We are bummed you couldn’t make it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get a little taste of Vegas during the 2019 National Charter Schools Conference (NCSC19)! We will be livestreaming all general sessions and happenings on the Charter Talks stage.
Tune in on our Facebook page for these sessions:
Monday, July 1
Opening General Session (9:30-10:30 a.m. PT): We’re thrilled to welcome back Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, back to the main stage at NCSC19! National Alliance President & CEO Nina Rees will kick-off and lead the first plenary session of NCSC19 with her annual State of the Movement address encouraging us all to share our stories.
And, finally, don’t miss a special guest introduce one of the 2019 Charter School Hall of Fame inductees, Fernando Zulueta, president of Academica!
Charter Talks (11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. PT): Back for a third year, presenters will share a 15-minute compelling presentation that shares a big idea, is a tech demo, delves into an issue, or shares a small idea with a big impact. These Charter Talks pack a punch, so come ready to learn a lot in a small amount of time from interactive, engaging presenters!
- 11:15 a.m. The Fight for the Best Charter Public Schools in the Nation – Cara Stillings Candal, Pioneer Institute
- 11:30 a.m. The Life and Times of an Independent Charter School Operator – India Ford, T-Squared Honors Academy
- 11:45 a.m. College for All: A Personal Odyssey – Robert Lane, Southland College Prep HS
Recording of The 8 Black Hands Podcast (3-4:30 p.m. PT): For the first time ever, we will have a live recording of two podcasts on-site, starting with The 8 Black Hands Podcast. The podcast from four black men (Ray Ankrum, Charles Cole, Sharif El-Mekki, and Chris Stewart) engages in passionate discussions about educating Black minds in a country that has perpetually failed them. Don’t miss the live recording of this powerful podcast!
Tuesday, July 2
Recording of Academica Media’s Charter School Superstars Podcast (10 a.m.-12 p.m. PT): The second live podcast recording at NCSC19 will feature a Q&A session with big players in the charter school movement on the Academic Media podcast.
Unleashing Opportunity and Creativity with Computer Science (12:15-1 p.m. PT): Hadi Partovi, founder of Code.org and creator of the global Hour of Code campaign, talks about the importance of teaching computer science as part of the core academic curriculum in grades K-12, introducing creativity to the classroom, approaches to diversity in computer science, and implementation challenges in schools.
Second General Session and Charter School Rally (3:15-4:30 p.m. PT): The National Alliance is pleased to have Hadi Partovi as our keynote speaker during Tuesday’s general session. Romy Drucker, deputy director of K-12 Education at the Walton Family Foundation and co-founder of The 74, will also give remarks. The General Session will close with a Charter Schools Rally encouraging us all to speak up on behalf of the nation’s 3.2 million charter school students, led by Dr. Howard Fuller, Institute for the Transformation of Learning; Keri Rodrigues, Massachusetts Parents United; and Myrna Casterjón, California Charter Schools Association.
Wednesday, July 3
Closing Session (9-10 a.m. PT): During the closing session of NCSC19, we will be recognizing two more 2019 Charter School Hall of Fame inductees: Joe Nathan, Ph.D., director of the Center for School Change, and Dr. Margaret Fortune, president and CEO of Fortune School. Clifton Taulbert, president of the Freemount Corporation and author of Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored, will be delivering our last keynote session of NCSC19 with his talk on the charter of community—a fitting end to the conference. Kendall Massett, executive director of Delaware Charter School Network and vice chair of the State Leaders Council, will lead the final session.
Don’t forget to follow the conversation throughout the conference on Twitter with #NCSC19!
While technology is great, everything is so much better in person—and you can still register onsite at Mandalay Bay. We’d love to have you!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Joe Nathan used to stalk me around the internet, so if I commented on any education blogs or posts about anything he could pounce and call me a hypocrite because my kids attended audition-admission public (non-charter) arts high school (Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, San Francisco Unified School District). He stopped after I started calling him out for it. Good times!
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And he was on billable time doing it, I assume (“reform” advocates never have to work for free).
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Carol, one of the reason we have a charter movement in this country is that some inner city families were fed with districts creating magnet schools that their children could not get into.
My apologies for commenting in a way that you felt was stalking. I thought & think that it’s ironic to enroll youngsters in a school that uses an admissions test while at the same time opposing creation of schools that are open to all, no admissions tests.
I stopped commenting on your situation because it was clear we disagreed and continued back and forth did not seem to accomplish much.
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“some inner city families were fed with districts creating magnet schools that their children could not get into.”
And some inner city families are fed up with charters who have made it clear their child is not welcome, send their children back to public schools, and then make all kinds of racist innuendoes about how violent and reprehensible their African-American kindergarten children are. I always find it interesting when well-compensated charter promoters ignore those families or make ugly innuendoes that their children are unworthy and thus anything done to them by charters is admirable.
Why do charters only want to teach the students who are most profitable for them to teach? Pure greed? Charter promoters dismiss the NAACP report because the students whose stories are told are not valuable to them.
Magnet schools don’t brag about their results and demand additional resources out of the mouths of public school students to reward their overpaid CEOS and administrators.
Charter schools lie and claim that they aren’t cherry picking when they are because their funders love when the charters they support lie and undermine public schools.
When you learned what was happening, you could have told the truth. Instead you kept quiet and enabled the lies.
It is never right to mislead and lie to benefit a few students at the expense of the many. Charter promoters aren’t doing it for the kids, they are doing it because they know that speaking out for the truth would stop their gravy train from rolling.
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Privatized education was the brain child of racist Georgia Gov. Talmadge to thwart integration. Charter school organizations should acknowledge the idea’s originator.
The deep pocketed funders of the attack against public schools (not movement) with whom Nathan has aligned his position are social Darwinists.
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JN was totally wrong when he wrote, “one of the reason we have a charter movement in this country is that some inner city (WHITE) families were fed with districts creating magnet schools that their children could not get into.”
The real reason is and they are still at it: “we have a charter movement in the United States because of the Walton family, Bill Gates, and some hedge fund billionaires, et al.
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Congratulations Joe! Well deserved. Thousands of students and families in MN owe you & Ted and others a debt of gratitude for providing opportunities they didn’t have in the district schools.
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And far, far more (and democracy itself) owe those folks a heaping helping of guilt for attacking public schools, teachers and teachers’ unions (sit DOWN, uppity women) and draining resources from public schools while enjoying the bounty of the billionaires.
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There are many many women and men who are terrific educators and have
created alternative district or schools within schools open to all,
charters open to all,
struggled sometimes successfully, sometimes not, to refine & improve district schools.
For the last 49 years I’ve worked with, learned from, and helped publicize re regular newspaper columns this terrific work.
No one pays them me to start work at 5 Am, or work late into the night. And at age 70, virtually all of the work I do is as a volunteer.
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Are you including your fellow honoree Ferdinand Zulueta?
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JN, I read this and thought I was reading one of Trump’s tweets.
“There are many many women and men who are terrific educators and have
created alternative district or schools within schools open to all”
And then providing no evidence, no links, nothing. Just the claim with words like “many” and “terrific” et al.
What does “many” and “terrific” mean without any facts and links to reliable sources to create context. This is exactly how Trump communicates everything he says and tweets.
No one yet knows what Trump means by “Make America Great Again”.
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Lloyd,
JN might be referring to the “terrific” corporate charter chains that receive hundreds of millions in federal support to expand across the nation and destroy public schools.
They are unsurprisingly “no excuses,” practicing harsh discipline
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This US Dept of Education 2008 publication found, based on a survey of school districts, that there were approximately 10,300 “district administered alternative schools and programs for at risk students in the 2007-2008 school year” https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2010/2010026.pdf
That’s what I was referring to. Having worked and learned from with alternative school educators all over the country, I’ve found many deeply committed to youngsters who face many challenges in their lives.
Here’s a link to a newspaper column describing alternative school student essays that were presented at a statewide alternative school conference:
https://centerforschoolchange.org/2015/05/students-describe-triumph-over-tragedy-joe-nathans-column/
Here’s a portion of that column:
“Quietly, with little attention and sometimes with much less respect than is deserved, a portion of Minnesota public education has grown from serving about 4,000 students in 1988 to more than 162,000 students, full- and part-time.
According to Mary Barrie at the Minnesota Department of Education, in 2013-14 alternative schools served about 17 percent of Minnesota public school students. (More information about alternative programs is at http://bit.ly/1JGUTKr.)
One of those students is Jessenia Kalstad. She became depressed when her father died. She planned to drop out, but her mother insisted she stay in school somewhere. Kalstad entered Ivan Sand Community High School in Elk River.
She found teachers who give “emotional, verbal and any kind of support you need. … I now know what it’s like not to give up on someone even when they give up on themself. I can’t count how many times I’ve said screw it, but the teachers are right over my shoulder ready to help me. … Everything I’ve been through has helped me help others, and it’s also showed me what I might be good at when I graduate high school. … I was half a year behind and now I’m graduating with my class. … I’ve learned that you have to put everything you have into what you want because success doesn’t come to those who sit around and wait.”
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Joe, you should hang your head in shame. The law you wrote in Minnesota opened the door to non union charters run by grifters, entrepreneurs, sports stars, celebrities and profiteers.
Pitbull, the misogynistic rapper, has a charter in Florida. I wonder I’d students read his lyrics.
Well done, Joe.
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There are literally thousands of stories similar to Kalstad’s everywhere in real public schools. That story proves absolutely nothing here, on this blog.
“Alternative” schools drain money from 90% of the student population and schools. This easily results in depression in students, teachers, parents.
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Mate, are you opposed to districts offering alternative schools? The school she is attending is a district school.
We agree there are literally thousands of stories similar to hers. Some well served by districts, some not.
Again, are you opposed to districts offering options?
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Joe is confusing readers by using the term alternative school without explaining their core differences.
There are alternative schools within the pubic system that serve the needs of some children with emotional and behavioral disturbances. Others are for students who more 1:1 instruction for specific disabilities. The differences are that those in the public work collaborative with the students neighborhood school to seamlessly reintegrate that child back into their community school.
Joe’s alternative schools are managed by a private management company that skims public school money off the top. When these alternative schools find them selves dealing with children who do not fit their mold, they throw the children out & it’s the paretn’s responsibility to find their child an appropriate school.
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Yes, Joe likes to throw sand in the eyes of those who oppose privatization.
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Articles like these don’t warm hearts for outsourced “alternative schools”.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/outsourcing-education/497708/
Perry, the Richmond school-board candidate, says she’s concerned about school districts relying on a for-profit model to educate their most vulnerable students. To keep making money, these companies benefit from maintaining a system where traditional schools cannot educate their own students. “They might also be tempted to cut costs, which can definitely hurt the quality of the education,” she says.
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To clarify one thing, alternative schools can mean different things in different places. In San Francisco, the district designated several public K-5s alternative schools in the ’70s — originally they had a specialty focus (such as language) and no admission requirements, and no neighborhood assignment area, and there was busing from certain areas to them. After Prop. 13, the specialty focuses faded away, and they basically became experiments in voluntary desegregation. That actually worked when there was busing.
But anyway, my mother-in-law, a veteran LAUSD substitute teacher, was flummoxed about the term “alternative school” and why my kids were starting one as kindergartners, because it means something entirely different in LAUSD.
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Yes, congratulations Joe! You’ve managed to repackage & sell the same school choice plans dreamed up by southern segregationists whose goal was to circumvent school desegregation after Brown vs BoEd (1954). Just like those old boys in the Citizen Councils, you promote “school choice” as a way to “improve” the education of low income black & brown kiddos. Not all of them- just the ones who pass.
You, like white supremacists, hijacked the language of civil rights to effectively divert billions of public dollars to private, unaccountable schools. You helped lobby for laws that keep choice schools just far enough from the court system to hide suspensions of 5 yr olds from scrutiny.
Kudos for reinvigorating the goals of Citizen’s Councils in getting those legal changes that benefit charter schools at the expense of integrated public schools. Who would have suspected that today’s education reformers reincarnated Lee Atwater’s softer racist rhetoric that, in the name of school choice would enable children to attend all-white schools, all-black schools, or desegregated schools in a state-financed system of public and private schools. Now THAT’s INNOVATION!
“Only by recovering and understanding the work of a wider cast of white actors who crafted enduring tools and strategies protecting segregation can the reactionary heritage of today’s school choice become clear. As Justin Driver has found, the efforts of these segregationist leaders “to maintain white supremacy were often considerably more sophisticated, self-aware, and nuanced than the cartoonish depiction of southern stupidity and hostility would admit.
These forgotten and ignored strategies help explain how today’s proponents of public financing of private schools can employ the language of civil rights without widespread discredit. Gosh, you might consider bringing a poster of George Wallace to the rally. He could stir fire in the bellies of the KKK- some of the earliest school choice proponents.
Everyone at this conference should feel deeply honored for doing the amazing work of preserving absolute segregation. Reactionary heritage, indeed. Jesse Helms is smiling up from hell upon you all.
https://southernspaces.org/2019/segregationists-libertarians-and-modern-school-choice-movement?fbclid=IwAR2M4-XxDt9isuO5G388pwDbwvYk_bRuUbe9EIm1OBsTMgLhUUgR-HxCkQ8
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JC, have your read the 1968 Harvard Ed Review article by civil rights hero Kenneth Clark (who was co-author of the doll test, cited by the US Supreme Court? In it he calls for creation of new public schools outside the control of local school boards.
He was writing 20 years before the word “charter” began to be used – but he was proposing one of the central principles of the charter movement.
Incidentally, there were public school choice programs WELL before the southern segs decided to use it. There were choice programs in Maine and Vermont where a town decided not to create a school and then gave the money to families who were (and still are) allowed to use that money to send their kids to other public schools (and in the case of Vermont, private schools)
And the creation of suburbs is in part a classic school choice plan for those who can afford to live in them. Some suburbs have mixed incomes. Some are only for the very affluent. Yet tax code subsidizes these families. The single largest school choice program imho is the suburbs.
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Joe, Charter School Champion, we have learned a lot since 1968, when Dr. Clark wrote. For one thing, he supported school integration, not segregated schools. It is outrageous that you now seek to appropriate his blessing for segregated charter schools. He was a wise man. He would have fought the Waltons and your other rightwing friends vigorously. He did NOT support privatization of public schools.
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The simple fact is that Clark urged creation of new public schools outside the control of local boards. That’s one of the central principles of chartering. It’s an opportunity for educators, community members, etc. And most important for students.
Rosa Parks tried to create a charter public school in Detroit during the last year of her life.
A few years ago Children Defense Founder Marion Wright Edelman called charters “an important part of the solution” for improving public education.
Citations for all of these are readily available.
But chartering is only part of what needs to be expanded. There’s a long list of other things that need doing. A few of them would include
* Dealing with hunger, homeless, health care, problems outside school that have a big impact on students
* Inequitable funding that in some states provides substantially more $ for the children of the wealthy than for the children of the poor
* Shared facilities, now sometime called “community schools” where schools share space with social service agencies and other organizations
* Increased use of service learning, where young people combine classroom study with service to the community
* Increased diversity of school faculty
* Increasing participation of low income students in programs like Washington State’s Running Start, Minnesota’s Post Secondary Enrollment Options, and some communities “MIddle College High Schools” where youngsters earn free college credit on high school campuses (or on line) as they work toward high school degrees.*
Creating opportunities for district educators to create new within district options like the Boston or LA Pilot Schools, or New VIsions Schools in NYC
That’s a partial list. In some places, district & charter educators ARE working together on these & other items in a broader agenda.
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Charter schools: public money to entrepreneurs and grifters without accountability. One of Edelman’s sons works in the charter industry. The other worked for Michele Rhee.
Kenneth Clark would be appalled.
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“Citations for all of these are readily available.”
Thinking that charter schools improve public education is an outdated idea. By now it has proven to be an incorrect assumption since the general idea of privatization is, in fact, harmful to anything which is part of the public good.
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Are you more incensed, jcgrim, that some district schools like Stuyvesant High School (1%?) have such low enrollment of Black kids?
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/stuyvesant-high-schools-chronic-lack-black-students/585349/
Or that some highly desirable charter schools have a small percentage of white students? “But there’s something else notable about Brooke Mattapan Charter School: Out of 508 students, just three are white, including the codirectors’ daughter.”
https://www3.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/10/08/schools-can-separate-equal/4Hd1O3Eu9xzO3FbUHnhg8I/story.html?arc404=true
Or you find both equally upsetting?
Any idea how common it is for charter schools to have a student body much more white than its neighborhood?
Overall would you suppose that there’s more segregation as a result of district magnet/pilot/exam schools selecting their student bodies, or due to parents/families selecting charter schools?
These items may be of interest:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/does-expanding-school-choice-increase-segregation/
https://www.urban.org/features/segregated-neighborhoods-segregated-schools
In the latter, by the way, there’s this:
“Our estimates show that school segregation has been on the decline in Newark since the early 2000s, however. Though we can’t say exactly why, we know that charter schools have been steadily growing as a share of enrollment since 2002. Additionally, in 2010, a large donation prompted the district to close poor performing schools, shift enrollment patterns, and introduce universal school choice for both district and charter schools. Which of these changes spurred the decline in school segregation should be examined in future research.”
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Joseph Nathan says: “But chartering is only part of what needs to be expanded. There’s a long list of other things that need doing. A few of them would include….”
Funny how the “other things that need doing” are exactly the things that the people who fund the charter movement don’t support.
When the people who are keeping you in business are against all those “other things” that help students, then your argument that your fight for charter schools has anything to do with families is shown to be false. You are doing the bidding of those who don’t want to spend the money to give families any of those things and in fact will spend money to elect politicians who will take them away.
Those who promote charters like you are simply their tool. And I think you know that because your unwillingness to criticize any of their sacred cows shows that pleasing those billionaires is more important than the few poor students who benefit at the expense of the many.
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Stephen Ronan left out the hurdles charter schools are free to place in the application/enrollment process that self-screen for motivated, compliant students from motivated, compliant, supportive, high-functioning families. Plus additional requirements, legal and illegal — such as the very common work-hours requirement (it’s illegal yet common/universal in California charter schools) for families.
Yes, some (not all) magnet public schools have requirements too — as noted, my own kids attended an audition-admission urban public arts high school. One difference is that they’re honest and open.
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Carolinesf:
“Stephen Ronan left out the hurdles charter schools are free to place in the application/enrollment process that self-screen for motivated, compliant students from motivated, compliant, supportive, high-functioning families.”
Here in Boston, the teachers’ unions have vigorously battled against the charter schools being permitted to admit a less motivated bunch of students… presumably because they’re aware of research like this below, or intuitively understood the likely result…
From “Charters Without Lotteries: Testing Takeovers in New Orleans and Boston” Atila Abdulkadirolu, Joshua D. Angrist, Peter D. Hull, and Parag A. Pathak, NBER Working Paper No. 20792:
“Takeovers are traditional public schools that close and then re-open as charter schools. Students enrolled in the schools designated for closure are eligible for ‘grandfathering’ into the new schools; that is, they are guaranteed seats. We use this fact to construct instrumental variables estimates of the effects of passive charter attendance: the grandfathering instrument compares students at schools designated for takeover with students who appear similar at baseline and who were attending similar schools not yet closed, while adjusting for possible violations of the exclusion restriction in such comparisons. Estimates for a large sample of takeover schools in the New Orleans Recovery School District show substantial gains from takeover enrollment. In Boston, where we can compare grandfathering and lottery estimates for a middle school, grandfathered students see achievement gains at least as large as the gains for students assigned seats in lotteries. Larger reading gains for grandfathering compliers are explained by a worse non-charter fallback.”
https://www.nber.org/papers/w20792
From “The Demand for Effective Charter Schools” by Christopher Walters of UC Berkeley:
“The estimates reveal that tastes for charter schools among Boston students are negatively associated with achievement gains: low achievers, poor students, and those with weak unobserved tastes for charters gain the most from charter attendance but are unlikely to apply.”
Click to access JMP_final.pdf
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Black parents and the local community, do they get to democratically elect the charter’s board?
If not, it’s an example of colonialism that can’t be spun differently.
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Steven Ronan, we agree!. ‘Choice’ fails to mitigate segregation, and if we’ve learned anything from history, makes segregation much worse. How else to explain the NAACP and Black Lives Matter’s opposition to public funding charters & privately managed schools?
You would agree that we need a stronger regulatory structure to enforce compliance with civil rights in the charter sector.
You would agree with me that the charter sector needs more government oversight to force “choice” schools to stop suspending and expelling children of color and with disabilities at alarming rates.
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Also, Peter, a debt of gratitude for enabling rightwing billionaires like DeVos, Koch, and the Waltons to undermine public schools and democracy.
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Thanks, Peter, for working with youngsters that in some cases, report they have been encouraged to leave district schools, and for whom district schools have not worked out. What you are doing Peter, is helping strengthen communities and democracy by helping youngsters with whom traditional schools have not succeeded.
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Why can’t Peter operate his charter school as part of the public schools, instead of going private? Why is his school 97% white?
Joe and Peter, I willnot let you use my blog to play ping-pong withyour stories of how wonderful private charters are. So you can stop now or be permanently banned.
I missed your comment of the indictment of 11 people in the charter industry for scamming $80 million from the state of California.
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When was the last time you thanked public school teachers who help 95% of the student population, hence maintaining the backbone of democracy ?
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I do this constantly, in various newspaper columns. Did you notice that the column I posted praised district schools?
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See how one of the nation’s leading advocates of privatization occasionally praises a public school? Now that’s broad minded
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How are the million students in MN whose school funding has been drained by charter schools? Do they get an apology from you?
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Wieczorek-
When are you going to once again regale readers with your economic, social and political theories from the Koch’s?
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The heroes of the charter school industry are traitors to their country.
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If ed reformers are “agnostic”, as they always claim, and also support public schools, why don’t they ever hold events celebrating and promoting public schools and advocating on behalf of public school students?
They’re supposedly advocates for students and families. There are no students and families in public schools?
I don’t mind that they lobby exclusively on behalf of charter schools and students who attend charter schools. I do think they have a duty to admit that, though.
I also don’t think they should set policy for public schools or public school students and families since they don’t support or work on behalf of our students and schools. I would prefer to have people who actually support our students and schools directing our schools.
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Ed reformers say they are not about schools but instead are about “students”
But these charter promotion events promote charter schools. Specifically and exclusively.
So why would it be wrong for public school advocates to also promote our schools, specifically and exclusively?
Charters can have dedicated advocates and vouchers can have dedicated advocates but public schools may not? Why not? Our students don’t deserve adult advocates?
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“The General Session will close with a Charter Schools Rally encouraging us all to speak up on behalf of the nation’s 3.2 million charter school students, led by Dr. Howard Fuller, Institute for the Transformation of Learning; Keri Rodrigues, Massachusetts Parents United; and Myrna Casterjón, California Charter Schools Association.”
Strange how folks who insist they just want “great schools” and have no preference for charter over public schools never, ever advocate on behalf of “the nations public school students”
One would think supporters of “public education” would also “speak up” on behalf of public school students. Apparently our students aren’t worthy of Walton-funded rallies.
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I like our NPE Conferences better!
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Why did Fordham write Ohio’s new graduation requirements? Requirements that will apply to every public school student in the state? Fordham promotes charters and vouchers.
I would prefer to have people who support public schools and public school students writing requirements for public school students.
Can’t we have people who actually support our schools writing laws that apply to our schools? Why do ed reform think tanks that don’t advocate on behalf of public school students draft all the policy for public school students? Public school advocates don’t draft rules for charter and private schools to follow, yet every new program that comes out of the Ohio legislature originates in an ed reform think tank. I expect lawmakers to speak with the people who run and support and attend public schools when setting policy for public school. I don’t want it outsourced to ed reformers.
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Please elucidate! How did it happen that Fordham Institute wrote Ohio’s new graduation requirements? Who hired them & how many taxpayer $ did they spend? Did anyone vote for that, or was it the usual Ohio DofEd top-down mandate? And what are the changes in grad reqts?
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Fordham wrote them because Ohio has senators like Peg Lehman and Steve Wilson, a banker who inherited his job from his father.
While Steve’s performance as a successful banker is somewhat marred by lackluster gains in share price (the usual measure of achievement) he’s part of the milieu in Columbus (likened to Don Trump Jr.) who feel superior. They fit in with Chester Finn’s hand picked Fordham staff. (The chronology of Fordham funding reported by NonPartisan Education Review apparently doesn’t dampen the connection. Why would it?) And, despite Ohio’s continued economic decline relative to other states, similar to all GOP roosters, the politicians can’t be routed due to gerrymandering and campaign contributions from the deep pocketed.
ALEC is Ohio’s government. If a good citizen group had the money to research it, it would be interesting to see how frequently the ALEC view is reflected in Ohio law. My speculation…100%.
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And, finally, don’t miss a special guest introduce one of the 2019 Charter School Hall of Fame inductees, Fernando Zulueta, president of Academica!
What is missing? Also, this guy is a crook.
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It seems as if the two honorees are kindred spirits.
Joe Nathan and Fernando Zulueta clearly both represent the only value charters are really about. I think we all can guess what that is.
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The choice of Zulueta is really fascinating, because in my observation, much of the charter sector has now taken a position opposing for-profit charters — the sector is really nimble in recognizing when they’d better respond to growing or even potential public outrage.
Generally all the bounteously compensated pro-charter voices (if Joe is doing all this advocacy as a volunteer, I guess that’s a nice gift to the Waltons et al., who pay an army of people in policy positions to do what he’s doing) all get the same memo and start promoting the same message at the same time. A top current message — damage control in response to reports that charters have fallen out of favor now that they’re associated with DeVos and Trump) — is that charter critics are racist.
Diane, I actually think BOTH Marian Wright Edelman’s sons went into so-called education “reform.” This is really, really sad — the offspring of a hero of children’s advocacy selling out to harm children. Her son Jonah is or has been the top honcho of the organization Stand for Children, which is the most extreme example of “mission creep” that I’ve seen, making a 180 on its original mission (in response to what funders will fund, which is the basis of mission creep) to the point of Jonah Edelman’s infamous speech at the Aspen Institute some years ago, in which he described cannily hiring the best lobbyists in a cunning covert strategy to undermine Chicago’s teachers’ union. Co-founders of Stand for Children, including a good friend of mine, were horrified. The Aspen speech pretty much backfired, but I think the now-fully corrupted organization still exists, with its public-image wings clipped but its funding intact.
Re all those great heroes who supposedly wanted to start charters themselves (sounds like a new memo went out to the advocacy army): It has been occurring to me that if you proposed the exact setup for charter schools but applied to a public park system, a public transit system or a law-enforcement system, everyone would think you were out of your skull — and they’d be right. Sure, take a chunk of the funding and turn it and part of the system over to anyone who can get it together to have the paperwork filled out for them — minimal oversight or accountability, and intense political and media clout ensuring that nothing stands in the privatizers’ way. How perfectly sensible.
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As usual, you have nailed it.
I love how Joe Nathan can’t deny the selective policies of charter, so he is always relegated to saying “but Stuyvesant” as if the fact that a public school system has a magnet school AND has the financial and educational responsibility to teach the students who are not in the magnet school is in any way similar to a charter school which acts as a private school and every student who a charter can get to leave can rot because charters are much too greedy to care about those unworthy students once they are drummed out of their school.
That’s why charters are really private schools because if they were REAL public schools then someone at charters would actually care about the students who they refuse to teach if they cut into their profits.
Your analogy to public parks and public transit systems is spot on. Of course I imagine Joe Nathan would say “why shouldn’t the park system be forced to turn over part of its funding to a private organization who can establish a park for those citizens that the private park administration decides are worthy of being in the park while excluding any citizens who the private park decides make their park too messy and cut into their profits.
No wonder Betsy DeVos is their idol.
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The money quote: “Joe Nathan and Fernando Zulueta clearly both represent the only value charters are really about.”
Charter fanatics fail to explain why they need a private management company to come in-between public money and their ‘schools’. I think we all know why they fight transparency about their complex financial agreements behind “civil rights” and “innovation.”
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jcgrim: Steven Ronan, we agree!. ‘Choice’ fails to mitigate segregation, and if we’ve learned anything from history, makes segregation much worse.
I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff we do agree on. But perhaps not quite everything. Brown v. Board originated not because Black schools were necessarily inferior, but because Oliver Brown et al wanted to be able to have more options, right?
http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/13-miss-buchanans-period-of-adjustment
The closest school to where I live (about 200 yards away) has a student body that’s 62.5% Black, 34.8% Hispanic, 2% white, .4% Native American, 0% Asian, not unlike the neighborhood. Assigning kids to their closest school, regardless of their preferences, would worsen segregation here in Boston where many neighborhoods, like this one, are not diversely populated. And involuntarily busing youngsters from here to a school that the family didn’t select, and that’s no better, way across town, seems also less than optimal.
“How else to explain the NAACP and Black Lives Matter’s opposition to public funding charters & privately managed schools?”
I’d explain those as two perspectives in an arena where there are diverse views (and recall the NAACP’s published analysis as flawed… I haven’t yet seen BLM’s rationale).
Many others retain the view that Hugh Price articulated as long-time president of the National Urban League:
“BRIAN LAMB: You say you`re against vouchers?
PRICE: Right.
LAMB: But for charter schools?
PRICE: Right. I think that having lots of different kinds of public schools available to kids that are different sizes, different themes, schools where principals have more flexibility to put together the faculty team that they want is a good thing for the schools. I think that kind of public – those kinds of options within a public system and that kind of accountability within the public system make a great deal of sense.”
He continues on with a severe critique of vouchers that may be of interest to some here:
http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/173967-1/Hugh-Price
jcgrim: “You would agree that we need a stronger regulatory structure to enforce compliance with civil rights in the charter sector.”
Such oversight has indeed been seriously lacking in some states, such as California, though charter oversight systems here in Massachusetts seem to work reasonably well.
jcgrim: “You would agree with me that the charter sector needs more government oversight to force ‘choice’ schools to stop suspending and expelling children of color and with disabilities at alarming rates.”
Do we perhaps need a dictate ensuring that whenever folks allude to charter school suspension rates they are required, under penalty of law, to immediately provide statistics on local district schools’ relative drop-out rates and unexcused absences, with well-researched footnotes about the anticipated consequences?
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Wrong, Ronan. Oliver Brown did not sue for school choice. He sued so his daughter Linda could attend the neighborhood school, not walk miles away to attend a segregated school. He was fighting to destroy segregation.
Charter schools are more segregated than public schools and proud of it.
That’s why the NAACP and Black Lives Matter endorsed a moratorium On new charters.
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Diane: “Wrong, Ronan. Oliver Brown did not sue for school choice. He sued so his daughter Linda could attend the neighborhood school, not walk miles away to attend a segregated school. He was fighting to destroy segregation.”
From the podcast episode I alluded to: “the lawsuit was a matter of principle. They didn’t think there was anything wrong with the quality of education at Monroe, the all-Black school, they just thought that the Topeka School board shouldn’t be telling them where they could or couldn’t send Linda to school, particularly if the only reason the school board could come up with was the color of Linda’s skin… Leola Brown said, we’re fine, we just want some control over our lives.”
Tangentially, as you probably know, Oliver and Leola’s daughter, Cheryl Brown Henderson, has praised Boston charter schools and decried the NAACP’s attempts at a moratorium.
Diane: “Charter schools are more segregated than public schools and proud of it.”
As you are presumably aware, Dr. Ravitch, there’s a bunch of very silly research that tries to make a point by comparing charter schools with all district schools nationwide, rather than in the same locales as the charter schools.
I’d be interested to know what flaws, if any, you may find in the Chingos’ analysis that I cited above:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/does-expanding-school-choice-increase-segregation/
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The Brown decision was about school segregation, not school choice. It was a landmark in the history of the fight to end racial segregation. At no point did any of the plaintiffs argue on behalf of school choice.
I have read all the underlying court cases and arguments. I wrote two chapters about the decision in “The Troubled Crusade.” Your opinion is bizarre.
The evidence about charter segregation is not anecdotal. It is overwhelming. The UCLA Civil Rights Project has written extensively about the segregating effects of choice, and scholars of choice worldwide have reached the same conclusion.
Your views are not in the mainstream. You should work for Betsy DeVos.
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Stephen Ronan,
You must have missed this post. It is a well-documented history of the racist origins of school choice.
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Diane: “You must have missed this post. It is a well-documented history of the racist origins of school choice.”
That states: “This article examines the history of government support for private schools as both the origin and primary foundation for the current movement for ‘school choice.'”
There’s only a very brief, glancing allusion to charter schools in that lengthy article which focuses largely on past and present government support for private schools.
In addition to relying on research comparing charter schools with traditional district schools nation-wide (methodology which you would rightfully ridicule if the focus was, for example, the percentage of newly enrolled ELL students) it seems to me that you’re not adequately distinguishing between circumstances when schools do or do not choose their students.
That Suitts article overwhelmingly focuses on circumstances where schools were and are empowered to select their student bodies. In that respect the referenced private schools shared a significant trait with all the district schools here in Boston and elsewhere that select by exam, grades, auditions, essay, teachers’ recommendation, etc.
Where it’s just families doing the choosing, as in charter schools here, the consequences tend to be far more benign.
I’ve previously quoted W. Bentley MacLeod and Miguel Urquiola who, in their paper “Anti-Lemons: School Reputation and Educational Quality,” wrote that
“if the reputation model holds for a school market:
• Parents will have a clear preference for schools with higher absolute achievement—this will not necessarily translate into a preference for schools with greater value added.
• If schools can select students based upon ability then:
– School choice will result in stratification, with the highest ability/income children going to the most desirable and productive schools.
– School choice will result in lower student effort, and in lower incomes for students who do not gain admission to selective schools. (Note that if peer effects exist, then changes in the distribution of students will have additional effects on the level and distribution of achievement.)
• If schools cannot select on ability, the introduction of school choice will unambiguously raise school performance and student outcomes.”
Click to access MacLeod-Urquiola(2009).pdf
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“That Suitts article overwhelmingly focuses on circumstances where schools were and are empowered to select their student bodies.”
Who cares? The charter school takes over the public school, takes its money, replaces all the veteran teachers with TFA charlatans, and you think the issue to be discussed is whom the charter school will admit?
The issue to be discussed is the attack of charter schools on public schools. Don’t try to move past this because this is the basic problem.
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“I’d be interested to know what flaws, if any, you may find in the Chingos’ analysis that I cited above:”
Even Brookings had counteranalyses, like these 4 years after Chingos’ analysis.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2017/11/20/how-school-district-boundaries-can-create-more-segregated-schools/
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/12/11/how-charter-schools-are-prolonging-segregation/
The 2nd report above references the 1st as
The Brookings report found that among the racially imbalanced schools, charters stood out as having a much higher representation of black students. Their imbalance rating is roughly four times that of traditional public schools. (You can see how your school compares through this interactive map). Charters didn’t cause segregation, but they sure aren’t helping matters.
Chingos make the usual mistake of education statisticians: they take a certain, very restricted way of analysing educational statistics and then they try to convince you, they found something significant and of widespread applicability.
In Chingos, the really significant sentence is this admission
charters tend to locate in areas that serve large shares of disadvantaged students and members of minority groups.
In other words, charters make business in minority areas. Take New Orleans, for example, where charters expolited a natural disaster to establish huge business, or Memphis, where federal Race to the Top money has been used to turn public schools over to charters. In these areas, charter schools effectively conduct war against public schools: they fire teachers by the thousands to replace them with TFA kids, take over schools despite of heavy protests by desperate parents and kids.
To put it more bluntly: charters conduct war against minorities as an integral part of their business strategy. It’s then completely immaterial if some statistics may or may not find that this war leads to segregation. The war is evident without looking at any statistics-friendly numbers.
Charters behave exactly like conquerers with the following slogan
We came to conquer your country because your current leaders are incompetent.
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Thank you, Mate.
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Even in fiction, villains are much more sophisticated nowadays than the simple proclamation of “I want to destroy good and beautiful things because I am just an evil SOB who enjoys this kind of stuff” borrowed from fairy tales. For example, in “Avengers: The infinity war” the main villain Thanos has an elaborate, even defensible philosophy behind his goal to destroy half of all living creatures in the Universe.
Part of what makes Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War so scary is that his “evil” plan makes a certain amount of rational sense: The greatest enemy of the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t Thanos; it’s overpopulation that will eventually lead to famine and ruin. By writing his own narrative, Thanos becomes the hero if he succeeds in wiping out half of the universe’s population from existence. Thanos isn’t a generic villain like Ultron or Steppenwolf who simply wants to destroy everything. He’s much more calculated, even logical in his approach, and more than 20,000 people in the real world agree with him enough to subscribe to a subreddit called /r/thanosdidnothingwrong. Even in moral philosophy, they’re probably not alone.
https://www.inverse.com/article/44383-avengers-infinity-war-thanos-ethics-philosophy
The narrative of school choice supporters, and, more generally, the supporters of privatozation of public goods, are much more laughable than Thanos’ honest rationale. The school choice supporters’ continued belief in that their real goal of making as great profit as possible is hidden behind their bs narrative of saving black children from public education doom leaves me dumbfounded and makes me believe that they have run out of ideas.
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Stephen,
This really is not the right blog for your comments. You are a Bosox fan in the Yankee dugout. Or a Confederate in the Union Army tent. Or pick your own analogy.
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MA’s Walton heavy BESE voted to impose a charter school on the city of New Bedford, in opposition to the community’s wishes. Commissioner Riley, fond of the so-called Third Way, twisted arms to get the mayor and school committee to petion the legislature for a Home Rule exemption to charter laws on Massachusetts’ books. The city would have had to give city property – a currently closed school building – to the Alma del Mar Charter school, and the students in the neighborhood around that building would forfit their right to a public education, because they would automatically be assigned to the charter by virtue of their zip codes. If the city did not agree to a charter of 450, the state threatened to impose a larger school of 594 or 1188 students. This would guarantee fiscal harm to the already struggling school district, as state Chapter 70 money would be allocated to the charter and away from public schools. (To say nothing of the state’s failure to fund poor school districts to the level legally required by the foundation budget, and for which there is a lawsuit in the making.) Incidentally, New Bedford voted against charter expansion in 2016 by 58% to 32%
The Home Rule petion failed because lawmakes saw through the subterfuge that such an agreement would affect only New Bedford. By the count of New Bedford’s state represntative Antion Cabral, seven charter regulations would have been violated by this agreement. Since the defeat of Question 2 3 years ago, the Waltons and friends have tried to eviscerate the will of the voters.
Charter advocates will point to “failing test scores” as evidence that public schools deserve to be shuttered, but seldom want to discuss other data which highlights failures of the charter sector. Here’s a bit of data to compare Alma del Mar with New Bedford and the state:
Teachers under age 32 66% 25% 21%
Licensed teachers 63% 94% 97%
Teacher retention rate 58% 81% 87%
Student suspension rate 15.1% overall 6.2%overall 4.7% overall
6% in school 0.8% in school 1.8% in school
9.1% out of school 5.4% out of school 2.9% overall
Administrators experienced 0% 58% 78%
with high-poverty groups
Hard to fathom why the kids with the greatest needs should get uncertified, inexperinced teachers and administrators, while suffering from churn of adults and suspension rates three times the state average.
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I have noticed Mr. Nathan’s posts here and welcome alternative views. Does the organization recognizing Mr. Nathan have that attitude? It seems odd they did not invite Ms. Ravitch to their honoring of important people. She has done so much to call out those who would hurt the education of the 90 percent. Should she not receive some award from an organization that purports to work tirelessly on behalf of the forgotten student?
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Given the award’s dubious recipients, it would be no honor to be nominated.
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Who’s funding the event?
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Answer- Walton’s, Zuck-Chan, College Board,…. And. perfectly fitting, the conference is in Sin City.
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What I’d like to know, given that the charter/”reform” sector is making a great big show of coming around to oppose for-profit charters (at least the California Charter Schools Assn. is now shouting that from the mountaintops), is how they also gave a prize to Mr. For-Profit Operator.
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