Jeff Bryant explains why many Democrats and progressives are backing away from the charter school idea. It is not just because Trump and DeVos are pushing charters, though surely that is one reason.
Arne Duncanpromoted charters as enthusiastically as DeVos. But something has changed.
Bryant writes:
The politics of charter schools have changed, and bipartisan support for these publicly funded, privately controlled schools has reached a turning point. A sure sign of the change came from Democrats in the House Appropriations Committee who have proposed a deep cut in federal charter school grants that would lower funding to $400 million, $40 million below current levels and $100 million less than what the Trump administration has proposed. Democrats are also calling for better oversight of charter schools that got federal funding and then closed.
This is a startling turn of events, as for years, Democrats have enthusiastically joined Republicans in providing federal grants to create new charter schools and expand existing ones.
In explaining this change in the politics of charter schools, pundits and reporters will likely point to two factors: the unpopularity of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, an ardent charter school proponent, and teachers’ unions that can exert influence in the Democratic Party. But if the tide is truly turning on bipartisan support for charter schools, it is the charter industry itself that is most to blame.
Read on.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Charters are the victims of their own waste, fraud, embezzling, failure to deliver on promises and segregation. The public is much more aware that a set of parallel schools harms public schools, and most communities value this public asset. Privatization is now embracing vouchers in the hands of the radical right wing DeVos. This is making more people aware that this is a money grab designed to transfer public money into private pockets. Increasing income inequality is causing a billionaire backlash, and much of the public is skeptical that the wealthy are looking out for their children. They know that billionaires have been funneling money into charters and undermining public schools.
As for the few good charter actors, perhaps their management can be absorbed by local school districts. The people paying for them should have a say in their fate. This is how democracy should work.
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Retired, I totally agree. If we had honest legislators, this waste-fraud-abuse would not be tolerated another minute. The good charters should willingly accept the oversight of the local district. I can’t think of a single reason to have two separate publicly funded school systems, one that chooses its students, and the other required to accept everyone.
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An addition:
“This is making more people aware that this is a money grab designed to transfer public money into private, PREFERABLY XTIAN pockets.”
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It would be a really interesting study to see how many students are enrolled at religious-based schools and how much money hat accounts for, especially in Florida where they are boring for this with a big auger.
How many Muslim schools do you suppose get state money?
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How many Gulen charters are there?
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About 160. Hard to be precise, because Gulen charters routinely deny that they are Gulen charters. The giveaway is that the board is dominated by Turkish men and many teachers are brought from Turkey on a visa.
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I’ve been able to hunt down that info online for some states. A 2017 Chalkbeat article said in Indiana, 306 of the 311 private schools receiving vouchers are religious. FL presently has 100,500 ESA (voucher) enrollees. A 3/19 Fl Phoenix article said nearly 80% of them are enrolled in religious schools.
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In thinking of questions to ask of Joe Biden…..”Joe we expect you to find a better secretary of education for the nation than Devos. Are you willing to promise that is will not be Arne Duncan, or anyone else who believes Bill Gates would be a good advisor to help develop federal policies for public schools?”
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How about this?
Joe, give us examples of the sort of person you envision as Secretary of Education?
Joe, what was your opinion of Race to the Top?
Joe, do you think the Federal Government should spend $400-500 million a year on charter schools?
Joe, are you for or against privately managed charter schools?
Joe, are you aware that all charter schools are privately managed?
Joe, what do you think of Teach for America? Do you think that states and districts should pay a bonus to inexperienced ill-trained college graduates to teach?
Joe, if elected, would you work to make sure that every state supports the right of working people to join unions?
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Joe, can you list ALL of the demands made by teachers in the past two years of teacher strikes/actions?
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Biden is the Dimocraps guarantee that Wall Street will be satisfied and that we will get another four years of the tRump. (unless by some miracle the Dims grow some and actually do something about IQ45-Shepard’s term)
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“The fact there are numerous charter schools that do wonderful work will continue to provide fodder for charter fans to refute Burris’ argument.”–Quoted from the Bryant post.
We were supposed to be able to clone these ideas and put them to work in public schools. Have not seen any of these yet.
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That line caught my eye also, Roy.
Correction of it:
“The fact there are A FEW charter schools (I CAN COUNT THEM ON ONE HAND) that do DECENT work will continue to provide fodder for charter fans to refute Burris’ argument.”
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Thanks Diane!
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Wondering why you posted this:
“The fact there are numerous charter schools that do wonderful work will continue to provide fodder for charter fans to refute Burris’ argument.”
What are these charter schools doing “wonderful work” that presumably requires them to be separate from the public school system? That assumes facts not in evidence, unless you are talking about charters that simply take advantage of their freedom not to teach any students they don’t feel like teaching and dump them back into the public school system.
The only charters doing “wonderful work” are those that would be able to do that same “wonderful work” if they were part of a public school choice system. If charters doing “wonderful work” insist on being given the freedom to choose their students and dump them in order to do “wonderful work”, then they aren’t doing wonderful work at all. They are simply privately operated schools profiting by dumping more expensive students on the public school system.
There are also public schools doing wonderful work. There are also private schools and Christian schools and Jewish schools and Muslim schools doing “wonderful work”. Why that would refute any of Burris’ argument is beyond my understanding.
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Adding to NYC comment-
the children abused by priests.. those who were the hundredth or thousandth ones victimized because the Catholic Church created an institutional cover-up, wouldn’t use the word, “wonderful” for their experiences. Avoidance of a major issue in order to placate, undermines serious discussion.
Gov. Bevin invited a representative from the Catholic church to his meeting with DeVos, the one where public school representatives were excluded and student press was denied admittance. Did the representative from the Catholic Church single himself out by standing up to advocate for democracy or, was he comfortable with an autocrat’s favor in the form of an invitation?
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Linda, child sexual abuse seems intuitively (at least to me) more likely to occur in a religious setting—especially Catholic or Evangelical—because of warped attitudes towards sex that encourage secrecy. But I have no stats for that, & the pedophilic phenomenon cuts across all populations.
What worries me more is that sexual abuse perpetrated on students is more likely to go unnoticed or be swept under the rug in any unmonitored privately-managed educational setting. Not uncommon historically in private schools– & now we are ushering in all manner of similarly-run alternatives to public schools. (If it matters, Catholic priests rarely if ever teach elementary classes, & high schools run by male religious orders have dwindled to a few handfuls—but Catholic schools are certainly as vulnerable as any of these others.)
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Bethree3-
As you reason, private schools are a much more likely incubator for harm to students than public schools are.
The donor class crafted the arguments in favor of privatization and they have the media platforms to present their views. The largest and most visible case of child abuse (by priests) and it doesn’t get a mention in the arguments against private schools. Why?
Recently, the alleged intellectual harm caused by orthodox Jewish schools, at least made it into the news cycle.
The Catholic Church should be singled out because it appears that its representatives are insinuated into the meetings of government decision makers. Unlike other faiths, its representatives get seats at the table where privatization finds traction. Evidently, the Catholic Church (an overwhelming number of the universities in D.C. are Catholic) have juice. And, Catholics get credit for rationality while evangelicals and Mormons don’t. An explanation for it would be an interesting subject of research.
The donor class, many of whom reject the societal values of decency, advance religious views as a convenience, Erik Prince is described as a converted Catholic raised by evangelical parents.
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The DINO’s at the helm of CAP, the DCCC and DGA serve their donors from Wall Street and the tech industry. In contrast, Justice Democrats are the real deal.
No true Democrat should give money to the DCCC or to Gina Raimondo’s DGA. Currently, the DCCC is raising money for one of the biggest frauds in Congress- right-to-life’s Dan Lipinski. (Dan also voted for more money for charter schools.) Lipinski who is in a district that elected Democrats for almost the last 40 years, doesn’t need money for his campaign. He’s the establishment Dems’ Congressional gift to the richest 0.1%
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I also think that some Democrats running for office are shifting attention to the debt issue for college students, early childhood education/child care. For K-12, job training is an easy topic and hit the mark if policies say that you should start in middle school with full-throttle work for local businesses in high school. These matters have a certain clarity and allow politicians to avoid issues associated with school choice, the disasters of the Obama Administration, damage to public education from NCLB and ESSA, quick-sand traps likely if there are questions about the Common Core, so-called personalized learning, and college affordability/necessity for all.
Early childhood education/child care is project of The Pritzker Children’s Initiative. The Initiative is aimed at making children “kindergarten ready.” For the last three years The Pritzker Children’s Initiative has sent money to CAP-the Center for American Progress, which is also pulling in money for early childhood and student debt initiatives far more than public education K-12. https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2018/4/25/pritzker-childrens-initiative-grants-program
I do not see any serious effort to address the sham in school “choice” plans, including vouchers. On the latter, it is easy to endorse the idea that vouchers are great for “some” parents and then let the whole system off the hook. That is the same camel’s-nose-under the-tent as with charters.
CAP’s experts in education have just discovered some problems with vouchers. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/reports/2019/05/13/469610/danger-private-school-voucher-programs-pose-civil-rights/
One year earlier, writers at CAP addressed the question of vouchers as if they were not really feasible, but still an option in “a portfolio“ of choices if the geography was OK.
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/news/2017/03/03/414853/vouchers-are-not-a-viable-solution-for-vast-swaths-of-america/
Remember that CAP functions as a holding company and lobby shop for big-time funders and many high officials in the Clinton and Obama administrations. The staff of Democrats who are running for office are likely to tap information from CAP.
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Rhetorically, is NORC (University of Chicago) illustrative of an organization that uses an ethical framework to make decisions about the practices it supports, for example, advocating the assessment of 3-5 year old students in “oral language, literacy and math skills”? Or, does the availability of funding precede the process and dictate interest and institutional position?
When academiccapture.org gets up and running, members of the public may find they have a method to distinguish between research that advances knowledge vs. propaganda from the donor class delivered through individuals with vested interests employed by “non-partisan” institutions.
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I am not certain the public has an interest in the problem of academic independence in higher education. The Waltons have bought an entire department of educational reform at the University of Arkansas. The B&M Gates Foundation sends money to the University of Washington to provide academic credibility for those “Gates Compacts” with school districts, with research designed to shame districts that do not meet contracted targets. Deeply flawed data from the Gates funded Measures of Effective Teaching project is routinely recycled in peer reviewed articles in Education Researcher, with one main reason. The database is free and Gates funded some researchers who recycled the data. I once kept records of these matters, but this issue needs to be addressed by collective action. I hope the “academic capture” effort succeeds.
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There are hard won and significant successes.
This month, at George Mason University, the policy for accepting donor money was rewritten to prevent academic capture- long overdue.
Reportedly, a harvard House Dean who was representing Roland Fryer and Harvey Weinstein is no longer going to have his Dean position -the decision is attributed to public backlash.
Colleagues in academia should be more vocal in condemning fellow faculty who take grants and, in demanding their departments force faculty to publicly identify their sources of income.
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Laura, do you have any more info on the Pritzker birth-age3 initiative? Any negative indicators? I don’t like the CAP connection. But I like the 5 groups Pritzker is working w/ (don’t see any ed-reformers, but then I don’t know all of them). “Making children K-ready” is not a good indicator, but then it seems Pritzker is more interested in the pre-preK period, especially childcare, which desperately needs attention/ funding– which means she’s really looking at “making children PreK-ready… That doesn’t sound threatening to me; just getting kids together in any formal way before PreK is about socialization… I’ll add that every employee-daycare/PreK or chain commercial PreK I’ve worked in (as a freelance special) has infants-PreK kids onboard. So the need is being addressed in some way for many wkg/mid-class families in my region (densely-pop, near major cities). I like that Prizker’s initiative is also directed to rural areas.
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Information is at the Pritzker Children’s Initiative website. Also check the website of the Center for American Progress.
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I will not vote for Mayor de Blasio in the primary. That being said, it would be a huge boon to public education if de Blasio becomes the very first primary candidate to put public education and the problems of charter schools on the table and forces the other candidates — who all seem to be cheerleaders for “good public charters” and supporters of the DFER agenda — to have to defend why they believe that public money should be taken from public schools and given instead to “public” charter CEOs to operate charters that are allowed to get rid of students they don’t want to teach and send them back to the public schools.
This primary desperately needs one candidate who will not be an apologist for what they insist on calling “public charters” and will force a real conversation about what those “we will only teach the students we want to teach and if parents complain we will release their child’s private records” charters are really all about.
I have no idea if de Blasio will be that candidate, but it is clear that none of the other candidates will do anything but promote the DFER agenda and give cover to the “non-profit” public charters (except the CEOs are handsomely paid) agenda so DFERs can claim the progressive mantle.
Supporting public charters whose only oversight is by a board full of billionaire CEOs and those who kowtow to them – whose agenda is to establish more and more charters – is not “progressive”. But you wouldn’t know it from the love those “public” charters get from every progressive candidate running in the primary. I hope de Blasio does not join that and forces the other candidates to confront their hypocrisy.
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I don’t think unions influence the Democratic party as much as we’d like to think or hope, nor as much as the media’s says they do. Or accuses them of doing.
CTA (CA) has its head so far up the party’s bum, they’ve tied rope around their feet to not get totally lost. And yet, Dems in good standing with the party seem to hate public schools.
Remember, it was just a year ago that Diane reported on all those Dems voting no, or abstaining from a bill that sought transparency in public funding going to charter schools.
And let’s not do the ol’ “But Republicans!.” I don’t expect anything good from them. I expect Dem electeds to support their base, which seems more and more like a pipe dream.
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Republicans will rob you and leave you to die in the gutter like a feral dog.
Establishment Democrats are like bad boyfriends who bad mouth their girlfriends to their friends and steal from their purses.
California’s Rep. Susan Davis confirms your point, Laura, as does DGA’s Gina Raimondo and DFER’s McKee in R.I. and, the DCCC’s fundraising for DINO, Dan Lipinski.
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Jonathan Chait, a charter lover, is part of the PR machine that labels CAP as liberal.
I can speculate about Lawrence Tribe’s links to CAP. Tribe recently called Bernie a phony. Fortunately, Lee Fang writing for the Intercept, identified Tribe as the phony for his work for the fossil fuel industry. Readers at this blog remember Tribe signed an amicus brief in the Vergara case which, if the courts had agreed with it, would have harned the teachers union.
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I prefer to focus on DFER rather than CAP. DFER is specifically there for the sole purpose of undermining public schools by getting Democrats of all sorts — progressives, moderates and conservatives — to embrace them. CAP has a very wide ranging agenda, but DFER has only one agenda — to undermine public education. DFER has done way more harm to public schools than CAP.
Since the topic of this post is about public education, I do not understand all the focus on CAP when the focus should be on DFER — the group most responsible for the current status quo where every single candidate is a fan of DFER and speaks in language right out of DFER’s press release about supporting “good public charters”.
We have a primary where not one progressive candidate will stand up to DFER and charters. Some of them will stand up to CAP, embrace DFER and give charters the tacit endorsement of the entire progressive movement.
Progressives can criticize CAP and “stand up” to CAP and it won’t help public schools one bit because they are ALSO embracing DFER and everything DFER stands for. And to date, that is exactly what they are doing.
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I suspect that many of the members and funders of DFER are not actually Democrats. All are hedge fund managers or poobahs of the financial industry. DFER is a perfect instrument that Republicans can use to attack public schools and unions, while pretending they are within the Democratic party.
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You are correct about DFER and CAP.
There is no doubt that DFER has a narrow focus on education. CAP does not.
Even so, I am confident that both organizations have some funders in common. DFER does not have a database of funders. CAP does. Here is one example.
The B&M Gates Foundation sent money to DFER in 2016 and 2017, total $255,600 for the following purposes:
2016 to design and implement a cutting-edge communications effort to enhance the public perception of key issues in education, and to position ERN’s president as a national spokesperson for the education movement and related civil rights topics.
2017 to communicate to policymakers, education stakeholders, and influencers the need for state and local ESSA implementation plans that serve the interests of students generally, and low-income students and students of color particularly.
The Gates Foundation has had more specific “targets” for funding CAP. Since 2008, CAP has received a total of $13,948,810 from15 grants for education. Grants before 2013 were to increase attention to “the quality and effectiveness of human capital in the public education sector,” along with publicity for degree-completion among low-income students.
From 2013 to 2018 grants were for policy and publicity on behalf of: effective teaching, better enactment of the College and Career/Common Core agenda, an effort “to reduce opposition to (that agenda) and associated high quality tests,” greater access to high quality postsecondary programs, early childhood education, and ESSA compliance.
DFER is a conspicuous supporter of charter schools but how much they receive from that industry is not easy to determine.
You can see how much Gates loves them here https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database#q/k=charter%20schools&sort=amount
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DFER has been described as CAP’s sister organization. Thanks Laura for the information. I speculate CAP’s favorite candidates are also DFER’s e.g. Cory Booker.
Ignoring Ann O’Leary’s connections to CAP is as unwise as ignoring New America CEO’s connections to Broad.
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Linda, I have heard that Chait’s wife teaches in a charter school. If I am wrong, a reader will let me know. Jonathan Alter is also fanatical about charters. We have argued them in public.
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