Shawgi Tell is a professor of education at Nazareth College in New York.
He points out that “More than 765 Charter Schools Have Closed in Three Years.”
This is what Disrupters refer to as “high-quality seats.” Here today, gone tomorrow.
Currently, about 3.2 million students are enrolled in roughly 7,000 privately-operated charter schools across the country. This represents less than 7% of all students and 7% of all schools in the country.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 765 charter schools closed between 2014-15 and 2016-2017, leaving thousands of families stressed, abandoned, dislocated,and angry. This figure represents more than one out of ten charter schools in the country by today’s numbers. The real closure figure is likely higher. To be sure, more than 3,000 charter schools have closed in under three decades.
The top three reasons privately-operated charter schools close are financial malfeasance, poor academic performance, and low enrollment.
With regard to academic performance, the Washington Post (November 1, 2019) reminds us that:
When you take all charters and all public schools into consideration, students at charters do worse than those at public schools. According to the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, public school students in fourth, eighth and 12th grades outperform charter school students in math, reading and science.
It is also worth recalling that the vast majority of high-performing nations do not have charter schools.
Today, nearly 60% of charter schools are in urban settings where schools tend to be under-funded, over-tested, constantly-shamed, and attended mostly by poor and low-income minority students. Charter school advocates prefer to target urban schools because this is where they can make the most profit given economies of scale and other factors.
While “choice” has worked out well for major owners of capital, what good is “choice” when it cannot deliver stable, reliable, high-quality education free of corruption, segregation, and overpaid administrators? How does funneling billions of dollars annually from public schools to unstable privately-operated charter schools that frequently perform poorly help the economy, education, or society? Do pay-the-rich schemes like charter schools advance the national interest?
There is no justification for the existence of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools. They do not provide a net public benefit. Endless news reports show that charter schools are always mired in scandal and controversy. It is time to stop bashing public education, reject the hype surrounding charter schools, fully fund all public schools, and vest real decision-making power in the hands of the public. The rich must be deprived of their ability to privatize public education with impunity. The content, purpose, and direction of education must not be in the hands of privatizers, neoliberals, and corporate school reformers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The GIG Economy:
https://www.axios.com/future-of-work-gig-workers-technology-detroit-ad62cdc2-13e8-4e78-b057-9e82c8f18a20.html
Its up at Oped News :https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Here-today-gone-tomorrow-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Charter-School-Failure_Charter-Schools_Education_Financial-191114-336.html#comment749919
“The top three reasons privately-operated charter schools close are financial malfeasance, poor academic performance, and low enrollment.”
Two of the three reasons are a real indictment of the governance schemes ed reformers have set up.
One wouldn’t know at the outset if a charter was going to turn in poor academic performance, but they absolutely SHOULD know that a charter will likely be engaging in financial malfeasance or will be under-enrolled.
It’s bad governance and since ed reformers invented these governance schemes they should take responsibility for their role in the closures.
The wait list numbers are fake. The reason they make bad guesses on enrollment in charters is because they’re inflating demand for political and marketing purposes.
This is a management failure and it’s not the managers of the schools. It’s the ed reformers who design the systems. There’s no accountability at the top in ed reform. It all falls to the school level.
Financial problems and low enrollment should have been weeded out before these schools ever opened.
When we built a new public school here (to replace an existing public school) we had to justify the size of the proposed school to both the State of Ohio and the local public.
We had to explain why we needed X number of seats, and we had to do that PRIOR to spending any money.
Why don’t charters have to meet the same initial benchmarks? They only realize the school is under-enrolled AFTER the public has invested in it? That’s ridiculous. No other publicly-funded entity is given that kind of license.
Education is supposed to be about serving the needs of young people. Charters have been an expensive, distracting mistake that have failed to deliver on their promises. Instability, waste, fraud and draining funds from public schools that serve most students are no solution. It has resulted in shameless profiteering that undermines public education. Every country that has embarked on free market education schemes has regretted this decision. We need to invest in the common good which aspires to serve all students as public education is the most efficient and effective approach to meeting the needs of our young people.
If there isn’t enough demand for your new publicly-funded charter school and you either didn’t bother to look at that or ignored it and opened it anyway based on your belief that ANY opposition or real questions to or about to your agenda is “protecting the status quo” , then you’re not a good steward of public funds and there’s something wrong with the “governance” plan you wrote.
It’s not the private sector. They’re playing with public money. No one authorized them to take it to the casino and gamble on “market share” or whatever they’re doing.
Leaving charter expansion up to zealous true believer charter cheerleaders and cutting everyone else out is a recipe for bad decisions. Of course the authorizers and contractors think there should be more charter schools. They’re all getting a cut of them and one would hope THEY all think they’re good schools. Of course they do. They probably don’t believe they’re opening BAD schools, right?
It’s like asking defense contractors to tell us how big the defense budget should be. The process that public schools undergo to justify opening a new one is not just “red tape” or “status quo” or any of these other anti-regulatory and anti-government political terms they use. It’s a real evaluation of capacity and demand. Necessary.
And anyone who imagines the private sector handles public money better? I have two words for you – defense contractors. If you don’t like that one I have another – health care.
The idea that inserting a private layer between public funding and outlays leads to no more lobbying and inevitable efficiencies is an ideological belief. Period. There is no publicly-funded private system that bears this belief out.
They’re trading one set of lobbyists and interested parties for another. To ignore that, and ed reformers do ignore it, means to me that they are relying on some OTHER measure and it must be that they believe charter promoters are just intrinsically better people than public school promoters.
If I travel to Columbus and go to the statehouse when an education bill is being debated I will meet three sets of lobbyists and/or advocates. One for public schools, one for charter schools and one for vouchers. The charter and voucher groups will be aligned.
They’re all promoting a position. The idea that charter and voucher promoters are as pure as the driven snow “for the children!” and the public school promoters are icky, self-interested greedy operators is not factual. It’s an opinion. It’s a value judgment.
Gates is still all in on charter schools. So are the Waltons. And bizarrely, Ditzy DeVoid, of all people, is still Secretary of Education. So, the money will keep flowing despite the record. Aie yie yie. Hearing Pete Seeger sing, in my head, “When will they ever learn?”
The suggestion has often been made that Charters are just a step toward vouchers. Are vouchers anything more than a step toward no vouchers? I have no basis for saying this, but I sense a move toward complete abandonment of all public education. While things have been trending back to our more traditional model of public schools, I see a lot of opinions that suggest some would rather not fund education at all, certainly not at levels where we can help those who are a bit different.
A bleak thought, RT! But I don’t think it’s really justified. There are pro-charter parents in cities looking for immediate relief from schools that are overcrowded, underfunded, dilapidated or even dangerous. And there are pro-voucher parents looking for religious ed, or just tax help to afford nearby privates that look better to them than nbhd pubschs. Lumped altogether these folks make up maybe 10% at most of US parents of school-age children, and I’m guessing every single one of them wants their kids in tax-supported K12. Also a good guess that not a single ed-reformer is leaning in that direction: they are all tied to money-making operations that depend on the K12 public tax spigot. What’s left is the small but loud segment of libertarians influencing the Rep party these days, w/the megaphone of rwpress and Fox dittoheads. Those w/political power run roughshod over their constituents in some states, but I suspect they’ll get a rude awakening the day they try to turn off that spigot.
Libertarians talk a good game to but are full of bluster, & know there’s few who would actually follow them down the rabbit-hole of repealing compulsory ed (or Soc Sec, or Medicare).
I am of the opinion that it was not more than one percent of the population that was able to get control of the public discourse about education to turn us into this present charter experiment. Let us hope that future dialogue would prevent what I wondered about above.
Put simply, Roy, the narrative about public schools was framed during the Reagan administration (it was false then and it is false now), and it has been amplified ever since by billionaires who believe in the private sector and are contemptuous of the public sector. See my forthcoming book SLAYING GOLIATH for documentation.
There are good charters and bad charters. Here, a better charter gets voted down.
A Charter School Gets Canceled for Wanting to Teach Indigenous History – https://newrepublic.com/article/155731/charter-school-gets-canceled-wanting-teach-indigenous-history
“On Tuesday, the North Carolina Charter Schools Advisory Board voted to reverse its recommendation for approval of a charter school set to open in Robeson County. Robeson County is home to the Lumbee Tribe, a state-recognized Native nation that is the largest tribe east of the Mississippi River. The reason for the reversal, according to Board member Lindalyn Kakadelis, was that the proposed curriculum was too Indigenous. Specifically, Kakadelis said the curriculum dabbled in “red pedagogy.””
Most charter schools in NC are racially segregated, according to a study by Prof Helen Ladd of Duke.
Some operate for profit, like those owned by BakerMitchell
Quoted from the article:
“Were the Lumbee able to enforce their sovereignty, they could take ownership of their own social services, as has been done by the Eastern Band of Cherokee, the state’s only federally recognized tribe. Instead, they are forced to rely on the state for hospitals, child welfare, and, of course, for schools. As a result, charter schools are the only tool available for shaping the education received by their children, and their ability to do even that is limited to what the state government and its various committees deem appropriate.”
“If one charter is operating under the notion that Christian extremists can operate vaccine-free plague breeding grounds, surely a historically marginalized Native community should be allowed merely to teach its own history.”
“Ultimately, Native children are not the only ones who need to hear it most. The American-backed genocide of Native peoples, its past and ongoing betrayal of legally binding treaties, and its multi-factored erasure of the modern Native citizen all needs to be extended to the public school curriculum, in North Carolina and all 49 other states.”
— end of quote
This is what have been saying all along: the system is broken on many levels and is in dire need of overhaul. Simply keeping public schools as is while prohibiting charters will not improve the situation.
BA,
Everyone who comments on this blog wants public schools to be better than they are today. They hate the lockstep testing regimen and the inane Common Core mandates.
You have an ugly habit of stereotyping everyone.
I lived in North Carolina and knew many folks down in the sandhills region where these folks lived. They were an interesting people, a sort of integrated society of about a third Scotts Highlander (their ancestors had come to North Carolina forced out of Scotland after the Battle of Cullodeen where Bonnie Prince Charlie failed) about a third the descendants of former slaves, and about a third who traced their ancestry to the various groups native to the area prior to European settlement, now grouped under the name Lumbee. These people have a beautiful accent which comes no doubt from the often volatile mixture of all these traditions.
As an advocate of regionalism in culture, I support the idea of a curriculum that emphasizes the unique culture of an area. I question, however, why we cannot achieve this through funding public education. The beautiful public high school in Cherokee, NC is mostly a NC public school, as I understand it. Why do we need a charter to teach our kids what is important to our local culture? The same goal might be reached by abolishing all these silly tests and encouraging local public school teachers to get interested in their own communities.
Well said. Shawgi Tells it like it is.