Education Law Center is calling for the NJ Department of Education (NJDOE) to immediately end the unauthorized practice of allowing charter schools in poor urban Abbott districts to operate separate preschool programs outside the districts’ universal “Abbott Preschool Program.”
The administration of former Governor Chris Christie allowed 10 charter schools in five Abbott districts to operate their own preschool programs, despite not having a contract from the districts to participate in the districts’ universal program, as required by the landmark Abbott v. Burke rulings. In 2019-20, the 10 charter preschool programs enrolled 630 three- and four-year-olds, funded by over $8 million in state preschool aid.
ELC’s December 2019
letter to the NJDOE emphasizes that, under the NJ Supreme Court’s detailed Abbott preschool mandates, only Abbott districts are authorized to offer high quality preschool to all resident three- and four-year-olds through an NJDOE-approved universal enrollment program. While community providers and Head Start are eligible to operate preschool classrooms in Abbott districts, they can only do so under a contract with the districts. The district contract requires strict adherence to teacher quality, class size, and other Abbott preschool standards, as well as enrollment through the district’s universal outreach and recruitment process.
As the Supreme Court has made clear, these requirements are essential elements of the constitutional obligation imposed on Abbott districts to provide high quality preschool to all eligible three- and four-year old children residing in their communities. The districts are mandated to enroll at least 90 percent of the universe of those children. The requirement for community-based providers to operate only under district contracts ensures that only those providers capable of and willing to deliver high quality preschool through district coordination, support and supervision, can participate in the Abbott program.
The NJDOE’s decision to allow the 10 charter schools to operate separate preschool programs not only violates the Abbott rulings and the agency’s own regulations, but also undermines the cornerstone of the nationally-recognized success of the Abbott Preschool Program: a district-supervised, mixed delivery system of early education unifying community-based providers and district classrooms under a common set of high quality standards, backed by adequate funding. This well-established legal and policy framework does not permit any entity, including charter schools, to provide preschool wholly outside of the district-run, universal Abbott program.
“The NJDOE has no authority to permit a charter school to run a parallel preschool program that competes with the district’s Abbott program for students and funding,” said David Sciarra, ELC Executive Director and lead counsel in the Abbott litigation. “Charter schools in Abbott districts cannot operate preschool classrooms unless they enter into a contract with the district, as is required of every community-based provider and Head Start program participating in Abbott preschool.”
In 2019-20, the following charter schools are providing preschool without obtaining the legally required contract to participate in the Abbott district program:
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Good news. I worry about preschool children. Many parents are getting scammed and children harmed.
Any country or organization, which USES it’s young FOR PROFIT needs to take good hard look at itself. Same with endless wars and our environment.
I worry, too. As a preschool teacher (and a parent and taxpayer), I have advocated against preschool for profit since it began in the 80’s. I worked for a highly respected university lab school near Boston for many years that was sadly handed over to Bright Horizons in 2014. The university (like many others recently) just didn’t want to deal with the complicated management of a child care program any more. Most of us left after the first year with BH. It was exactly what I expected.
Current families mobilized, but to no avail. But the most disturbing part was that newly enrolled parents were clueless. They had no idea that they were participating in a system that only cares about the bottom line not the children or staff. They were not aware of how Mitt Romney and others have gotten rich off BH. It’s similar to how parents are duped by charters.
These privatizers seek to put poor, minority students on the privatization gravy train as early as possible. These students will then be funneled into privatized K-12 schools unless, of course, they have expensive problems or needs. Then, the private schools will shed them and send them to the barren public schools until they are ready for the privatized criminal justice system. Isn’t the whole point of poor people to provide streams of revenue for wealthy investors?
5 in Newark…hmmm…nice Booker legacy (existing charter, not commenting on new pre-school plotting).
That’s just one of the reasons why he’s not on the stage. Nothing to do w/racism one iota.
Charter preschool? Privatized nursery school is what it’s come to? They are going to try to bleed taxes using 3-4 year-olds? Is there no small place of life left into which tech CEOs, hedge fund managers, and corporate financiers will not wield their controlling power to creep? I do not want to see a day when a single bris is performed by a charter rabbi, no I do not.
I would be more sanguine on this subject had I not experienced the NJ state-sanctified – i.e., non-charter-sch – Abbott School version of preschool in 2010. (And pls note, the once-wonderful [circa 1991] NJ “PreK Expectations”– tho still extant in a dumbed-down, stdzd form– has been virtually replaced by “state-approved” packaged alternatives like “Creative Curriculum”(tm) et al.)… Keep in mind, this is just ONE anecdote… but I think you’ll see it follows the general ed-deform pattern.
I had been providing Fr & Span enrichment [via parent sign-up/ extra fee] to a hospital-employee daycare/ PreK/K in Edison NJ for nearly a decade when the founding director passed away & was replaced by an ed-reformer type.
The new director updated this [very good] PreK/K by getting it accredited w/NAEYC– not a bad thing per se– but also was determined to plump up [perhaps-shaky – due to chaotic healthcare market] financing, by enrolling nearby [N Brunswick – 4 mis away] Abbott School students. [The founder’s plan generously provided that disadvantaged locals could attend at the same discounted tuition as employee families]. What this meant was that the entire sch curric was re-vamped to Abbott PreK stds to accommodate potential, future disadvantaged local enrollees.
For me personally, the curricular changes were minor [just map my curric to that of the only natlly accepted WL stds, ACTFL, which I already used], but the sched change crippled my pgm & killed it w/n one yr. For 25 yrs, parents had been able to sign their kids up, for a modest fee, for ‘extras’ like for-langs, ed-computer pgms, science, music, art during the course of the 8:30-3:00 scheduled day. Parents of 2.5-4y.o.’s naturally chose a.m. or just after nap pull-outs, when they knew their little ones could handle it.
All of a sudden, everything was pigeonholed per Abbott Sch stds. 8:30-3:00 was “curric time”– restricted to math, eng & phys-ed. ‘Specials’ like yoga, dance, soccer fit under phys-ed, but sorry, no for-langs, science experiments, educational computer pgms, violin or piano or art lessons – they could only be offered after 3 [at which point employees w/daycare were picking up their kids & delivering them to babysitters at home, & those w/o sensibly chose low-demand extended school-daycare until end of workday].
Meanwhile, per Abbott School [ed-reform] policy, indoor & outdoor recesses were curtailed, & sand-tables/ dress-up corners/ kitchen-workshop/ toy-play/ large rug areas were minimized or disappeared entirely, replaced by “pre-math” and “pre-reading tables with chairs – & natch, ‘accountability’ was honed via assessment reporting to the state.
Full disclosure, there was one good consequence to Abbott School rules: the teacher staff was upgraded, & a career path was set up for all, from infant-care aides on up, via PD, which greatly improved teacher morale. However IMHO the students’ PreK/K school experience was dumbed down, while simultaneously engendering more agita/ focus issues via restricting play, eliminating ‘extras,’ & subjecting kids/ teachers to extensive assessment/ reporting reqts.
If you’re still with me: opening charter options to NJ Abbott Schdist families looks to me like just the usual ed-deform MO: subject publicly-funded schs to onerous stds/ assessments, then provide privatized escape-hatches.
Sounds dreadful. Free play -indoors and out – is the most important and valuable thing that should be offered to preschoolers. And it should take up the bulk of their day. I’ve been teaching 35 years and have sadly watched as preschool has become over-regulated, inappropriate and a money maker. There are two reasons – 1. Some do care and mistakenly believe that children “need” the “academics,” “direct instruction,” etc. because they don’t understand play. 2. Others -whether or not they believe #1 – are happy to make a profit from the misguided ideas by selling curricula and assessments to schools. There is absolutely no reason to purchase curricula and assessments. A professional educator can create those on her/his own -if they even feel it’s necessary. It does take skilled adults to support learning through child-directed play, but I have to say, on the other hand, it’s really not rocket science! It’s much simpler than people think. IF we don’t let the BS get in the way.
You are absolutely right.
As a special to various regional PreK/K’s, I’ve seen a spectrum of what’s on offer in cental-Northern NJ over the last 20 yrs. You can pretty much peg quality by (a)amount of unstructured indoor/ outdoor play, and (b)exactly how they deal w/ the increased [state] pressure for early academics.
The former is the key flag. The latter is more difficult to assess, and can only be discerned by a close look at director’s relationship to teachers —e.g. mentorship re best ways to relate sensitively to kids, degree of teacher autonomy allowed— even just the degree of camaraderie among teachers can be giveaway re: how much top-down stdzn is being applied.
But do pay attention to type & # of tables/ desks/ chairs – keeping in mind that this is an age-group that is not generally comfortable in chairs/ desks for long periods of time- & that mid/wkg & even higher-midclass students are likely to be there for up to 10- hrs: they’ll all have cots, but good to view whether naptimes are perfunctory, or perhaps long, w/ lowered lights & soft music.
Yes, nap time is so important! One of my principals (who was new and had only taught 4th grade for a few years) was surprised to learn I had three-year-olds who needed a two hour nap. And concerned – mustn’t waste precious instructional time on naps! I told her at home they napped for two hours. It was an “extended day” program (7:30am-4:00pm), too, so plenty of time for learning. Like I said, not really rocket science. We have lost the plot.
One of the biggest issues with charter schools is that of governance. Right-wingers, of course, think that individuals (for example, owners or C-level managers in companies) should make the decisions about everything. And in charter schools, that’s how it usually is. The owner makes the decisions. He or she might have a board, but that board is not elected. The board is packed with the owner’s spouse, mistresses or boy toys, golfing buddies, and ne’er-do-well cousins. And here’s one of the many problems with that. Even if the charter owner happens to be a person of goodwill who is not primarily interested in using the school finance mechanism for self-dealing (there might be some of those), individuals get enthusiasms, sometimes these are wrong-headed, and that’s why we need checks and balances. In a charter, if the owner/CEO of the management company reads a blurb in Exploiting Workers Daily about grading on a curve and decides that this is just peachy, he or she will fire off a memo, and suddenly, grading on a curve will become law throughout the school or school system, for everything, and heads will roll if the PE Coach doesn’t grade the dribbling exercise on a curve. Now, the chances are that neither the CEO nor the teachers know how to standardize scores so that they can actually be graded in this way, so the edict is a recipe for confusion, and there are other problems. If a test is easy, grading on a curve unfairly punishes kids whose scores aren’t much different from those of their classmates, for one example, and though there are common guidelines for setting cut scores on a normal distribution of scores, these are rough, not apply well in all cases, and can be unknown or ignored, for another example. Multiply this kind of thing many, many times, and you end up with the quotidian absurdity of life in an autocracy. This why TEACHERS NEED TO RUN THEIR SCHOOLS and why we need elected boards and superintendents.
In many areas, Deform Orthodoxy tells us, the US is falling behind. But in monetizing our children, we are leaps and bounds ahead. Never too soon to start squeezing capital out the Human Capital!