Journalist Florina Rodov taught for several years in a New York City public schools, but she was turned off by the testing craze and the paperwork. Then she heard about these remarkable new schools called “charter schools.” She heard they were academically superior, safe, free of the bureaucracy of public schools, and she applied to work in a charter school in Los Angeles. The principal told her that the school was like a family. It sounded wonderful.
But then her eyes were opened.
I soon realized there was a gulf between charter school hype and reality. Every day brought shocking and disturbing revelations: high attrition rates of students and teachers, dangerous working conditions, widespread suspensions, harassment of teachers, violations against students with disabilities, nepotism, and fraud. By the end of the school year, I vowed never to step foot in a charter school again, and to fight for the protection of public schools like never before.
On August 15, my first day of work, I dashed into the school’s newest home, a crumbling building on the campus of a public middle school in South Los Angeles. Greeting my colleagues, who were coughing due to the dust in the air, I realized most of us were new. It wasn’t just several people who had quit over the summer, but more than half the faculty — 8 out of 15 teachers. Among the highly qualified new hires were a seasoned calculus teacher; an experienced sixth grade humanities teacher; a physics instructor who’d previously taught college; an actor turned biology teacher; and a young and exuberant special education teacher.
When the old-timers trickled in, they told us there’d been attrition among the students, too: 202 of 270 hadn’t returned, and not all their seats had been filled. Because funding was tied to enrollment, the school was struggling financially.
Her first-person tell-all pulls the curtain away from the charter myth. On Twitter, Rodov describes herself as a “fierce advocate for public schools.” Read this article and you will understand why.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane Here is at least one example of the Orwellian doublespeak: ” . . . free of the bureaucracy of public schools.” In Bush-speak, that’s “government schools.”
Transposed, that means: “free from qualified regulations and transparency”; aka: free from oversight by professionals who have well-wrought protocols and who are ONLY interested in the well-being of students and faculty, not to mention in how the public’s tax money is spent; or in the longer view concerning the wellspring of our young intelligence as developing human beings and as informed by the sciences and fields of study . . . including history . . . rather than by unregulated CEO’s, oligarchs, corporations, and more generally, by a short-sighted view of capitalism. CBK
The pitch is like reading an ad for a weight loss program! They all sound wonderful until you try the actual program. The charter hype really did sound good, but they sure didn’t deliver. It’s disheartening that so many still believe the advertising copy.
It’s the same ominipresent pitch seniors are getting during the Medicare sign up period by companies trying to sell Medicare Advantage policies. They relate all the perks, but they fail to mention if you get seriously ill, you may be on the hook for a lot of money for uncovered services.
Yes!!!! I am sick and tired of those ads. Also the rates on some of these plans are set to change in April, no explanation.
The whole Medicare thingie reminds me of trying to figure out my AT&T bill before the breakup of Bell– & lots of other current things [health ins e.g]– that was just the first time I noticed that all the complications were about hiding the true costs..
It would be helpful for this teacher to be available on zoom to testify at state legislative committees in various state legislatures. Hopefully you could help facilitate that to your state chapters and to teacher and administrator associations nation-wide.
The tragedy of trying to fund school choice in public, charter, and voucher-recipient private schools is that safe and good choices are eliminated by spreading the dollars too thinly. The starkest example is special ed. Charter and voucher schools reject so many special ed. students, but dollars are being drained from the public schools which were already struggling to provide programs and accommodations to these students. So special ed. students won’t get what they need ANYWHERE.
Nancy Papas Yes, . . . this is where those running federal and “state education departments” continue to shoot themselves in the foot . . . they ARE THE GOVERNMENT. . . and as a subset, they are in charge of GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS. aka: Public Education.
By buying the privatizers’ schtick, they are accepting the argument about their own systematic incompetence.
(In the remote case that anyone doesn’t understand the correlation, “accepting the argument about their own incompetence” is what I mean by “shooting themselves in the foot.”) CBK
When Bloomberg and Klein had total control of NYC public schools, they prioritized charter schools. I hides to argue that this was a declaration of their own inability to help schools.
dianeravitch Are they really “unable” or are they just trying to get the “education problem” (as they see it) off their political backs? . . . to shift it to the supposedly all-knowing CEO’s and private “industries”? CBK
You’re both right. Education and all social common goods are “problems” for unregulated capitalists sucking the life out of the public into their offshore assets. Problems they can’t solve from within that paradigm at all , but they’re good at dazzling us with shiny-object distractions & marketing them as solutions.
This article should be sent to all the head of the state education departments across the US. Charter schools are not worth the disruption. They are often operated by amateurs with no background in education and no vision for what is best for young people. The buildings that the schools occupy may be unsafe and violate health and safety standards.
BTW, the author came from the Soviet Union and attended an Ivy League School. she credits the public schools with preparing her for college. I once had a shy Russian student that seemed to be maybe a little slow in my elementary ESL classes. Perhaps slow and steady wins the race. This young man attended Columbia University for engineering and graduated with honors. His mother praised the public schools for the job they had done for her son. Unlike charter schools, public schools do not have press agents or marketing departments to advertise their accomplishments.
retired teacher . . . not to mention the stability of public schools. CBK
Being a journalist, Florina Rodov should have investigated the charter school before working there. Σ(ಠ_ಠ) 🤔
This article is dated March 16, 2018…over 2 years old. And, of course, charter schools continue in this way.
The Biden Dept. of Education had better rid us of charter schools once & for all.
An anti–charter school Sec. of Ed. would be a good start, & I DO mean ANTI.
It’s about time we turned government attention back to government schools…public
schools. You know, the ones (& the only ones that need be) supported by us taxpayers?
Apologizing for double-posting on previous posts. Word Press keeps popping up that it’s “unable to post comments,” but then I re-posted, & 2 came up. Then, w/another comment, that was posted, then disappeared. (Know you didn’t do it, Diane. This kind of thing has happened on other WordPress blogsites.)
Proving that tech isn’t “the last word.”
Although, in this case, maybe it is–?!
It seems we need some creative destruction in this charter “school” industry.
I wonder how much longer this nonsense will go on for. I don’t understand why it’s been able to persist for so long. I suppose there is a lot of money involved and people in high places with connections. There are so many regular people who refuse to think critically about what is going on and just accept the charter industry’s pr spin.
I can’t tell you how many times other parents have told me I don’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to charter schools, even though I cite first- and second-hand stories I’ve heard. I wonder if it’s because I’m a woman, but sexism doesn’t totally explain the amount of pushback I’ve received because of my criticism of charter schools.
Beth “Toxic capitalism” might cover it, or that way too many Americans are “sheep in sheep’s clothing.” But your comment about sexism hit home for me, AT LEAST as a subset to trying to get a message across. You’ve heard of “walking while black,” . . . with sexism it’s like “communicating while female.” CBK
The creative disruption has wracked the charter industry. They open and close like day lilies.
Diane In my more optimistic moments, I find myself hoping that the pandemic will help the rich businesspeople among us to realize how important the first-liners and customers are to the very life of their businesses and where their loss is the death-knell of business . . . and to undergo an insightful transition:
. . . to begin thinking in terms of circular-comprehensive cultural economics instead of groundless vertical economics. What I mean by groundless vertical economics is that, at the beginning of that thinking is a self-abstraction coupled with an operative ignorance of the actual and long-term power source of business (the comprehensive well-being of first-liners, customers and, more generally culture). At the top, or at the end run of that thinking is an apparently nowhere-land of endless accumulation of wealth and power.
You can kick me now. CBK
I am a parent, not an educator. That said, it was obvious to me pretty early on in my children’s education that if teachers were not unionized, they would be exploited. I saw the potential for that in my own children’s school, which is not a charter school. IME I find that people from the Soviet Union who now live in the US are anti-union for reasons having to do with what happened in the Soviet Union, which are not relevant to our situation here.
Hey Diane, alerting you and your readers to Florina Rodov’s more recent and in-depth account of her experience at that charter school where she taught and how that reality clashed with the rhetoric about charters during the Los Angeles school board election that pitted Steve Zimmer vs. Nick Melvoin. The article was published through my Our Schools project:
https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/charter-school-myth/