Jan Resseger writes here about the damage that “portfolio districts” do to students, schools, and communities. The original concept for “portfolio districts” was developed by Paul Hill of the Gates-funded Center for Reinventing Public Educatuon at the University of Washington. The fundamental idea was that the school board would act like a stock portfolio manager, closing low-performing schools, replacing them with charter schools, keeping open the schools with high test scores. Students would choose where to go to school. The concept was adopted by many districts as the latest thing, and many beloved neighborhood schools serving black and brown communities were shuttered. If their replacement got low scores, it was also closed. The students were collateral damage.
She writes:
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein launched this scheme in New York City by creating district-wide school choice, breaking up large comprehensive high schools into small schools with curricular specialties, encouraging the opening of a large number of charter schools, co-locating many schools—small specialty public schools along with charter schools—into the same buildings. Those running the school district would consider all of these schools of choice as if they were investments in a stock portfolio. The district would hold on to the successful investments and phase out those whose test scores were low or which families didn’t choose.
Portfolio school reform has created collateral damage across the school districts which have experimented with the idea. After the Chicago Public Schools, another district managed by portfolio school reform theory, closed 50 schools at the end of the 2013 school year, the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research, and separately a University of Chicago sociologist, Eve Ewing tracked widespread community grieving when neighborhoods lost the public school institutions that had anchored their neighborhoods.
But there have been other kinds of collateral damage beyond the tragedy of school closures. In a new piece for the NY Times, Eliza Shapiro documents how district-wide school choice in New York City has contributed to inequity along with racial and segregation.
One problem is inequitable access to information. Parents who can afford to pay for consultants and who have the skills and position to understand how to navigate the system are able to privilege their own children with access to the schools widely thought to be desirable. Shapiro explains: “There is a trick to getting to the front of the lines that clog sidewalks outside New York City’s top public high schools each fall. Parents who pay $200 for a newsletter compiled by a local admissions consultant know that they should arrive hours ahead of the scheduled start time for school tours. On a recent Tuesday, there were about a hundred mostly white parents queued up at 2:30 p.m. in the spitting rain outside of Beacon High School, some toting snacks and even a few folding chairs for the long wait. The doors of the highly selective, extremely popular school would not open for another two hours for the tour. Parents and students who arrived at the actual start time were in for a surprise. The line of several thousand people had wrapped around itself, stretching for three midtown Manhattan blocks.”
Resseger adds:
My own children graduated from a racially and economically diverse public high school in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Articles like Shapiro’s cause me to appreciate our family’s privilege in a way I had never really previously considered. From the time they entered Kindergarten, our children knew they would someday go to the big high school at the corner of Cedar and Lee. At a week-long summer music camp in our school district, middle school students play side-by-side with some of the members of the high school band and orchestra. Our daughter learned to know the high school tennis coach when he worked with younger students in the city recreation program. And the summer before his high school freshman year, our son, knowing that the high school cross country team worked out in a city park during August, went to the park and asked the coach if he could start working out with the team. High school for our children was a natural, predictable, and exciting transition. How lucky we were.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Madness. I half expect billionaires to create stock portfolios of individual people, and buy and sell all of us as their property. Tencent is already doing it. If I don’t make Bill Gates a profit, he will just close me down.
already much “which kids can afford tech products and which kids cannot” division going on where the portfolio game has been playing out
As if tech products overcome poverty.
“Dr. Hill is lead author (with Lawrence Pierce and James Guthrie) of Reinventing Public Education: How Contracting Can Transform America’s Schools (University of Chicago Press, 1997)”
Interesting how the (accurate) description of charters as contractors dropped out of the ed reform language.
Dr. Hill has degrees in political science so I’m wondering how it happened that he is in charge of “reinventing” public schools in states and cities all over the country. Or, contracting out public school services, which is what this is. Granted, “reinventing” sounds much better. All government contractors should do it- “I’m not privatizing this public entity and system, I’m reinventing it”.
The Center on Reinventing Public Education is funded by the Gates Foundation.
As you know it’s just one big circle – around and around it goes.
If it wasn’t Gates it would be Walton or Arnold or Bloomberg but it doesn’t matter- it’s all the same stuff.
For me the portfolio system suffers from the same problem that all ed reform initiatives suffer from- it contributes absolutely nothing to students in existing public schools.
The defense of this in ed reform is some studies they have done that privatizing 20 or 30 or 40% of a system doesn’t HARM public school students, but we don’t hire and pay public employees to not HARM our students. That’s a rock bottom measure. Call me crazy but I think the public should actually insist that they return some value to public schools and public school students. When they sold this ideology they promised to “improve public schools”. If the plan was to neglect or actively weaken existing public schools in order to achieve privatization, they should probably have told the public that.
Go read anything ed reform churns out about a “portfolio system” and try to find anything about the PUBLIC schools in the “transformation”. They just disappear. There are students in those schools. We’re not permitted to hire people who actually work on their behalf? Ed reformers don’t see any value in existing public schools so public school families are just supposed to go along with that? Why would they?
Cleveland is a portfolio city that was promoted by the Obama Administration (not that it matters who they technically work for- it’s all the same people) and yet we never hear about it anymore.
Was it not miraculous enough, or did it fall out of fashion? Detroit was one of the earlier half-privatized cities. What happened to that?
The portfolio model at Oakland Unified has been a painful lesson in how to disrupt and dismantle public education; with the students/parents/teachers as the losers and consultants and developers as the winners. It’s all about real estate. At the school board meeting announcing the closure of Roots, a very high-needs district school, the pain and anger were palpable. The school board put up a screen shot of the school’s test scores for all to see, just to add to the humiliation and degradation. Next, the closure of Kaiser Elementary, one of the most popular, diverse, well-supported schools in the district, with a real waitlist and a large number of LGBT families. The excuse? They want to merge the school with another high-needs underenrolled school nearly 4 miles away, separated by a freeway. And then sell off the Kaiser school property, complete with Bay Bridge views. Students aren’t allowed to have nice things. Finally, the proposed closure of a charter, Roses in Concrete. Serving nearly all children of color, it opened with great promise and a SEL curriculum. It’s demise will happen, once again, due to poor test scores (because of the populations that it serves), leaving those families scrambling for another school. Whether one agrees that it was needed or not, those families probably had no idea of the possible closure, and test scores are being used as the weapon of choice to create all this chaos.
I really encourage everyone to read ed reformers, because if you’re a public school supporter you read them differently than those in the echo chamber do.
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/471595-devos-should-be-applauded-not-demonized-for-her-work-in-education
That’s a cheerleading piece about about DeVos. It’s written by ed reformers for other ed reformers. But what YOU’LL notice if you’re a public school supporter or public school family is DeVos has not accomplished one thing that will benefit any public school student, anywhere.
Your schools and kids simply don’t exist in this world, other than as a “control group” they use to promote the schools they prefer. This is bad. It will harm public schools. Why? Because no one exerts any effort on behalf of 90-some per cent of the actual students in this country. A country that MOSTLY has public schools.
It’s as if you had a huge group of people who supposedly worked for “retirees” but they excluded all effort on behalf of Social Security and Medicare, and instead worked full time on abolishing or privatizing those programs. I guess it’s interesting, this ideological quest they’re conducting on the public dime but they’re not actually contributing anything to most retirees. Instead, you might think about hiring people who do the actual work, rather than invent a job they like better.
Jan Resseger wrote an insightful article, but she used a misleading example from Eliza Shapiro’s reporting. (Shapiro is always certain to give the right wing “Public schools are evil and we need lots and lots of new high performing perfect charters” perspective).
Eliza Shapiro, in her usual fashion, didn’t ask questions that might enlighten her in the article that Jan Resseger cites. Instead she basically wrote an advertorial for the “consultants” who make money by giving public school parents the same information they could find on the DOE website or a blog like inside schools.
So Shapiro scared ignorant parents reading that into believing that there was some advantage to “knowing” that they could arrive early and stand in line for hours to get into an open house for a popular public high school. In fact, if those parents didn’t have a clue, they would have arrived late, waited the same amount of time and still attended the open house. Shapiro somehow overlooked the fact that it is like waiting in line to get into a concert for which you have an assigned seat you will sit in whether you are first or last in the door. Instead, readers who didn’t know the truth would assume that only those early in line could attend.
Today Shapiro co-wrote a heavily biased pro-charter article in today’s NY Times in which she works very, very hard to give viewers the absolutely wrong impression that the vast majority of African-American parents are demanding charters when the majority of those parents do not support charters. (If you read to the very end of a long article she throws in some disclaimers to give her plausible deniability that she was intentionally leaving that fact out.)
I wish the NY Times had a real journalist covering education instead of someone who believes that writing a story quoting lots of highly paid pro-charter voices is “reporting”.
You see it with the ed-reform approved Presidential candidates too.
Corey Booker doesn’t have a public education plan. He has a charter schools plan.
They don’t even feel any need to address public school supporters and families at all. It doesn’t even occur to them. They believe our schools and students are one undifferentiated mass of “status quo” that they have rejected and that’s reflected in everything they do. It doesn’t even occur to them that there might be actual public school supporters and advocates, or even FAMILIES. That’s unimaginable. If they’re willing to admit we exist at all they insist we’re either wholly self-interested or idiots who are emotionally and irrationally attached to an inferior product and must be “dragged, kicking and screaming” (as Obama said) to the clear superiority of their privatized systems.
Go look at the prestigious ed reformers and see the “debate” they’re conducting on “public education” in the 2020 election. It DOESN’T INCLUDE 90% of students and schools, and it’s such an echo chamber this doesn’t even occur to them.
BTW my husband and I came to central Florida a day early to see the Dali museum in St. Petersburg before taking our grandson to Disney. While at the museum we saw a group of children from the Plato Academy. The class had fifteen students, eleven black and brown students and four white students. The students were well behaved so I looked up the parent reviews on-line. I could tell that the young person in charge was not the “best and brightest” from the way she addressed the students.
This Plato group has a few schools on the central Gulf coast of Florida. In the reviews the parents complained that if a student didn’t understand something easily, he would be ignored until he would leave. Other parents complained that the schools were filthy with vermin. Other than a small class size I cannot see the advantage in this school.
The diverse public school described in this post reminds of the district in which I taught. The public school was the center of community life. The community gave to the schools, and the schools in turn gave back through fund raising for community projects and needy families. My poor ELLs were among the neediest, and they benefited tremendously by attending a well resourced school system with supportive services.
Public schools are valuable public assets that belong to the entire community. People must protect their valuable asset from the assaults of the wealthy that seek to transfer a key public asset into their own greedy pockets. People must organize, resist and fight back. There is no community benefit to monetizing young people. The benefits go to the investors and corporations. A strong public education system enhances property values and aspires to provide equitable education. Sending money to privatization ‘pirates’ only enriches investors that will provide a cheap substitute for the public schools that are lost. Communities should not fall for the false hope of “choice,” that forces a community to disinvest in the public schools that are the best hope for the future.
We’ve been on the road all day. Just seeing this. Thanks so much for sending it around.
I also saw the Eliza Shapiro-Elizabeth Green piece in NY Times. Seems terrible. Green is their higher ed DC reporter. It is dismaying as they trot out the old stereotypes—unions vs. black parents; the desire for escapes for black kids without any mention of the consequences for all the kids who lose funding; and the poor quality and corruption of the charter sector. It is a very shallow and biased piece with big play on the NY Times web page.
And, like me, probably few will be blogging in the next few days. We’ll be back home Wed the 4th. My kids have told me they will help try to change color scheme of my blog.
I’ll have another piece on Friday the 6th. But it may be on Massachusetts, as we are in Boston and I can buy the Globe to see the coverage of Charlie Baker’s school funding plan.
I will be in Pittsburgh on the 14. It sounds like a great opportunity to explain some of this to candidates.
Take care and good wishes for the holiday.
Jan Resseger
https://janresseger.wordpress.com/
“That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children…. is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination…. It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose… tied to one another by a common bond.” —Senator Paul Wellstone, March 31, 2000
Erica Green, not Elizabeth, who edits and runs Chalkbeat
Jan, I wrote to Eliza Shapiro to say that the piece in The NY Times was one-sided and recommended that she speak to black parents and activists like Dr Anika Whitfield in Little Rock, who is fighting the Walton behemoth, fighting to preserve public schools. She replied that the article was fair and balanced.
I saw your replies to her on twitter — thank you they were excellent.
I think it is very revealing that Eliza Shapiro has the same definition of “fair and balanced” that Fox News has.
Thank you.
No journalist has ever replied and said, “I’m sorry. I made a mistake.”