Michael Mulgrew, president of the New York City United Federation of Teachers, urges the Legislature not to raise the cap on charters but to enact legislation to make charter schools transparent and accountable.
There is a national pushback against untrammeled growth of charters, and New York State is unlikely to give the charter industry carte blanche since Democrats won control of the State Senate last fall. Until now, the charters were protected by the Governor Cuomo, whose campaign was funded by charter-loving financiers, and by the Republican-controlled State Senate, which was happy to expand the number of charters but not in their own suburban districts.
Mulgrew points out that under existing law, charters have room to add as many as 50,000 students. One charter gives the operator the authority to expand to K-12, or three schools. The city currently has 235 charters, which are actually 377 schools, enrolling 123,000 students. These schools divert $2.1 billion from public schools, but do not accept a proportionate share of the neediest students. Success Academy alone has room to add another 10,000 students without lifting the cap.
He writes:
“Charters should be forced to demonstrate that tax dollars are spent in the classroom rather than on inflated salaries of charter executives and overpriced services of charter management companies. The transparency legislation would make wealthy charters — those with $1 million or more in assets — ineligible to receive co-located space in public building, or to get a public rental subsidy for private classroom space. It would also cap compensation packages for the majority of charter executives at $199,000 a year.
“Real transparency would also reveal why charters had only 9% of the school population but 46% of the suspensions; 10% percent of the homeless students, less than the public school average of 15%; and only 7% of the English language learners population, less than half the public school average.”
He concludes:
It is time for state government to freeze their growth, and to put in place measures to ensure that charters take, keep and educate all kinds of students, while they open up their operations to real public scrutiny.
There are two bitter pills in Mulgrew’s proposal:
One is the cap on salaries, which would be anathema to charters, where teacher salaries are artificially low, due to hiring of young teachers and constant turnover as they burn out, and lavish executive compensation, which is sometimes far above that of the School Chancellor, who oversees 1.1 million students.
The other is the idea that rich charters should not get free public space. This will outage the charter industry but please the existing public schools that have been forced to give up computer rooms, resource rooms, rooms for the arts, and other spaces that are not considered classrooms.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well, thank you Michael Mulgrew! Now together let’s do something about standardized testing! It has been harming our public schools for over 7 years! Together we can end this nightmare, give public schools back to the teachers and LET THEM TEACH!
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Its not the testing; its the weaponizing of test scores. Under NCLB we had testing with general pressures to meet AYP. When the USDOE doubled down with RTTT and NCLB waivers, the weaponizing of test scores under the bullshit concept of “teacher accountability” did more damage to our profession than could be imagined. When this was combined with the Marzano/Danielson rubric component of APPR, enter the micro-management of teachers by administrators who could not teach their way out of a wet paper bag. Data walls, posted learning objectives, SLOs, and all the other crapola that came with it furthered the downward spiral of the teaching and learning experience.
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Help me with this: didn’t NCLB itself weaponize test scores? The way I remember it (as a parent & tutor), annual stdzd testing 3rd-8th+hisch based on existing state stds was implemented, but the accountability movement found the system toothless due to lower stds in some states [or states actually lowered their stds in response], ushering in the already-in-the-pipeline natl stds movement. Why was ‘testing w/general pressure to meet AYP’ OK—wasn’t that just giving a little more time to meet weaponized testing?
To my way of thinking, it IS the testing: the harm started w/annual stdzd testing in elem/ midsch, which ties everyone into do-or-die grade-level accomplishment [regardless of state stds], thus ignoring the fits & spurts of individual learning that overlap grades– which is why stdzd tests every 3-4 yrs made more sense.
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Yes, NCLB weaponized test scores via AYP requirements which included, showing score improvements in each of up to 10 subgroups of students along with the impossible demand of 100% passing by 2014. However, the pressure was on school districts and administrators because the punishments involved piles of administrative improvement plans. Under NCLB we also were working with reasonable, pre-CC standards and age appropriate tests.
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Not until Cuomo won a $700 million RTTT award for NYS did the tests get fully weaponized, with new threats aimed directly at individual teachers. The USDOE requirements to win a slice of the $5 billion dollar pie included adoption of CCSS, companion tests, linking teacher evaluations to test scores, and data harvesting. The majority of teachers do not teach math and ELA in grades 3 to 8, but this did not deter the powers that be from requiring all teachers to be evaluated using test scores. This forced the state to rely on a combination of state CC tests from Pearson, HS Regents tests, and locally developed tests in all other subjects, including all specials. The disparity in test rigor made for a very divisive system of teacher evaluation. Under the current 4 year moratorium on the use of CC scores ( 3 to 8), teachers are evaluated using shared Regents scores and SLO targets that ensure “effective” ratings.
Would love to hear that Mulgrew is urging the legislature to de-couple test scores and teacher evaluations.
Testing should not be the new Learning.
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Well stated Mr. Mulgrew.
If these “incubators” of new methods and innovation to share with all were so good – why is it that CTE, real world tech, partnerships with ever-improving community colleges.. and most significantly PROFESSIONAL teachers reside only in the public schools?
If these saviors of the “fate determined by what zip code you were born in” are so wonderful, why the suspensions, low ELL, and students with IEPs as Mr. Mulgrew writes about and the HIDDEN charter rejections of parents who don’t bother to apply because they know the charter cannot educate their child with disabilities — and unknown staggering number of discipline cases that never get to suspension numbers because parents are counseled to leave the charter (usually AFTER the state money is received by the charter) to avoid the suspension.
If the system is so successful that now they can expand, how is it that the current number of charters with only two oversight groups still fail, still get renewed when they fail, and still get by with scandalous activity and dismal numbers (Eva) – why do they think adding more will be better. Maybe get their act together with the ones in place now.
If these efficiency anyone can teach models are so successful, why are TFAers still dropping like flies and burned out. Not every teacher needs to be a 20 year experienced professional with degrees and continued learning; but the majority do. This McDonalds version of schooling discredits the profession and those who consider entering it.
If these privatized run like a business models are so effective, why like the majority of small businesses do so many fail and end up in scandal, embellishment, and shuttering? We’ve seen what running the country like a business does to humanity and democracy and the “all” in Justice for All. Why should a charters touted and legislated by trump-wannabees be any better.
Speak far and wide and loud Mr. Mulgrew.
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Doesn’t sound like Mulgrew is ready yet to go to war against the charters privatizing public education to death in NYC. Many years of terrible damage already underway and continuing as he and his cronies sat on their hands. Modest words and no fighting tone send a signal that Mulgrew is no champion of public schools or teachers but rather may sense a change of political wind and doesn’t want to be left too far behind. When we see comfortable teacher union leaders putting up a real fight, we will finally exhale and smile.
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“Modest words and no fighting tone send a signal ” — excellent understanding of why the nation never seems to MOVE on so many things at so many levels.
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We do not need to use more public money for niche schools that do not serve all students, particularly when existing charters have the ability to serve 50,000 more students. The charter industry will always try to manipulate and maneuver to get a larger share of the pie because they seek access to more public money. The state obligation is to serve the greater good, not to please profiteers. Clearly, charter expansion is not justified. The state should serve the needs of most students and not the profit seeking interests of a few.
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Well said: “Charter schools were originally designed to be laboratories of innovation rather than a parallel and unaccountable competitor for resources with the public system.”
There’s no question 2+-tier schooling costs more & doesn’t deliver results. And no question once camel-nose of privatization is under tent, there will be constant pressure to expand à la the usual biz-market plan.
However I think it is time to move the argument to a different front. The vast public doesn’t care about “innovation,” they see charters as an escape hatch from overcrowded, physically-detiorating and unsafe urban schools—made unsafe by failure to suspend/ expel students who threaten teachers/ other students with aggressive behavior. This crowd—just judging from comments read on many article threads– seems to be OK w/base-level readin-writin-rithmetic, even if taught by TFA’s from scripts—even if implemented in a no-excuses manner– as long as class size is smaller and kids are physically safe. The attitude reflects total public resignation to the impossibility of improving inner-city public schools. It’s a tough nut to crack, but I think going forward we need to be pitching how to correct, & highlighting schools that are succeeding w/those ideas.
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Why in some of the richest cities in the country with some of the highest priced real estate we still do not have money to provide quality programming for urban schools and maintain buildings? We need to fix how we fund education. It is not that we don’t have the money. We do not have the political will to equitably fund minority majority schools!
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