At the annual conference of the NewSchools Venture Fund, which raises millions to launch charter schools, there was a sour and tremulous mood, according to Matt Barnum in Chalkbeat.
A group from the Oakland Education Association picketed outside the meeting, and the conveyors focused in on “the unions” as their big problem. It was especially galling to them that some of their own charters had been the target of strikes. The report did not indicate that anyone thought seriously about the teacher turnover for which charters have become noted. Nor about the gap between the sky-high salaries for charter administrators and lowly teachers.
Nor did there seem to be any self-awareness about the near-daily scandals in the charter industry. Did they discuss the public revulsion to for-profit charters or for-profit EMOs and CMOs? Apparently not.
They were aware that the teachers’ strikes during the past year specifically targeted charter schools, but they didn’t know why. Must be those damn unions. They really didn’t get that they were not only left out of Red4Ed, but seen as the enemy of teachers in states that had weak unions.
The level of self-scrutiny, as reported here, seemed defensive and shallow.
The event offered a look at how charter leaders from across the country are coming to grips with new limits on their growth and political clout. And there are signs that their anxiety is warranted, with charters losing support particularly in blue states and cities and among Democrats.
NewSchools attendees were reminded of the opposition when dozens of protestors, organized by the Oakland Education Association, gathered outside the conference hotel downtown. One of their chants: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, charter schools have got to go.”
“They are a leech onto the public system,” said Harley Litzelman, an Oakland teacher who protested at the event.
But charter backers also used the event to explain how they’re planning to confront what they see as the danger posed by teachers unions, internal and external.
The charter industry will never understand what went wrong until they stop looking for enemies and examine their own ranks and their own behavior.
Several years ago, I was invited to speak at Rice University in Houston by KIPP and TFA. At that time, I warned them that if the charter industry did not clean out its Augean stables and get rid of the grifters, entrepreneurs, dilettantes, and crooks, they would all be tarnished. They didn’t listen. They still lack the capacity to look inside to learn why things are going so badly.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reposting the comment I posted on this Chalkbeat report — sorry it’s long. There are obvious issues. The entire promotion of charter schools has been based on a foundation of lies:
the claim that charter schools are all about innovations that public schools can adopt (try naming even one);
the claim that “competition” from charter schools will force public schools to improve;
the notion that the billionaires behind the charter/”reform” sector are the true civil rights heroes, so the Koch brothers would be marching shoulder to shoulder with Dr. King to overthrow the true oppressors — teachers;
the accusations that “bad teachers” are the cause of low achievement among low-income students;
the charges that teachers’ unions exist to protect lazy, greedy teachers who are just whiling away time for their fat pensions;
… and I could go on and on. (Go back and watch the far-right-funded, charter-promoting, teacher-bashing movie “Waiting for Superman,” anyone who questions whether my list is accurate.)
Then there are the lies and “juked stats” propping up charters’ claims that they serve all students; that they don’t select or winnow — the fact that charters are free to select students and kick out those they don’t want has become more and more evident; by now, we know that KIPP schools’ upper grades are far smaller than the lower grades as the unsuccessful students leave or are pushed out.
Sooner or later, that many lies piling up start to become obvious and backfire. I recognize that the charter/”reform” sector has been operating on the principle that the end justifies the means. Aside from the immorality and dishonesty of that notion, the other problem is that the end, overall, is not so utopian. Have charter schools improved education overall for low-income students — have they improved the nation’s entire education landscape?
As we all know, charter schools are blissfully free from burdensome bureaucratic regulations, which makes them a fertile breeding ground for crooks, swindlers, self-dealers and other bad elements. That really hasn’t escaped the public view.
Charters have also been hitched closely to fake “miracles” of the past that have been hyped to the skies and then fizzled, such as for-profit Edison Schools in the early ’00s (traded on the NASDAQ and once promoted as possibly the savior of the nation’s entire education system) and the ridiculous “parent trigger” of eight or nine years ago. Even to people who didn’t follow those hustles closely, the impression clings to the charter sector’s image — grandiose hype for snake oil, then ignominious fizzles.
It’s evident that charters will continue as long as the billionaires are willing to pour money into operations like New Schools Venture Fund and a long list of similar outfits, which don’t actually educate anyone but exist to engage in hype and scheme for new ways to win more grant funding. But it should also be evident why the dishonest, scam-ridden charter sector has lost its luster.
And, to be clear, the real purpose of all those operations (NSVF and the many, many others such as 50Can, Stand for Children, Educators 4 Excellence, The74, the former StudentsFirst, Democrats for Education Reform and its spinoffs, on and on and on and on) is to privatize our education system, in service to the free-market billionaires who fund them all. It’s kinda not working out for them, but those involved gotta keep that funding going as long as possible. In case anyone actually thought they were sincere about improving education — people who care about education don’t do it by bashing, blaming, undermining and deprofessionalizing teachers.
It wasn’t just a charter conference. It was an ed tech conference:
https://www.newschools.org/our-ventures/tools-services/
They don’t support public schools or invite public schools or get any input from public school supporters or advocates, but they are more than happy to sell public schools billions in ed tech.
We’re useful only as a market.
If ed tech developers and salespeople aren’t going to support public schools or include public schools, why should public schools spend billions of dollars purchasing their products? If we must buy ed tech- and I’m not sure we “must”- we could buy from people who actually support our schools and our students, couldn’t we?
Also, note that the billionaire-funded, highly sophisticated PR machinery of the charter/”reform” sector has deployed its damage-control strategy already with intense promotion of the notion that white liberals dislike charters but black and brown people still love them. They launched this campaign on a national basis.
Right at the same time, there was a special election in L.A. for a school board seat, and the pro-public-education candidate (Jackie Goldberg) swamped the charter sector’s candidate (Heather Repenning) — the current count is about 72% to 28%, despite the fact that the mayor and the L.A. Times endorsed Repenning. This was yesterday, and the charter/”reform” PR machinery has already come back with a campaign about how the LAUSD school board is too white. It’s true that it is, but the charter/”reform” candidate was white too, so if it were sincere (as opposed to carefully orchestrated damage control), that would be an utterly bizarre response. So we can see that racial strategy being deployed on a national level and a local L.A. level simultaneously.
Interestingly, the Repenning campaign carefully didn’t call her pro-charter but just said she wasn’t against charters. But follow the money — she was funded by charter/”reform” bucks. That messaging about Repenning reflects awareness of the new unpopularity of charters.
hopefully as reformers change up their game, trying to hide intentions behind new titles/labels they will be exposed over and over now
The DEFORMERS need to point the finger at themselves. They think school should be online everything with students in cubicles completing electronic worksheets, which, of course, is NOT LEARNING.
The “public education” people held another conference where they excluded 90% of students and schools?
Come on. Just call yourselves “charter and voucher proponents”. That is obviously the case. It’s fine! But it sure isn’t “public education”. It’s a very narrow and specific promotion of a certain kind of preferred school, and the students who attend those schools. It’s completely irrelevant to public school families, unless they transfer to a charter or private school.
If the teachers hadn’t have gone on strike in all these states there would have been NO discussion of public schools, and no work done on their behalf.
Even WITH the strikes the only thing we’ve seen out of ed reform states has been vouchers.
They didn’t have any choice but to strike. It was the only way to get anyone in state government to pay attention to public schools.
They may have to go out on strike every legislative session. It seems to be the only way to get any of these people to perform some actual work that is at all relevant to the unfashionable public sector schools most students attend.
And here is where it will crumble. The Democrats now want to be portrayed as looking out for the common man and the common good. Democrats were/are supposed to be Union loving. There will be a shift and the Dems that have outwardly supported the Charter Industry (Looking at you Cory Booker!) will have to back track and “atone” for their sins in order to keep any political clout. I still wouldn’t trust a single one of them, but they sure will want to play the game. Cory Booker was recently asked about his love of Charter schools and he quickly changed the subject and refused to answer the question. Time’s up for these cockroaches.
Cory has a short memory. Can’t remember that he loves charters, and vouchers too? That’s a very good sign!
Speaking of Matt Barnum, Diane, this is another interesting article written a few months back by him reviewing research about school closures. I searched your archives but didn’t find a reference to it, so you might have missed it? (I searched for “Matt Barnum.”).
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2019/02/05/school-closure-research-review/
P.S. – as expected, I have heard nothing back from my comment on Bill Gates’ blog attempting to arrange a meeting between the two of you. I also made inquiries among some of my friends in the Silicon Valley area about how to reach him and came up empty-handed, so I guess the war will continue…
I wonder if you read the recent cover story about Bill and Melinda Gates in Fortune magazine?? It paints a completely different picture than usually portrayed in this forum, but said little about his education initiatives that draw so much ire here, instead focusing on disease prevention and global development. The last time I mentioned those other initiatives in this forum, I was promptly told by readers how bad they were too…
I still maintain that our country will only progress if people step outside their “comfort zone” and attempt to reach out to the opposition even when past attempts have been rejected. There must be some readers of your blog in the Seattle area that have the needed personal contacts to assist in arranging a meeting. However, I am not going to “pester” you further on this point, and there is no need for a reply to this comment.
Here is a link to the Fortune article mentioned in my comment above. I am sure that readers will love the text in the hyperlink 😉: http://fortune.com/longform/bill-melinda-gates-worlds-greatest-leaders/
David K.,
I am eager to meet Bill Gates.
I have repeatedly sought such a meeting and been rejected or ignored.
I hope you will keep trying to find a way to reach him.
If I run across any other possible contacts I will definitely keep trying!
Thank you.
P.S. – the Fortune article kept mentioning how Gates is in a position to “speak truth to power” and opened with a blunt critique he delivered to the leaders of Nigeria. If he can dish it out, then it would be hypocritical if he could not listen to well-reasoned criticism.
Charter/”reform” insider Peter Cunningham started a debate on Twitter by complaining about charter schools being described as “privately run” or “privately managed.” It’s pretty rich that his objection was to one of those ubiquitous stories about a high-poverty charter school whose entire graduating class was “accepted to college” — I’m really sorry to have to put down these boasts of achievement, but they’re almost always BS. Usually the graduating class is a small percentage of the students who started, with the rest pushed out or dropping out along the way; and anyone can be “accepted to college” depending on the college. A vast number of for-profit colleges accept all applicants (the Academy of Art in San Francisco is one example) — then if those applicants take out enormous loans, they can attend; most don’t, or drop out along the way. Anyway, the press falls for this BS over and over.
So it’s especially ironic that with the press puffing one of these highly sketchy claims, Cunningham is complaining about two little perfectly accurate words — words often used BY the charter sector. Now he claims they’re pejorative and shows that the press is biased. I debated the use of the words, but in a public forum (because of my job) I can’t point out that it’s a totally sketchy puff piece he’s calling biased AGAINST charters. (I can get away with saying accurate words are not biased, which I did.) He basically even objected to pointing out that a school is a charter school if he deems it irrelevant to the story.
So the interesting thing is that he’s saying that “charter school” and “privately run” or “privately managed” now have negative connotations — and it’s clear that a memo has gone out in the charter/”reform” sector about this.
Caroline SF,
More evidence that the charter industry has fallen into disrepute. They don’t want to be called exactly what they are.