep pushing this into the Dem pres. discourse despite the resistance by the candidates.
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Exactly. I hope at least one of the candidates steps up and actually makes this point.
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“at least one” — saddest reality almost two decades past NCLB’s inception
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At every candidates’ town hall, someone in the audience should ask pointblank, “Do you support public schools or charter schools?” or words to that effect. Watch to see if the candidate scurries to insist that charters are another kind of public school. Then you will know whether he or she sold out to the hedge funders in hopes of funding.
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Great question, help it go viral to all candidate forums.
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That was power, in writing itself. But what he says is true. Our teachers need to see this and more of this line of thought. Public moneys need to go where it is intended, and always used to improve the things for which it is meant. It is also a message to send to our politicians, that they might stop funneling moneys to these over rich people.
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“To funnel public wealth to private competing interests under the banner of high ideals is irrational, destructive, and unethical.”
This is a great post that exposes major false assumptions of market based education.
The main objective has always been to transfer public money to private companies, ie. mass privatization. The movement has always been “capital centered.” Deregulation has always been a goal through ” built in loopholes by conscious design.” The loss of funds to public education is staggering, and our students and society would be better off without privatization. I wish every candidate running for office had a copy of this post.
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“Beto O’Rourke says he wants to encourage nonprofit charter schools, and they should have a mandate to share what they do and learn with traditional public schools.”
Why doesn’t he want to “encourage” public schools?
If we have charter promoters and voucher promoters on one side and “agnostics” on the other side, it isn’t it inevitable that public school students will be neglected and ignored? And isn’t that in fact what has happened in the federal government and state after state that ed reformers control?
Why can’t public school students have a passionate committed advocate, like charters and vouchers do? I don’t understand why our schools are barred from having actual advocates- how did we end up with the weak and ineffective “agnostics” who never get public school students any actual gains, and instead promise only to limit losses?
Why do our schools get such a narrow “vision”, where our schools and our kids are seen as some “status quo default” that politicians can safely ignore while they “encourage” the schools they prefer? Our kids WILL LOSE with these lousy advocates.It’s inevitable.
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Beto sounds like he is regurgitating the rhetoric of a decade ago. It has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that charters have NO magic or secret sauce to “share” with public schools. The level of instruction in most public schools with trained teachers is frankly better than that in charters. The public schools could share a lot with charters, but privatization has never been about sharing. It has always been a competition. With politicians in their pocket the privatizers want to force public schools to collapse. That is not a recipe for collaboration. Beto should do his homework.
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It has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that charters have NO magic or secret sauce to “share” with public schools.
Yes. Show me one that does.
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My interest in Beto flagged when I read here that his wife was a charter promoter– then tanked a couple of weeks later when the FREEEP organization she heads succeeded in getting 20 new IDEA schools approved for El Paso. I’m not a one-issue voter, but for me, that combined w/his weak-kneed statements on charters tells me he occupies the neoliberal branch of the party.
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There is no secret sauce ! What do they do ? If you put aside the unfair things..picking students, no excuses, ridding themselves of troublemakers, …what do they do ? I would say, in the very beginning they were ahead in technology, but now public schools have everything in tech, in fact too much. Being in front of a screen for long periods is not healthy and is not true education. It is a money grab as the post below simply and forcefully explains. No federal or state funds should go to charters.
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I know this isn’t the majority opinion here, but I think what would really shake up “the status quo” in ed reform is if one of the Democratic candidates came out with an affirmative positive message of support for public schools and public school students.
That’s what’s missing in ed reform. I think public school families would be shocked. Many of them haven’t hear anything positive for the 20 years ed reform has been the dominant player in policy, other than “your schools suck, your teachers are union thugs, and public schools students are violent, low performers who are probably drug addicts- you should switch to a charter or private school”
They simply don’t speak to our families. At all. It’s this endless droning recitation of the “the problem”- which is our students and our schools. The solution is their schools- charters and private schools. Nothing else is offered.
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Chiara,
You are wrong in this comment. You say that “this isn’t the majority position here,” meaning “if one of the Democratic candidates came out with an affirmative positive message of support for public schools and public school students.”
This is the majority position here.
You are not writing a comment for The 74 or EdPost or some other billionaire funded website.
I have urged the Bernie campaign to do exactly that: to come out against charter schools and to support public schools. I am waiting to hear if it happens.
Progressives say they want to “make sure that charter schools enroll all children,” that “charter schools don’t screen out ELLs and SpecEd students,” that “charter schools become transparent and accountable.” They don’t recognize that what make charter schools what they are are the practices they criticize. If charter schools were transparent and accountable, if they accepted a fair share of high-needs students, they would not be different from public schools. And what would be their raison d’être?
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Every single candidate comes out with affirmative positions on public schools.
The problem is that every single candidate also comes out with affirmative positions on those wonderful good public charters. They just want to make charter schools and public schools even better!
All progressives love public schools and they love public charter schools.
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“They don’t recognize that what make charter schools what they are are the practices they criticize:” Perfect, Diane.
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Chiara, I think that IS the majority opinion here. This site is run by the President of The Network for Public Education. If there is a tie that binds us, that support for public schools is it.
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Chiara, I suspect what you may mean is that a Dem contender doesn’t even have to get too far into the weeds of “what’s wrong w/charters”: what’s needed is full-throated support for the traditional public schools attended by the vast majority of US K12 students. Upfront should be figures on the % natl pubschs whose per-pupil funding hasn’t kept up w/modest inflation for x# of yrs, & the % who still lag pre-recession spending– & what the fed govt plans to do about that. Like (a)supporting legislation that dumps the ESSA 3rd-8th+11th-gr stdzd testing reqt, w/$figures on cost [borne by states] vs effect, (b)getting the DofEd out of the biz of ‘approving’ specifics on state “ed accountability” plans—more unfunded mandates– & (c)shifting fed funds/ grants promoting costly ineffective investment in 2-&-3-tier schooling back into civil rights protections, IDEA, Pell grants, et al endeavors appropriate to fed govt.
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Do you-all actually read DeVos speeches? It’s shocking. In every one of her anecdotes the public school is abusive, or low performing, or dangerous, or full of “rats”
I mean- this isn’t subtle! It’s absolute state sponsored propaganda and it uniformly and completely anti-public school.
IT HARMS public school students. Hell if I believed ed reform propaganda I wouldn’t support public schools either! No one would. They’re dangerous hovels full of lazy teachers and low performing and violent students. “Factories” where no one cares for kids and no one goes to college or succeeds in any way.
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Any of you can go look at what the US Department of Education offers public school students and families: drug abuse prevention and gun violence prevention.
I don’t know- could their opinion of our students be any lower? The absolute best they see for our students is literally surviving in school while not becoming drug addicts.
What does this tell public school families and students? Why would I ever want these people anywhere near my son’s school? I really don’t need a huge phalanx of federal employees telling him his school is subpar, his teachers are lazy and “self interested” and the best he can hope for is getting out alive.
Do me a favor! Don’t come! Just stay in your own schools. This “help” I don’t need.
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One of the arguments in favor of charter schools and private schools is that they can be centers of innovation because, unlike “government schools,” they aren’t bound by layers of bureaucracy. And certainly, all one has to do is to fill out an application to teach in a big-city district like Hillsborough County, in Florida, and one gets a taste of what the charter advocates mean. The online application is Byzantine; the directions for completing the application are complex and confusing and self-contradictory; key information is missing or given ex post facto; and the requirements for the necessary certification are often extremely onerous. The chances are pretty good that once you take the day or two that it requires to complete the application, the system will randomly reject it and make you start all over again—this at a time when there is a significant teacher shortage. One thinks, with good reason, if the application process alone is this Kafkaesque, what will the rest of the experience of teaching in one of these schools be like?
So, in the public schools, excessive bureaucracy is a problem. And, yes, it stifles innovation. In theory, charter schools are supposed to be an answer to that. But when one turns to actual charter schools, as opposed to those that exist only as castles in the sky in the minds of paid Ed Deform pundits, does one in fact find that they deliver on the promises of innovative solutions leading to improved educational outcomes? Well, no. When one factors in the exclusion by various means, in many charters, of challenged students, English language learners, and students with disabilities, one finds that the charter sector as a whole doesn’t outperform public schools on the Ed Deformers’ own key measure—performance on standardized tests. And most charters are required by law to give the same standardized tests that traditional public schools do, and this is a huge drag on innovation. Probably the closest thing to innovation that one finds in the charter sector are the “no excuses” schools that have substituted draconian external punishments and rewards and an ever-present fear of expulsion for anything that might build in students an intrinsic motivation to learn. And then there are the charters that have given themselves over entirely to depersonalized learning, which fails and fails and fails. In short, actual charter schools turn out not to be all that innovative, and their one leg up is having more ability than public schools do to exclude kids who won’t perform well on tests.
So, in such a situation, how can public schools improve to such a degree that THEY become, clearly, THE centers of innovation, and charter schools no longer pose a threat to them? I have an idea about that.
Way, way back in the 1970s and ‘80s, all across the US, districts were expanding their command and control over schools. At the time, there was a RAGING DEBATE in the country over district- versus school-level control over testing, curricula, and pedagogical approaches. Well, the folks who favored school-level control LOST. They lost BIG TIME. Administrative staffs and salaries at the district level grew and grew and grew, and all the important decision making was centralized.
Back when I first taught high-school English, in late 1980s, I would meet once a week with the fellow members of my English Department. We would talk about what was working and what wasn’t. We would plan lessons. We would choose the novels and plays we were going to teach. We would discuss the latest articles in The English Journal about then new curricular and pedagogical approaches (the writing process, sentence combining, modeling in student writing of archetypal structures from folktales and myths, integrated language arts, flexible modular scheduling, project-based learning, cross-curricular studies and team-teaching, and so on). We would share tests and lesson plans and handouts. We would review textbooks and decide which we wanted to adopt. We would tell war stories. And in the summer, we would work together to plan our curricula and pedagogical approaches for the coming year.
Flash forward thirty years, and a Department meeting had come to look like this: the department chairperson would read off the weekly list of mandates from administration, from the district, and the state and then ask if there were any questions. People would gripe. End of meeting.
So, what used to happen is exactly what happened in manufacturing businesses as a result of the quality-control movement initiated by visionaries like Deming, Juran, and Sewart and as a result of the Lean Manufacturing movement instigated by folks like Kiichiro Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno and brought to the US by folks like Womack, Roos, and Jones. There was bottom-up continuous quality control, and the folks at the bottom were empowered to innovate. And because people work best in conditions of autonomy, they rose to the occasion and did precisely that.
Now, after a full generation of Ed Deform and centralized, top-down planning, it’s safe to say that Deform has failed by its own measures. It hasn’t improved test scores, and it hasn’t closed achievement gaps, and in ELA, my field, education has been narrowed to such a point that it now consists almost entirely, in most places, of inane and mostly useless test prep.
So, here’s my suggestion for meeting the charter challenge: limit school districts to matters like facilities and legal compliance and finance and the hiring and firing of Principals. Make public schools more innovative and responsive by returning decision-making power and authority to the building and classroom levels. CREATE A DIVERSE ECOSYSTEM, NOT A MONOCULTURE.
Teachers, take back your classrooms, and insist upon union leadership that insists on this. You have nothing to lose but your weekly mandates, and you and your students have everything to gain.
I know. What a crazy dream–running schools democratically! It could never work.
Except that it did for a century before the GREAT CENTRALIZATION.
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Bob, I have ruminations on this, which I put down below in general comments for space-saving purposes.
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Your guide to starting a charter:
Take out a mortgage on a large, abandoned building. An old K-Mart will do nicely.
Gut the building place computer terminals around the walls.
Purchase inexpensive learning software from a company like K-12, or use the free stuff from Khan Academy. Have your students spend half their time doing this stuff and the rest of their time completing standardized test prep worksheets with multiple-choice answers.
Form a management company with yourself and your n’er-do-well spouses, brothers, sisters, golfing buddies, and one or two state-level grifter politicians on the board. Pay them all, but especially yourself, very well.
Lease the building to your school at twice the mortgage on the building.
Keep the teacher-to-student ratio low. After all, since you are using depersonalized learning software, your teacher need be no more than glorified proctors. One in a room with 300 students will do quite nicely. Pimply adolescents from TFA who have had five weeks of training will do quite nicely as well. They will teach at your school for a couple years before going off to their real jobs in investment banking or in one of the Gates- or Walton-funded Ed Deform astroturf organizations. That couple of years of “public service” will look great on those kids’ resumes. Think of this as “giving back.”
Collect the per pupil expenditure that the state would otherwise have given to its public schools. This, ofc, is the key item. These are the public funds that you use to build private equity.
Don’t waste money on theatres, science labs, gymnasiums, language labs, libraries, nurses, school supplies, textbooks, or decent school lunches. Anything that you don’t spend is yours to keep. Teachers can buy their own paper and markers. One kitchen staff worker can handle setting out the milk cartons and microwaving the rations. Put lots of vending machines in the lunchroom. These are a source of revenue.
Create applications, including student essays, that will weed out challenged students, English language learners, and students with many kinds of disabilities. If any student is the slightest bit disruptive, ever, kick him or her out. Doing these things will increase your standardized test scores and graduation rates.
Hire a company that you own separately, or one owned by your spouse, golfing buddies, or ne’er-do-well relatives to do the janitorial work.
Don’t run a bus service. Again, remember that every penny that you don’t spend on kids is yours.
Require parents to pay an annual fee to supplement your skim from the state public education coffers.
Build a really nice office for yourself somewhere–preferably near shopping and overlooking the water. Drive company cars. Take company-paid trips to education conferences sponsored by Bill Gates. Pay for this from “management fees” charged to the school.
Collect your check from Betsy DeVoid.
Anything I left out?
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@ Bob Shepherd 4/29 11:37 am: Bob, your description of school-level control in your pre-‘70’s teaching experience dovetails exactly w/my K12 ed ‘50’s-‘60’s. It also matches my first teaching experience in the ‘70’s—but I was teaching in a private school. While choosing in college whether to pursue certification or go the private route (– because I attended uni in my home town– ), I was in touch w/radical changes occurring in my former high school. My alma mater had long been an award-winning amazing place, but about 1970, voters started turning down bond issues, complaining they were paying for a “private-school” ed—first to be chopped were the vo-tech facilities/ courses; electives & fine arts started to be cut back. And in larger cities like the one I first taught in, I was aware before I got there of post-late-‘60’s “trouble” in pubschs: overcrowded, w/racial strife, & a consequent doubling-down of district-level control & micromgt. I felt I was constitutionally unsuited to large-scale bureaucracy, so chose the less-remunerative route.
Do you have any thoughts on why, in ‘70’s-‘80’s, districts pressured for control over their schools’ testing, curricula, pedagogical approaches? I think we have to start there, in order to dial things back.
I can’t help suspecting first the overcrowding created by the baby boom. Schools were suddenly splitting at the seams in the ‘60’s, which suggests problems of classroom/ hallway behavior-mgt, which can in the pinch tend toward top-down mgt solutions. And simultaneously (at least here in the Northeast), you had the flow of blacks to the suburbs/ blockbusting etc, where school populations changed from white to black overnight—another sudden change seeming to call for doubling down on district control. That was not a factor in my small upstate town, but there probably was a knee-jerk reaction to anti-war college protests [actually affecting my high school already in the mid-‘60’s], & in big cities, widespread race riots in cities in the late ‘60’s.
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I simply don’t know enough about school finance and demographics of the period, Bethree, to answer your fascinating question. Why, exactly, did advocates of top-down, district-, state-, and federal-level micromanagement of schools utterly crush advocates of teacher empowerment? But of one thing I am certain, this was a disaster. One interesting thing about US schools before the GREAT CENTRALIZATION of power and control is how much emergent, de facto consensus there was in matters of curricula and pedagogical approaches. You could pretty much count on the fact that if you went into any high school in the country, the kids would be reading Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade and Julius Caesar and To Kill a Mockingbird in 10th grade and The Scarlet Letter and Our Town and The Crucible in 11th Grade and Macbeth in the 12th Grade, and there would be a 12th-grade Brit lit text that hauled off with the Anglo-Saxons and carried through, by period, to Stevie Smith and Ted Hughes. So, it wasn’t exactly the Wild West. And that’s what happens when there is local (building-level) control. People generally go with the tried-and-true, and there is a lot of local social sanction to do that, but, at the same time, because those people have the power to implement change, they tweak things based on what researchers are telling them, based on changes in the culture, based on the specific needs of their specific students. There was a time in the US when a person could write an article for The English Journal arguing for, say, use of sentence-combining and memorization/recitation as methods for increasing syntactic fluency, and people would try that and, if it worked, it would stick. Now, we’ve had a whole generation of new teachers come into an environment in which they are continually micromanaged and are excluded from decision-making processes to such an extent that they will have to learn to do this all over again. I remember a time when teachers thought of themselves as responsible for planning their courses for the year, the way a professor does in a college class. My experience of teaching years ago and then returning to teaching after a 25-year hiatus (during which I worked in educational publishing) was eye-opening. The change was dramatic and breathtaking. Teachers were no longer treated as the keepers of their disciplines but as pawns to be moved about on a board. Autonomy and ownership were gone. Teachers felt disrespected, and they totally despised, in secret, most of the autocrats they worked for and had nothing but contempt for the mandates they had to implement, and most of them were looking for the exits, even as they continued to care about their kids and to rebel in thousands of little ways against the data walls and the data chats and the test prep worksheets and the mind-numbing educational software and the standardized testing and the constant, relentless bureaucratic demands on their limited and depleted energies. It felt like awakening into the Orwell’s Oceania.
And here’s the thing: no one does his or her best work under such conditions. Quite the opposite. What Ed Deformers don’t understand is how people work–what drives them. They really wish that teachers would just go away and be replaced by machines that will do exactly and only what they are told to do. Autocrats love standardization. But people don’t have standardized minds. And the Deformers don’t understand that quality comes from having dedicated, empowered, intrinsically motivated professionals making the decisions, at the classroom level, that work for THEIR students. At most, a district or a state should issue a few very broad goals–a framework statement consisting of, say, six or seven of these for a subject area. And teachers need to be given time in their now insane schedules to conduct the quality circles and planning and reflection that the job actually requires if it is to be done at all well.
Give teachers these things, and they will rise to the occasion, and we shall see a real Renaissance in U.S. education.
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Agreed 100%
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