Eliza Shapiro of the New York Times reports on the efforts of some charter schools in New York City to reform their practices and repair their tarnished image in response to a backlash against them.
If you can open the comments, you will see that most readers who comment understand the charter hoax. They know that charters are a rightwing ploy created by billionaires like DeVos and Broad to bust unions and divert funding from public schools.
The story has a factually inaccurate headline: “Why Some of the Country’s Best Urban Schools Are Facing a Reckoning.” The story itself does not call these schools “the best urban schools in the country.” Yet the story buys into charter marketing myths. Some, like Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy chain, achieve high test scores by exclusion, attrition, and test prep. Does that make them among “the best urban schools”? The story falsely claims that these schools have “long waiting lists,” but that is charter propaganda. If they have these long lines hoping to gain admission, why do they demand that the NYC Department of Education turn over their mailing lists for recruitment purposes? Even Success Academy puts advertising on buses and hangs posters in supermarkets; why advertise if there is a waiting list?
The story says that some charter leaders are responding to the backlash against them by taking the critics seriously and trying to reduce their harsh discipline, to accept students with disabilities, and to hire more teachers of color.
When the charter school movement first burst on to the scene, its founders pledged to transform big urban school districts by offering low-income and minority families something they believed was missing: safe, orderly schools with rigorous academics.
But now, several decades later, as the movement has expanded, questions about whether its leaders were fulfilling their original promise to educate vulnerable children better than neighborhood public schools have mounted.
The story perpetuates another myth: that the backlash against charters was created by teachers’ unions. But teachers’ unions are eager to organize charter teachers.
In New York State, the real backlash against charters occurred at the polls last fall, when voters ousted the “Independent Democratic Caucus” which caucused with Republicans in the State Senate, and replaced them with progressive Democrats, who opposed charter invasions of their neighborhoods.
The legislative victories of charters depended on control of the State Senate by Republicans, who collaborated with Governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo was the recipient of millions in campaign contributions from the charter lobby, especially hedge funders and Wall Street.
The story focuses on KIPP, the national corporate charter chain, and its national policy director Richard Buery, who previously was Deputy Mayor in the DeBlasio administration.
Mr. Buery, who is black and grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, noticed that black and Hispanic students in KIPP schools were sometimes being disciplined too harshly by their white teachers. The network’s high schools had impressive academic results and graduation rates, but their students then struggled in college. And KIPP executives’ relationships with elected officials were fraying.
In response, Mr. Buery adopted an unusual strategy: He publicly declared that some of the criticism of KIPP — and the charter movement in general — was merited, and announced that KIPP needed to change for it to continue to thrive.
Mr. Buery is part of a growing number of charter school executives to acknowledge shortcomings in their schools — partly in an effort to recast their tarnished image and to counteract a growing backlash that threatens the schools’ ability to influence American public education…
KIPP’s internal reckoning has coincided with a moment in which New York’s elected officials and Democratic presidential candidates have turned decisively away from the charter movement. Both groups are eager to please their allies in teachers unions, which have consolidated power over the last year.
The threat to charters is severe in New York City, which is home to more than 100,000 charter school students and was once seen as an incubator within the movement.
Exactly why the charter sector faces a “severe” threat, when it enrolls 100,000 students, is not clear. Unless the reporter means that the sector’s growth is stymied by the loss of power in Albany. The charter industry wants the Legislature to raise the cap on charters in NYC, and the newly energized Democratic-controlled Legislature won’t do it.
Why do corporate charter chains have to grow? Why can’t they be content to own 10% market share?
Nowhere in this article does it explain why the public should underwrite the costs of two competing school systems, one of which is privately controlled.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why “The New York Times” would call Obama’s education policy a “centrist” position is beyond me? Promoting and giving preferential treatment to private charter schools is a radical notion that has no basis in fact. The centrist position would be to support the schools that the government has established and work on ways to improve them, not abandon them. Allowing billionaires with unsubstantiated claims to insert themselves into federal policy is reckless and short sighted. Believing that the magical market is going solve problems and erase poverty is naive. Likewise, believing that more testing is going to raise standards, when there is lots of research to the contrary, is fake form of “accountability,” not a centrist idea. Obama’s education policy was a misguided, ideological failure.
There is backlash against private charter schools because the public has witnessed that private charter schools do not meet the needs of many students. They also undermine the quality of public education by draining public school budgets. Why won’t charters be satisfied with a 10% share? It is because in business the goal is always to expand markets and capture a greater market share. Left unchecked the charter industry will attempt a hostile takeover of public education, and replace it with an array private schools of questionable value.
Did anyone see what the candidates said about education at the NEA forum?
The quote is from a Chalkbeat article about it:
“De Blasio, who has garnered little support in recent polls, took an aggressive stance against charter schools, saying supporting them should be disqualifying for potential Democratic nominees.
“Too many Republicans, but also too many Democrats, have been cozy with the charter schools,” de Blasio said. “Let’s be blunt about it. We need to hold our own party accountable, too. And no one should ask for your support, or no one should be the Democratic nominee, unless they’re willing to stand up to Wall Street and the rich people behind the charter school movement once and for all.”
Moments earlier, he said, “I am sick and tired of these efforts to privatize public education. I know we’re not supposed to be saying ‘hate’ — our teachers taught us not to — but I hate the privatizers and I want to stop them.”
This is why I’m happy de Blasio is in the race even if others consider him a joke. You need someone who is holding the other candidates’ feet to the fire and isn’t afraid to call out the charters directly. I have other candidates I prefer, but if de Blasio keeps this up, he could actually earn my vote if he is still in the race next year (which does seem doubtful). Nonetheless, the democrats absolutely need his voice because otherwise it’s lots of platitudes about supporting teachers.
The entire “centrist” meme is ridiculous. All it means is that you vote with Republicans half the time (and that you support them the other half but vote with Democrats just to make yourself look minimally reasonable)
among the major accomplishments of the state legislature’s session this year after the(real) Democrats recaptured the senate, there appears to have been nothing significant about education.
How come?
I can’t answer your question, Jack, because I don’t know the answer. The legislature should have passed a bill to protect the right of parents to opt out; such a bill passed in the Senate, died in the Assembly.
The legislature’s refusal to raise the NYC charter cap was an accomplishment. The charter industry got whatever it wanted when Republicans controlled the Senate and held hands with Cuomo.
This idea that teachers’ unions organize resistance of testing and charters has always been ridiculous. It reminds me of the GOP charge that protesters against thd GOP are ‘paid protesters’. It’s the same lie. Denying the roots of grassroots movements.
and the deeper irony is that the national unions SHOULD have been adamantly organizing teacher resistance across the nation against testing and charters from day one….yet never have
The standard narrative of the mainstream media is to blame the unions for resistance to privatization (charters and vouchers). That’s wrong. The Resistance is Grassroots, neither organized nor paid by unions.
What continues to amaze me about ed reform is how the whole debate exists completely apart from actual public schools.
You see it in this article, too. They set it up as “charter schools versus teachers unions”
What is missing from ed reform? Public schools and public school students.
It’s supposedly a “public education movement” but it excludes 90% of schools, students and families. Remarkable.
If you arrived here from another planet and read exclusively ed reformers you would not know public schools exist. In this world there are charter schools and then there are “teachers unions”. I just don’t think public school students and families look at public schools this way. I don’t know a single public school parent who says “there’s my child’s school- it’s where union members work”. This is uniquely and narrowly an ed reform construction.
UPS is unionized and FedEx is not. No one refers to UPS as “the Teamsters”. It’s a parcel delivery company.
“Nowhere in this article does it explain why the public should underwrite the costs of two competing school systems, one of which is privately controlled.” And worse, many of these charter chains operate in an unworkable financial model. Often, operating expenses exceed operating revenue — due to hefty “management fees.” Sometimes donations or relieved debt will push them into the black. Also they don’t pay rent, maintenance, and security costs that traditional public schools do. In short, these schools do not hold up to financial scrutiny; their finances are unsustainable. Why should we allow them to proliferate — certainly not until at least until they show they can exercise the same fiscal restraints placed on traditional schools.
As the opposition grows to charter schools, the so called “journalists” that are a part of the “reform” crowed are equally becoming desperate. I’d imagine their go-to sources and “education friends” are putting a lot of pressure on them to change the conversation and offer some distractions during these times. NYC charters have always had a friend in Eliza Shapiro. I’m sure some would point out that she had some arguments with Eva Moskowitz in the past, but that was over some specific incidents that didn’t say much about the very nature of charters. Imagine this, she has been reporting (regurgitating) on NYC schools for many years now and has not once reached out to Diane Ravitch, who lives in the city, for a comment or an opinion. That should tell you everything you need to know. This story was an attempt to quiet the storm, insert some pro privatization propaganda, and might have even been a self serving flip flop on Eliza’s part. I can’t imagine a journalist in a liberal city wants to be seen promoting the ideas of Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump. But I’m sure there are plenty of media outlets and think tanks willing to spin the narrative and hand Eliza a ready to go article she can publish. Time to start calling out her nonsense.
True, Bill. I am not in Eliza Shapiro’s Rolodex or cell phone.
“I am not in Eliza Shapiro’s Rolodex or cell phone.”
Which tells you a lot about Eliza Shapiro.
In this article you linked to above, Shapiro quoted the self-serving remarks from the head of KIPP charter, the head of Ascend charter, the head of Achievement First, and Ann Powell, the highly paid mouthpiece for Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy. In this article, Shapiro quoted KIPP charter principal Brandi Vardiman and the director of the National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools. We are supposed to believe the propaganda that those charter leaders now want to put out that they really, really don’t agree with Betsy DeVos and we are supposed to ignore how much DeVos has helped them and how little they objected to her back when the public still believed all of the charter propaganda.
There is a single line from a democrat politician who introduced a bill to limit public funding of charters.
The entire article is full of propaganda stated as fact and unquestioned as the absolute truth. A charter leader says it so it is true.
That’s why I see Eliza Shapiro as the Judith Miller of education reporting.
I read through Shapiro’s twitter feed once, and saw one post tagging you in which she was dismissive of you. I found that very disrespectful. You are experienced and knowledgeable about education. She is not.
She never communicated with me. Ever. I’d like to see her defend her claim that charters have long waiting lists. The charters say this as a marketing ploy. People always want to get into a restaurant that’s fully booked. I’m waiting for the charters to stop demanding access to the public schools’ lists of names and addresses, which the charters mine for students.
The Koch/Gates/Walton, et al. Kleptocracy’s CEO’s, managers, and minions are trained to attack and discredit anyone that is seen as a threat to their power-hungry, greedy, plot to subvert the U.S. Constitution and take over the United States and the world.
If you are named and attacked, then they see you as a serious threat to their regime change.
Trump is a tadpole compared to the Koch-Gates-Walton, et al. misleadin, totally corrupt in every way, T-Rex of political-business machines.
Koch brothers libertarian and/or neo-liberal style free-market wild-west capitalism without rules-or-laws kleptocracy does not want any restrictions on growth like a 10-percent cap.
The Charter School Industry wants it all and they are already figuring out how to get more after they have it all. But first they ever get rid of the public schools and replace them with a private sector charter school industry staffed with powerless, non-union, underpaid TFA type teachers with no job protection or benefits like medical care and each classroom will be packed with 50-to-100 students all sitting slack-jawed with glazed eyes staring at computer screens while their brains drain out of their eyes and ears into a puddle of gray fat.
I’m not sure what will distinguish KIPP from public schools now that it has relaxed its discipline.
We don’t really know whether KIPP will Change its rigid, no-excuses discipline. The more it does, the less justification for its existence. Irony.
It is typical of Eliza Shapiro’s reporting that she repeats two incorrect charter propaganda “facts” that a reporter who wasn’t as credulous as she is would question.
First of all, Shapiro repeats the false claim that NYC charters have long wait lists. I’d like to see the facts that back that up. Charters seem to calculate “demand” by including every student on any charter wait list after the first lottery. Thus if a parent signs up for 10 charter lotteries and wins a lottery seat for one of the schools but doesn’t take the seat because their child gets a seat at a public school they prefer, the charter industry will count that as “9 students on wait lists”. But those 9 students don’t exist — it is a single student who signed up for multiple lotteries as a back-up but took a public school seat that was always their preferred choice. That doesn’t seem to stop the charter movement from misleading the public into believing there are 9 different students out there who desperately want a seat in their charters.
We have previously noted that using that kind of calculation is absurd, since that means there are 10,000 students on the “waitlist” for Frances Lewis High School — a single public high school whose programs were ranked somewhere on the public high school application by well over 10,000 8th grade students. Using that kind of false calculation means that there are more high school 8th graders on “wait lists” for NYC public schools than there are NYC 8th graders, period. But gullible reporters like Eliza Shapiro continue to accept charter claims of huge wait lists at face value without demanding any proof or asking exactly how they are calculated.
Secondly, Shapiro repeats nonstop the charter propaganda that there are NYC charters getting good results because of their superiority without ever mentioning that the charters with the best results also have some of the highest attrition rates and were the subject of the NAACP’s report that recounted how the very youngest students are drummed out if a charter decides it doesn’t want to teach them. Shapiro seems determined to convince her readers that those high attrition charters’ results must be because of something special that the charters are doing — most likely their harsh “no excuses” discipline that white education reporters seem to believe African-American kindergarten children must have to do well.
Shapiro was far too lazy to read the NAACP’s report to see how the “no excuses” discipline is used by high performing charters to identify and counsel out the students they do not want to teach, sometimes in the first week of school, sometimes by humiliating them and making them targets as we saw on the video, and sometimes after flunking those students over and over until their parents get the message.
Eliza Shapiro makes the same mistakes Judith Miller did when Miller was reporting about the lead up to the Iraq War and Miller accepted at face value every claim that the “experts” told her about how Saddam Hussein had WMD. There were plenty of voices telling Judith Miller to do more research and check her biases, but Miller’s reporting was lazy and she decided that only the people who were “her kind of people” were smart enough to be worth her time and everyone else just had an agenda. And Miller was far too lazy or ignorant of how good reporting is done to do any homework beyond “did a guy who someone in power tells me to listen to say it? Then it must be true.”
Shapiro makes the same mistake here that Judith Miler did. She never bothers to check the false premise that underlies every single article she writes — that there are charters that take any child and work miracles to turn every student who wins the lottery into high performing scholars. Shapiro never bothers to check whether there really are those thousands of students on wait lists, and she certainly never questions why a charter would nave the need to suspend 18% or 20% of the 5 year old children in their schools. If a top public school with mostly white students was insisting that 20% of their kindergarten students were acting out violently, I suspect that Shapiro would ask some questions. Instead, presumably because those students are mostly African-American, Shapiro doesn’t question the claims that charter CEOs make about how violent those 5 year old lottery winners turned out to be. Shapiro just knows it is true just like Judith Miller just knew that Saddam had WMD.
Shapiro is a stenographer for the charter industry the way Miller was a stenographer for the neoconservatives who wanted Saddam gone. It just so happens that the new guy running KIPP doesn’t want to be quite as harsh about disciplining students, so Shapiro is willing to report that while including all the false charter propaganda that she should be questioning.
Judith Miller was finally shown to be a terrible reporter with an agenda and got fired and I wonder if Eliza Shapiro will continue being a stenographer for the industry and eventually be shamed the way Judith Miller was. If hope Shapiro starts practicing real journalism (if she is capable of that) or ends up discredited the way Miller was. She has a chance to do better but so far in every article she has remained the stenographer for the powerful people who run charters and can’t be bothered to question anything that they tell her is true.
Kate Taylor, who proceeded Shapiro at the education desk, started asking inconvenient questions and reporting stories that weren’t simply what the powerful charter leaders wanted the public to know. Shapiro should try to be more like Taylor and work a little harder instead of taking the easy way by reporting what the people in power want the public to believe about them. I hope she has enough pride not to want to become the next Judith Miller.
Shapiro has been at this game for a long time. She knows she can’t actually piss off the very industry that gives her big juicy controversial stories to write. She knows how to create a story, not just report on one. If she actually did some reporting, the well would dry up and she’s have to move on to real journalism. Best to keep milking this big fat cow called “edreform” for every penny. She’s not the only one. In fact, now that I think of it, she’s not even the worst offender.
I googled Eliza Shapiro, and it seems as if she just graduated college in 2012. So I don’t consider that “a long time” (although I confess to being many decades older so perhaps my perspective is off).
@NYC public school parent beat me to this, but NO, Eliza Shapiro has not been at this for a long time. She is a recent college graduate. Like some other 20-somethings she has been duped into thinking that charter schools are a progressive cause, not the regressive cause that they actually are.
“Why do corporate charter chains have to grow? Why can’t they be content to own 10% market share?”
More than 1/3 of the African-American and Latinx students in NYC public schools were proficient on ELA state exams and almost 1/3 in Math.
Just in grades 3 – 8, there are well over 160,000 students in NYC public schools who are proficient on state tests. That does NOT include charter school students.
The charters are chomping at the bit to cherry pick from the extraordinarily high number of students who perform at or above grade level in this city.
Corporate charter chains could expand in places outside NYC because I believe only NYC has exhausted the charters the state allows but other places have not.
However, how can they get away with cherry picking if they don’t have over one million students to choose from?
Charters on the Run
The charter’s on the run
From FBI and like
Let’s have ourselves some fun
And give them all a bike
How about a “wooden spike” instead of a “bike”?
Doesn’t it take a “wooden spike” pounded into the heart to kill a vampire?
My husband forwarded me this article yesterday, which I read without looking at the byline. I question whether Shapiro wrote any of it. It reads like a paid placement for the charter school industry.
I agree with Diane that it’s poor journalism to claim that charter schools have long wait lists without providing actual numbers. However, given that these numbers would come from charter providers, they probably would be misleading anyway.
I took issue with how Buery placed blame on the young, white teachers for the authoritarian discipline at KIPP schools. Talk about scapegoating! The tenor of any organization comes from the top. If discipline was excessive at these schools, it is the fault of the administration, not the teachers. Young, white people take these jobs, because they are idealistic. Buery has always come across to me as a jerk, in interviews on tv and in print, but to blame young, white volunteers is pathetic.
I also question this “kinder and gentler” approach from KIPP given that through their own guile and DOE incompetence, they were approved for a middle school in District 3 (Upper West Side). Eliza Shapiro grew up on the West Side. I would recommend that she read my entries on the West Side Rag with regard to the unwelcome incursion of KIPP into our neighborhood.
Even a city of 1.1 school children, charter networks like KIPP and Success Academy that want to expand are now demanding the right to expand in far more affluent neighborhoods where they insist that they must give priority to the students whose families can afford to live in the district. But you’d never see any reporting on that from the credulous reporters like Shapiro who just know every statement a charter CEO who is the favorite of her bosses tells her is the gospel truth and no need for her to lift a finger to do any independent reporting.
When you specialize in cherry picking students who are easily taught by inexperienced teachers who know only one way to teach and believe all children who don’t thrive need to be severely punished for being “bad” and not learning quickly, you soon run out of students you are willing to teach in the poorest neighborhoods. And people might start asking questions about why so many of the students who originally enrolled are no longer with their cohorts.
It is no coincidence that Success Academy has 3 elementary schools which specifically give priority only to students whose families are lucky enough to live in one of the most affluent districts in NYC (District 2, Manhattan) and only 1 or 0 where the charter would have to give priority to students who live in the very poorest districts.
KIPP is suddenly touting that it is no longer a “no excuses” school at the same time that it opened a middle school on the affluent upper west side and clearly covets those affluent students whose parents would not put up with that unnecessarily harsh treatment for their children.
I suspect that KIPP is desperate for affluent college educated parents to send their kids to their new upper west side middle school and Eliza Shapiro’s puff piece about KIPP is designed to market to affluent college educated parents to reassure them that their children won’t be treated with the very harsh discipline charter advocates keep implying is necessary to teach low-income African-American students.
The NYT also put out a pro-charter editorial disguised as “news” when Sydney Ember reported on Bernie’s education proposal, ignoring most of it’s elements to focus on his support of the NAACP moratorium. Then, an exposé was published recounting the pattern of deceptive journalism practices by Ember in the Times. Readers (like me) requested a Public Editor’s review, but the NYT has not responded, even as the criticisms mount:
https://boingboing.net/2019/07/06/war-criminals-and-corporate-lo.html/amp
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/07/bernie-sanders-sydney-ember-new-york-times
https://portside.org/2019-05-29/new-york-times-vs-senator-bernie-sanders
Today, the front page of the New York Times has an article about Bernie co-written, of course, by Sydney Ember, who is apparently the Times’ designated reporter to disparage Bernie at all times and in all subjects.