Many people have written to me to complain about an article that appeared Wednesday on the front page of the New York Times, saying it was pro-charter propaganda. The article claims that black and brown parents are offended that the Democratic candidates (with the exception of Cory Booker, now polling at 1%) have turned their backs on charter schools.
This is not true. Black parents in Little Rock, Arkansas, are fighting at this very moment to stop the Walton-controlled state government from controlling their district and re-segregating it with charter schools. Jitu Brown and his allies fought to keep Rahm Emanuel from closing Walter Dyett High School, the last open enrollment public high school on the South Side of Chicago; they launched a 34-day hunger strike, and Rahm backed down. Jitu Brown’s Journey for Justice Alliance has organized black parents in 25 cities to fight to improve their neighborhood public schools rather than let them be taken over by corporate charter chains. Black parents in many other districts–think Detroit–are disillusioned with the failed promises of charter schools. Eve Ewing wrote a terrific book (Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side) about resistance by parents, grandparents, students, and teachers in the black community to Rahm Emanuel’s mass closings of public schools to make way for charter schools; Ewing called their response “institutional mourning.” When Puerto Rico teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, parents, teachers, and students rallied against efforts to turn the Island’s public schools over to charter chains.
The article’s claim that “hundreds of thousands” of students are on “waiting lists” to enroll in charters links to a five-year-old press release by a charter advocacy group, the National Alliance for Charter Schools. In fact, there has never been verification of any “wait list” for charters. Although there are surely charters that do have wait lists, just as there are public schools that have long wait lists, there is no evidence that hundreds of thousands of students are clamoring to gain admission to charters. That claim appears to be a marketing ploy. Earlier this year, a member of the Los Angeles school board revealed that 80% of the charters in that city have empty seats. Just this past week, a well-established Boston charter announced that it was closing one campus and consolidating its other two because of declining enrollments. Four of Bill Gates’ charter schools in Washington State have closed due to low enrollments. The only effort to verify the claim of “waiting lists” was carried out by Isaiah Thompson, a public radio reporter in Boston; his review showed that the list contained many duplications, even triplications, since many students applied to more than one school, and the same lists held the names of students who had already enrolled in a charter school or a public school.
Perhaps the Times will now interview Dr./Rev. Anika Whitfield in Little Rock to learn about the struggles of Grassroots Arkansas to block the Walton campaign to destroy their public schools. Perhaps its reporters will interview Jitu Brown to hear from a genuine civil rights leader who is not funded by the Waltons or the Bradley Foundation or Betsy DeVos. Perhaps they will dig into the data in Ohio, where 2/3 of the state’s charter schools were rated either D or F by the state in 2018, and where the state’s biggest cyber charter went into bankruptcy earlier this year after draining away over $1 billion from public schools’ coffers. Perhaps they will cover the news from New Orleans, the only all-charter district in the nation, where the state just posted its school scores and reported that 49% of the charters in New Orleans are rated either D or F. Perhaps they will cover the numerous real estate scandals that have enabled unscrupulous charter operators to fleece taxpayers.
Fairness requires that the New York Times take a closer look at this issue, not by interviewing advocates for the charter industry but by trying to understand why so many Democrats, especially progressives, have abandoned the charter crusade. Why, as the Times asked in July, have charter schools lost their luster? (I asked the same question last April.) [Editor’s note: I added these two links to refer to use of the term “lost their luster.”] Why have the number of new charters plummeted nationally despite the expenditure of $440 million a year by the federal government and even more by foundations like Gates, Broad, DeVos, Bloomberg, Koch, and Walton. Maybe it was disappointment in their lackluster, often very poor, academic performance. Or maybe it was the almost daily revelations of waste, fraud, and abuse that occurs when public money is handed to entrepreneurs without any accountability of oversight.
The question that must be answered is whether it is just and sensible to create two publicly funded school systems, instead of appropriately funding the public schools that enroll 47 million students, almost 90% of all students. It serves the interests of billionaires to keep people fighting about governance and structure, but it serves the interest of our society to invest in great public schools for everyone.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on janresseger and commented:
Extra: read this rebuttal by Diane Ravitch of the misleading recent NY Times piece on charter schools.
A fine response to a truly unsettling article in “the paper of record.” Besides commenting on the Times site, what’s to be done? TY.
Email or tweet the writers.
Erica L. Green, a talented veteran journalist, has suddenly turned into an aggressive charter booster and responds scathingly to pushback.
I wrote offline to Eliza Shapiro and she responded that the article was fair and balanced. I think the balance starts around paragraph 28.
I’m genuinely shocked that Eliza Shapiro responded to you! Unfortunately the NYT’s education coverage is anything but fair and balanced. They have their narrative, which I’m guessing is a mandate from their charter-loving owners the Sulzbergers, and then they write a story to fit the narrative. Curiously, this appears at the same time Eva Moskowitz has been appealing for more public school space.
Are the Sulzbergers known to be charter school fans? In general that’s not how it works at a reputable newspaper in any case. Sometimes a narrative does take over a newsroom — not necessarily by edict.
But the Times has alternated between weak, unquestioning, fawning, inaccurate coverage of charters (one particular Page 1 story on Edison Schools circa 2001) and sharp exposes (a later critical story dissecting BS Edison “success” claims) — with no explanation of why the tone changed. It’s outside journalistic convention to explain such a thing (but should it be?). Times coverage of Success Academy charters has been sharp too. This story seems like payback — score one for the charter sector — but how that happened is mysterious.
“she responded that the article was fair and balanced”
Like Fox News?
It’s getting hard to tell the difference between all these media sources.
NYT coverage of Success Academy has not been particularly sharp, especially since Eliza Shapiro took over.
I notice that Eliza Shapiro has happily embraced Eva Moskowitz’ desire to completely erase a very important part of her history — the fact that Moskowitz was one of the most vocal supporters of Betsy DeVos and Moskowitz devoted quite a bit of her time giving interviews, writing op eds, and appearing on tv news shows to demand that the Senate confirm DeVos, who Eva Moskowitz personally certified as caring about students just as much as Moskowitz herself did.
I can understand why Moskowitz leaves out her endorsement of Betsy DeVos every time she whines publicly about how mean people are being because all she did was have a brief meeting with Trump and never endorsed his agenda. Somehow Moskowitz never mentions her many public exhortations to Senators to vote for DeVos if they cared about kids.
But I have read numerous Shapiro articles that also report on Moskowitz where Moskowitz’ tireless efforts to get Betsy DeVos confirmed as Sec. of Education is somehow erased from Moskowitz’ history.
What is the reason that Eliza Shapiro won’t ever mention Moskowitz endorsement of DeVos whenever Shapiro dutifully reports the Success Academy PR about their miraculous results in one of her pro-charter articles? My hypothesis is that Shapiro knows that the fact that Moskowitz made dishonest claims about how wonderful DeVos was would clearly cast doubt on her credibility when she makes dishonest claims about the miracles her charters are achieving. And Shapiro does not want anything to cast doubt on what she includes in every article where Moskowitz is mentioned, that Success Academy has “extremely high test scores and national accolades”.
Kate Taylor, the previous education reporter, did practice better journalism and was skeptical of Moskowitz’ claims and did some real reporting. She was switched to a different beat, perhaps to make way for a more charter-friendly reporter like Shapiro who would not ask any inconvenient questions. As Shapiro herself acknowledged in an interview posted in the NY Times about her reporting:
“I have been writing about charter schools in New York for the last six years. I had been hearing from some of my sources who run charter schools, work in charter schools, think about charter schools….”
And usually those many sources are “balanced” in the “fair and balanced” way of Fox News: with one soundbite from a teacher union spokesperson who “disagrees”. No other voices matter. And no mention of anything that might make the charter CEOs whose quotes and PR she dutifully transcribes look as dishonest as Trump.
At the Times, Kate Taylor did the story on the video of the Success Academy teacher ripping a student’s math paper in half and the story on the Success Academy principal with the “got to go” list of students to be pushed out. Back in the Edison Schools days, Jacques Steinberg did math crunching for a Times story to dissect and discredit Edison’s fake miracle test scores — and that was startlingly aggressive after previous coverage printed flat-out lies from Edison spokespeople as gospel, unchecked and unchallenged. They’ve just been all over the place on miracle charters — it’s pretty confusing.
Though at my own paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, years ago a columnist (with no expertise in education) gushed about a miracle charter, and not many weeks later, the education reporter (with expertise) exposed layers of fraud by that same charter and got it shut down. I’ve always wondered if there should be some explanation in such cases so readers don’t get whiplash.
“NYT” offers a slanted interpretation of reality, but you have the facts to support your assertion. I can remember in the early days of privatization black parents and students in Newark and Philadelphia protested the hostile takeover of their schools by the state working in collusion with the interests of the wealthy. Their protests were largely ignored while the state transferred governance of public schools to private interests. Thank your for your insightful rebuttal basted on facts. https://abc7ny.com/education/newark-students-walk-out-to-protest-school-superintendent/735946/
Correction: based
I was astonished when I saw that the article documented the fictional “wait lists” by linking to a five year old press release from a charter advocacy group.
As a veteran daily newspaper journalist, I can attest that that does NOT pass journalistic muster. For shame.
I went to the link in the NY Times article for their claim of large wait lists.
If you look at page 3 of that report by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, they include a table that lists “Estimated Number of Student Names on Waiting Lists, 2013-14”
In NYC, that table on page 3 has a huge number — 163,000.
Ah, but there is a small footnote (#4) next to the number 163,000. And if one bothers to read the footnote at the bottom, you get this:
“4 The New York City Charter School Center also ESTIMATES an UNDUPLICATED waitlist number of 50,400 individual students.” (All caps are mine)
In other words, the number of actual students on wait lists is fewer than 1/3 of the number in the chart. And all those numbers are simply “estimates” anyway.
That is what the NY Times considers a reliable and unimpeachable source whose numbers must never be questioned but must be treated as absolute fact. On the contrary, those who question that source must be attacked and criticized with the implication being that those people are no better than Warren and Sanders, and their only desire is to lie and mislead and throw poor African-American children under the bus just to make the teachers union happy.
Apparently the only people with real scruples are the charter advocates who cite these numbers and the upright and honest people like Betsy DeVos and the Walton Family who really care about the kids that Bernie and Warren have “abandoned” just to please the union.
“Basted on Facts”
The turkey was basted
And so was rebuttal
But latter was wasted
Cuz Times is a muddle
Regarding the alleged “long waiting lists”: Of course attempts to confirm that they’re legit are hopeless, because you’d have to contact the names on them to find out if they’re still “waiting” or ever were “waiting.” I learned when I was on the board of a parent-run co-op preschool years ago that even what an honest school thinks is a legit waiting list is actually hollow — we’d have an opening that we HAD to fill (because of the tuition) and find out that, predictably enough if you think about it, most everyone on the list had actually found another preschool and weren’t lolling around with their kid at home waiting for us to call them.
Friends who toured a San Francisco charter high school for their son many years ago said they learned they were put on the alleged “long waiting list” even though they weren’t interested in the school — it took their name anyway and put them on the list. This particular school, now-defunct Metro Arts and Tech, was run by the lie-prone Envision chain, and Envision, in a sham effort to look righteous and transparent, used to post its board meeting minutes online. So you could see that they were actually discussing the problem of unfilled seats in their schools, despite the alleged “long waiting lists.” After I blogged about that in the mid-00s, they stopped posting the minutes online.
Probably the only way to semi-confirm a claimed “waiting list” would be to call the school and ask if it had a seat for your child or grandchild — except that a response that there’s a “waiting list” is also a measure to allow it to screen, handpick and reject. Back in the days of former magical-miracle-run-by-saints for-profit Edison Schools, there was national coverage of Edison’s charter school in San Francisco, which routinely parroted Edison’s claims of a “long waiting list,” but if you called (I did), they would eagerly say they had openings, and it was known in the community that they were aggressively marketing and recruiting because they WEREN’T full. So really this is a confirmation-proof piece of marketing BS, and shame on any reporters who parrot it.
The NY Times desperately needs an education reporter like you.
I really don’t understand how Eliza Shapiro can be quite as inept as she is. But her response to Diane Ravitch demonstrates the high self-regard so many children of privilege like her have. Her parents are well-connected. Shapiro is so certain of her own superiority that she has no need to consider whether there are significant flaws in the worldview she shares with overprivileged charter advocates and the charter parents they hold out for her to interview. All other parents seem to be invisible to her, which says a lot about Eliza Shapiro’s own biases. Shapiro’s worldview – evident from her reporting – is that African-American students either thrive in charters or are on wait lists for them while they unwillingly attend urban public schools where every student is an abject failure. Any nuances that a more thoughtful and curious journalist like carolinesf understands just do not exist for Eliza Shapiro. I don’t know if it is laziness or simply smugness that leads journalists like Shapiro to their wrongheaded reporting. No doubt Shapiro believes she is far superior to Robert Kuttner as well.
It’s amazing that Shapiro so often includes comments from the few parents that charter advocates put in front of her but all the parents who testified before the NAACP panel are invisible to her. What kind of reporting is that? It’s like reporting on a new “miracle drug” by interviewing only the patients put in front of her by the drug company and implying that all the patients who were drummed out of the study or who had terrible side effects or who weren’t helped do not exist. A medical reporter who did that would be viewed as simply a shill for the drug company. And that is how Shapiro reports on charters.
Gary Miron and I also took a look at the “long waiting lists” claim. We identified 9 reasons why the claims are likely exaggerated — concluding that “overall waitlist numbers are likely much less than advocates’ estimates.” See: https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/charter-waitlists
When rightwing billionaires fund protesters that are wrongfully portrayed as grassroots, that fact should be noted by reporters. It happened. It was overlooked. That is not quality journalism. I personally am done with the New York Times. This article was the last straw. There are other places to get the news without all the lies of commission and omission. I don’t want any more propaganda.
A fundamental rule of our times: Spontaneous protesters do not wear matching T=shirts.
🙂 truth
So true as to make me laugh and cry.
A protest by folks with matching tea-shirts is called “sponteaneous”
In the New Yorker, it’s sponteäneous.
The NYTimes article had photos provided by Eagle Academy, a DC charter school for pre-K to grade 3.
I looked at the school website. The Eagle Academy is really two schools, pre-k to grade 3 with a third campus and new facility opening next year.
I looked at the most recent annual report. It provides details about the curriculum for each grade level, including brand names of programs and which of these are online. It also includes some stats on enrollments, percentage of special education students by type of disability and so on.
Both schools show decreasing enrollments from the earliest pre-K to grade 3 (as usual) and astonishing rates of attrition for teachers, 31% for one school; 36% for the other.
The Eagle Academy has its own non-profit foundation. One facility has a swimming pool.
I looked at the parent handbook. It is 50 pages long and has the usual demands for uniforms, properly worn. On page 48, I found this unusual requirement: “Required Parent/Legal Guardian Shadowing,” is a disciplinary measure that may be taken prior to suspension/expulsion for significant misbehavior. The parent/legal guardian will be required to accompany the child to school, and remain with the student during class, lunch, enrichment, etc. for a designated time determined by Administration. Refusal, or partial compliance, to shadow a student may result in suspension or expulsion.” https://4.files.edl.io/b8b8/08/21/18/174640-c964a839-2836-4b1d-bf58-396655aa317e.pdf
A lot of PR is devoted to a before-school program ($125 a month) and after-school program ($125 a month) or for a drop-in program per day ($35).
Click to access 150930-ab4780db-2381-463b-9b23-b2a0af52728d.pdf
The NYTimes reporters may or may not have controlled the pictures that accompanied the article. At minimum they should now do a deep dive into this school, its financing, reasons for losing almost a third of the teachers, and perhaps the actual scores of the grade three students on the PARCC tests.
Correcting just so we remain accurate — the pictures were taken by NY Times photographers at the Eagle Academy charter school, not provided by the charter school. In context, photos of a charter school would seem relevant — my issues are with the article, and the furious response from Erica Green to critics of the article.
Thanks for the correction. So photographers from the NYTimes visited this charter school in DC. Did the journalists?
We don’t know. But as a daily-newspaper journalist, I would say that sending photographers to take pictures at a charter school would be standard, whether an article about charters were flattering or unflattering to charters. Of course they have to find a charter that will give them access.
“black and brown parents are offended that the Democratic candidates (with the exception of Cory Booker, now polling at 1%) have turned their backs on charter schools.”
Say the lilly white owners and editors of the NY Times.
Leading the way for privatization – the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and state Catholic Conferences.
There will be good Catholic schools for the rich and Catholic school chains for the poor “black and brown” children- schools where they work 5 days a month for companies doing filing and data entry and then are forced to return their pay to the school chain- a school that local taxpayers pay for.
The vision of Koch moral bankruptcy.
There’s a pool of Catholic high schools, Cristo Rey schools, that emphasizes putting the students to work just as you say. They’re widely hailed in the press.I’m not sure if they’re tax-supported, though. As one is described on Wikipedia: …part of the national Cristo Rey Network of work-study schools for underserved Hispanic and African American students…
“black and brown parents are offended that the Democratic candidates (with the exception of Cory Booker, now polling at 1%) have turned their backs on charter schools.”
That sentence clearly wants readers to assume that those parents are not offended when Democratic candidates turn their backs on public schools and embrace Betsy DeVos.
Reading the NY Times, I would believe that those parents protesting Warren highly approve of candidates who abandon public schools and embrace Betsy DeVos and her agenda.
As far as I could tell, every single argument made in support of charters in Erica Green and Eliza Shapiro’s article could be made about vouchers.
After all, if their main argument is that the only thing that matters is whether the parents who use vouchers like them — which certainly seems to be Erica Green’s attack on anyone who is critical of her article — then it is clear that vouchers are the way to go.
I wonder if they will soon write an article about how angry some parents are that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are “siding with the teachers union” and refusing to force every public school system in America to give a voucher to all parents to use in any school they want. After all, according to those reporters, what matters is always whether some parents likes vouchers and if there are any parents that do, then vouchers must never be criticized and any politician who refuses to expand vouchers to every public school in America is simply a tool of the union and hates poor kids.
And also, all critics will be called racists.
There was a big strategically calculated sh*tstorm on Twitter about observations that the protesters were orchestrated. I pointed out in a tweet that there’s a long history of astroturfing, paid operatives masquerading as volunteer advocates, and parents required to show up at protests, so who can be blamed for taking a “fool me twice, shame on me” attitude? I got called racist a few times for that.
I looked at photos and I was trying to get a sense of how many protesters were there. Do you know?
Is the argument that if the same number of parents show up with “we support public education” signs at Cory Booker’s next rally, the NY Times and other organizations will cover it as clear proof that the vast majority of public school parents do not want private charter schools getting public money to teach the students they decide are worthwhile and profitable to teach?
So if 100 “protesters” were at Warren’s rally, and the same number show up at Booker’s next speech, will the NY Times report that with headlines blasting about how massive numbers of parents are protesting Cory Booker’s abandonment of public schools?
Only if they have matching T-shirts.
“I have spoken to hundreds of parents” says Eliza Shapiro pushing the dishonest propaganda that charters give any parent who wants it a choice.
What is shocking is that she has never once talked to a parent who learned that the choice of a charter is illusory when the charter does not choose your child. Or that “choice” is illusory when your child is put on a got to go list or is humiliated and targeted because that charter prefers not to teach that child. Or when your child has disabilities that charters have no obligation to address. Or when charters make it clear that only parents who can meet expectations that many working poor parents struggle to meet are welcome.
What is shocking is that Eliza Shapiro clearly never read the NAACP report or did read it and dismissed all the testimony as coming from lying parents who were secretly paid by the teachers union. Apparently those parents’ choice doesn’t really count. They aren’t worthy of choice.
Some parents get choice ONLY because charter CEOs allow them that choice. And when charter CEOs decide not to allow them that choice anymore, charters have complete freedom to make that child feel as miserable as possible to get him out of the school.
Apparently, to Shapiro, some low-income parents — the ones whose children charters agree to teach — are more equal than other low-income parents — the ones whose children charters don’t want to teach. And only those who charters want to teach get “choice”.
The parents who aren’t deemed worthy enough for charters are invisible to Shapiro.
As a daily newspaper journalist, I’m really shocked that Shapiro and Green are so openly dumping on their critics on Twitter, openly taking the side of the charter advocates. I mean, this is a situation where there are two sides to the story, and writing an unbalanced story is problematic enough, but openly dumping on the voices pointing out that the story is unbalanced is seriously unprofessional. And the dumping is aggressively perpetuating the story that privileged white people are disparaging the choices of downtrodden people of color (without noting that the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful people are promoting the cause of the charter supporters, as the matching T-shirts demonstrate).
I noticed that. They have shed any pretense of journalistic neutrality.
There is a really interesting tweet exchange between Erica Green and Denisha Jones which is the only time I saw Green not being defensive.
It seems to have started @leoniehaimson on December 1, when Leonie posted a link to your Jacobin Magazine article about the NYT story:
“@dianeravitch forcefully rebuts @nytimes inaccurate & biased depiction of charter debate via @jacobinmag”
Then Denisha Jones tweets: “When Black & brown education justice advocates speak out against charters we are ignored or silenced. Public schools work as designed but charter schools don’t improve education except for an even smaller percentage of chosen Black & brown youths & those who profit from them.”
And Erica Green tweets a reply: “Ms. Jones – I am sorry to hear that. That’s not OK, just as it wasn’t OK for the black and brown advocates who speak out and advocate for them to feel that way either. I’d love to connect with you on future stories.”
It was the first time Green actually took seriously any of the critics instead of replying as if everything they said was worthless drivel from white elites who only cared about the teachers union. There were a number of excellent replies, including from Denisha Jones herself, which Green clearly read, because one of the replies by someone else was:
“It concerns me that the Times reporter’s reply to you indicated that she has not come across other brown or Black charter opponents. She can’t have been looking very hard.”
And Erica Green replied: “It doesn’t indicate that. At all. I responded to the sentiment that was expressed. Let’s not go there…”
(So Green is obviously reading these and at least now realizes that she was wrong when she implies all opposition to charters is coming from white elites trying to force poor non-white parents to stay in failing public schools.)
On the other hand, it appears that Eliza Shapiro still believes that the parents that charter organizations hold out for her to speak with represent all low-income African-American and Latinx parents in NYC. Certainly they seem to represent all parents that Shapiro believes have anything that is worth quoting, which says a lot about Shapiro’s view of who matters. So she is very defensive and insists her reporting is fair and balanced since she speaks only to the parents who matter to her. And the parents who matter don’t include the parents who aren’t welcome in charters.
For Eliza Shapiro, the fact that there are upwards of 700,000 African-American and Latinx students in NYC who do not attend charters and 35% of those students are proficient in standardized tests despite supposedly all being stuck in failing schools does not register for her. She seems to know a lot of white parents at Beacon High School but she can’t manage to find a single African-American parent who isn’t a rabid charter supporter. And clearly the NAACP’s report is something she does not believe is worth reading because her many sources in charter schools and charter advocacy organizations know much better than the NAACP what those parents want, or at least what they deserve — “choice” — but only if charter CEOs decide their kid is worthy enough to deserve a choice. Shapiro misrepresents that as “choice” by the parents because she doesn’t speak to any parents whose choice was not approved by charter organizations. Those parents remain invisible to Shapiro.
This is par for the course for Shapiro. She’s an op-ed writer disguised as a reporter.
Also, as I am reading more of Eliza Shapiro’s defensive tweets about why her piece was absolutely fair and balanced, I realize what her perspective is. Shapiro DID include this sentence “Still, there is no consensus on charter schools among families of color. ” It appeared at one of the last paragraphs in a very long article pushing the narrative that white people were keeping black parents out of charters.
According to Shapiro, “fair and balanced” means writing a long story with dozens of pro-charter quotes coming from parents, children, advocates, supporters, people who want to run charters. And then one sentence disclaimer that other parents may disagree without hearing a single one of their voices. Their voices must remain silent but Eliza Shapiro believes she is fair and balanced because she does admit they exist out there even if she has made it clear that their voices are worthless to her. Absolutely worthless.
I comment often on NYTimes editorials. I noticed that none of my comments mentioning education ever get posted. I find it so frustrating that I even wrote Ms. Shapiro asking her to be a true journalist and investigate and report honestly rather than just broadcasting special interest talking points. But the Times like just about every other mainstream media news source wants to push the education reform agenda.