Almost 90% of American students attend public schools, subject to democratic control. 6% of American students are enrolled in privately managed charter schools. Under the leadership of Betsy DeVos, it is obvious that the promotion of both charters and vouchers is central to the education policy of the Trump administration.
Two Democratic senators who are candidates for president, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have released education plans that recommend an end to federal support for charter schools (currently $440 million), which DeVos has handed out to corporate charter chains like IDEA and KIPP.
Senator Cory Booker, having equivocated during the campaign about his previous zealous support for charters, vouchers, and Betsy DeVos, surprisingly reversed course and wrote an article in the New York Times, once again stating his support for charters.
Since Senator Booker is polling at less than 2% in the primaries, he may be looking past the election to restore his relationship with his funders, who love charter schools and were disappointed by his apparent defection from their cause.
Leonie Haimson writes here about Senator Booker’s curious use of the word “boogeyman” to belittle critics of charter schools.
She notes that reporters at the New York Times have also used that term to belittle charter critics. Then she googled and found that the same word has been used by charter defenders thousands of times.
Haimson points out that charters in NYC divert more than $2 billion each year from the public school system. That money might have been spent to meet crucial capital needs and to reduce class sizes.
Also, Senator Booker did not mention that the national NAACP passed a resolution in 2016 calling for a moratorium on charters.
There are many reasons to be critical of charters, including their diversion of funding from public schools, their private governance, their long and well-documented record of waste, fraud, and abuse.
To dismiss all criticism of charters as a fear of a boogeyman is cynical, to say the least, and serves only the interests of the charter industry.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes, Booker’s dismal run for Pres. is DOA so he has to retreat back into the arms of the billionaire privatizers before they too cut him loose. He is a fraud who has come very far and uses his roots to great personal advantage.
#NeverBooker
“Bookyman criticizes fear of Boogeyman”
Sorry, its spelled Bookeyman
Charters are a rob Peter to pay Paul scenario. The problem with supporters of privatization is that they do not care about the loss of funding impact on public schools. Booker should ask the people in the Chester Upland school district in Pennsylvania if they think they are better off now that privatization is destroying their public schools.
Since I have never been inside a charter school I cannot judge it’s quality. But,continuasly
The scary thing is that Booker could run for governor in NJ at some point. Just what we do NOT need in NJ, another charter cheerleader. At least Murphy has slowed down the charter school juggernaut.
“supporting high-performing public charter schools if and when they are the right fit for a community , are equitable and inclusive , and play by the same rules as other public schools ” – Name one charter law in the country that supports the creation of such fantasy schools. While you’re at it, define “high-performing” and comment cogently – then provide stats on the frequency of the phenomenon.
“As a coalition, we have to acknowledge that our goals for federal education funding will continue to face serious political opposition. Supporting well-regulated public charters, in the meantime, is a meaningful complementary solution.” Translation: put a pinky-sized bandaid on a gaping wound, wash your hands and walk away.
When people who want to place themselves near the middle of the political spectrum by supporting school privatization, they should hear a story from Florida I heard recently.
This Floridian I met had a neighbor. He was a grade school principal and lived in a nice little house in a nice little neighborhood. People there were not poor at all, indeed they would be the envy of a majority of the world’s population. This principal got a position in one of the many charter schools I the county, Florida being what it is regarding charters. No sooner had he gotten this job than he moved over to the other side of the county where houses averaged between half a million and a million each.
If there is a moral to this story, it is that people notice when you behave certain ways. You cannot claim to be in the middle and support charters.
The Wall Street Journal today has a long oped in support of charter schools. It comes from David Osborne, of the Progressive Policy Institute and author of “Reinventing America’s Schools: Creating a 21st Century Education System.”
Osborn’s op-ed, Titled “The Big Lie About Charter Schools,” is designed as an attack on Presidential candidates Warren, Sanders, and Biden for “lambasting charters as a threat to public education,” while praising Cory Booker’s work as mayor of Newark, NJ. “in growing the best charters.”
Osborn implies that critics of charter schools are eager to capture the votes and the political money of the teachers unions– $64 million in the last election.
Osborn then proceeds to make claims about charter school that are patently false.
1. In the majority of states with charter schools, local and state revenue covers almost all of the dollars lost to charters. This falsehood also provides an occassion to complain about teachers who have pension funds and to imply that these are funded at a cost to charter school expansion.
Charter schools are entitled to occupy public school buildings, co-locate in these, lease or buy the facilities, and have maintence issues paid for by the district. “None of this decreases the public education available to students and it often improves the quality.” Teachers unions “scream when school boards contemplate” these options.
Unions shrink when charters grow. About 11% of charter schools unionize, but that is a threat to the overpaid leaders to the NEA and ADT and other staff. Charter schools expand the number of potential employers for teachers.
Charter schools outperform traditional district schools on standardized tests “in months of learning” in reading and math, also in graduation rates, college-going, and college completion rates.
Competition from charter schools “can push district and school leaders to improve their schools, to make them more attracted to parents.”
The Walton-funded 74 million website marketed Osborn’s book, published in 2017 by the
Progressive Policy Institute as “a story of transformation. It is a bracing survey of the most dramatic improvements taking place in urban public education today, in cities as diverse as New Orleans, Denver, Washington, D.C., and Indianapolis.”
All four cities are sites of “disaster charterizing” and failed policies offered up by managers who think corporate best bang for the buck values are above reproach, no matter the collateral damage.
The Progressive Policy Institute is a “project” of the Third Way Foundation. Both are a legacy from the Clinton administration’s pursuit of policies that were not really different from those of Republicans.
There is nothing “progressive” about the Progressive Policy Institute that Osborne runs for the Third Way Foundation. These two interconnected non-profits are engaged in a well-funded effort to make the Democratic party a false front for far-right Republican ideas and policies. See for example the following websites https://www.thenation.com/article/gop-donors-and-k-street-fuel-third-ways-advice-democratic-party/ and also here https://www.salon.com/2019/08/14/koch-brothers-funded-centrist-democratic-group-third-way-according-to-new-book/
“$64 million in the last election” Do you know if that is an accurate figure? If so, how would it compare to other donations from large bloc donors? Would it equal the investment of large donors in the development of Common Corp or similar initiatives?
Gates spent hundreds of millions on Common Core.
The Waltons have spent more than $1 billion launching and supporting charter schools and charter advocacy groups.
Big surprise -Acton Institute favorably reviewed a book by Osborne-the book. “Reinventing Government: How the entrepreneurial spirit…”. From the review, “…making the decision to fund faith-based charities easier for policy makers…”
The biggest challenge is how people think.
Promotion of charter schools (among those not in it to make a buck or undermine unions) is based on the cynical belief that it is impossible to orchestrate a systemic solution to the disparity in education outcomes across race and socioeconomic differences in children’s life experience. It accepts scarcity, inequity, and poverty as unalterable constants.
The conclusion of such defeatists is that we need to save some because we can save everyone. Supporting that notion is the assertion that because democratic control of education is often conflictual and inefficient, we should abandon rather than improve democracy and turn control over education to private market-driven management.
We need to defeat not just the billionaires and politicians who support charter school expansion but the normalization of their ideas.
I agree with your perspective. Many charter supporters are defeatists that don’t support democracy.
Cory Booker = Obama minus the brain
Cory Booker is shifty like Gina Raimondo. We won’t see either one of them at a teacher or a pension protection rally.
When it became unpopular for Dems to privatize schools, Booker told an Indiana student publication that he wasn’t a privatizer. Like Diane suggested, Cory’s, now, out there currying favor with the rich patrons.
This is exactly why he is excluded from the top tier candidates and Warren and Sanders are included in top 4.
Corey is a panderer and a fraud! Thank goodness he will never be president. One charlatan s enough!
Booker built a straw man and then attacked it.
The issue with ed reformers is not that public school supporters won’t try anything new.
The issue with ed reformers is they offer absolutely nothing of practical value to students in public schools. There is no upside for public school students. They simply don’t offer anything to our kids, which is why we shouldn’t continue to hire and pay them in government.
It’s fine to be a charter and voucher promoter. God knows there are a lot of them. However. Public school students and families need and deserve people in government who value them and their schools. They are due that. It simply isn’t fair that public school students are either ignored or denigrated by ed reformers in government and public school advocates are permitted to object to that.
Public school students are the dead last priority in ed reform schemes, and it shows. That’s unacceptable and the public shouldn’t have to pay for a “movement” that returns NO VALUE to +/- 90% of students.
Tyler Perry Studios will also host the Freedom Coalition for Charter Schools this evening, 6:30PM-8:30PM, prior to the democratic presidential debate, 9:00PM-11:00PM.
With these events taking place in Atlanta, the so-called Black Mecca, Cory Booker may simply see it as a prime opportunity to be on the national stage to pander to selfish, black racialist ideologues, just as his puppet masters would have him do. Just as Obama did when it comes to public education.
https://www.freedomcoalitionforcharterschools.com/open-letter-to-elizabeth-warren
Okay, honest question, because I’ve seen this claim multiple times. How exactly is the fact that the charter schools are receiving funding that would have otherwise gone to NYC public schools had the students gone to NYC public schools improve the outcomes at NYC schools if the students went there instead? Yeah, NYC would have an extra $2 billion to spend on teachers and supplies and facilities… but they also would have all the additional students. From a fiscal perspective, it looks the same (in terms of lost revenue and saved expenses) when a student leaves a NYC school because their family chose to put them in a charter school as when a student leaves a NYC school because their family moved to Bergen County.
Please, someone explain to me why those two scenarios are so radically different that one (choosing the charter school) draws so much ire, and the other (moving to another school district) doesn’t.
It’s called stranded costs – see economist Gordon Lafer’s report here, focused on CA:
Click to access ITPI_Breaking_Point_May2018FINAL.pdf
“To the casual observer, it may not be obvious why charter schools should create any net costs at all for their home districts. To grasp why they do, it is necessary to understand the structural differences between the challenge of operating a single school—or even a local chain of schools—and that of a district-wide system operating tens or hundreds of schools and charged with the legal responsibility to serve all students in the community.
When a new charter school opens, it typically fills its classrooms by drawing students away from existing schools in the district… If, for instance, a given school loses five percent of its student body—and that loss is spread across multiple grade levels, the school may be unable to lay off even a single teacher… Plus, the costs of maintaining school buildings cannot be reduced…. Unless the enrollment falloff is so steep as to force school closures, the expense of eating and cooling schools, running cafeterias, maintaining digital and wireless technologies, and paving parking lots—all of this is unchanged by modest declines in enrollment.
In addition, both individual schools and school districts bear significant administrative responsibilities that cannot be cut in response to falling enrollment. These include planning bus routes and operating transportation systems; developing and auditing budgets; managing teacher training and employee benefits; applying for grants and certifying compliance with federal and state regulations; and the everyday work of principals, librarians and guidance counselors.”
See also here for the impact of charter growth on public school budgets in PA: https://thenotebook.org/articles/2017/09/13/new-report-on-pa-charter-school-growth-finds-stranded-costs-linger-five-years-later/ and Helen Ladd’s analysis for NC public schools https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3082968
Rutgers university professor Bruce Baker has done a lot of research on the financial impacts of charter schools on the public schools and districts from which they siphon students. In a nutshell, the claim that “it’s a wash in financial terms (doesn’t matter) when students leave public schools for charters” is false.
Diane has linked to many of Bakers findings
https://dianeravitch.net/?s=Bruce+baker