This post was originally published on January 6. The day turned into a full-scale riot as Trump urged his devoted followers to march on the Capitol. They did, they invaded it, they vandalized it, they went looking for legislators and the Vice-President with murderous intent. We narrowly averted a coup that day, and thank God, none of our legislators were killed, though several of them feared for their lives, and five people (including a Capitol Police officer) died.
Thus, due to the national Insurrection, many people did not get to read this outstanding critique by Heilig.
Julian Vasquez Heilig directly refuted journalist Jonathan Chait on the subject of charters, citing research that is unknown to Chait.
Here is an excerpt from Heilig’s brilliant article:
In this blog I respond to Jonathan Chait’s grossly unfounded opinions in the New York Magazine article entitled Unlearning an Answer with data, peer reviewed research and by highlighting the work of scholars who have conducted extensive research about charter schools. I will also recognize when the predominance of the research supports his opinions.
Political support for Charters is waning among Democrats Chait writes that “political support among Democrats has collapsed.” Chait is right on this point, it’s true political support amongst Democrats has dropped. In a recent meeting I was shown internal polling from the November 2020 election that indicates this fact. I also saw in the same data that Republicans are bigger fans of vouchers than they are of charters. The memory of Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump’s unwavering support for charters will probably have a longstanding and poisonous political legacy for Democratic party support of charter schools. Also, this past year, I met with legislative staffs on the Hill and they relayed that previously increased federal funding for charters was a requirement for Republicans in previous budgets but in recent years they have had other priorities besides charters— such as vouchers.
Charter Schools do not deliver extraordinary results— in fact on average their results are quite limited.Contrary to Chait’s argument, as an academic, I can assuredly tell you that “education researchers” HAVE NOT been shocked by charter schools gains— I think unimpressed is probably a better word. Check out this extensive list of more than 30 National Education Policy Center “top experts” whose peer reviewed research findings are largely contrary to Chait’s grandiose claims about school choice. Also, Chait cited studies produced by The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) located at the conservative Hoover Institution. CREDO studies are not blind peer reviewed. But Chait and charter school supporters point to CREDO’s 2015 urban charter study to say that African American and Latino students have more success in charter schools. Leaving aside the methodological integrity of the study for a moment, what Chait and charter proponents don’t mention is that the performance impact is .008 and .05 for Latinos and African Americans in charter schools, respectively. These impact numbers are larger than zero, but you need a magnifying glass or telescope to see them. Contrast that outcome with policies such as pre-K and class size reduction with far more unequivocal measures of success than charter schools— often more than double and triple the impact of charter schools. Also, CREDO doesn’t usually compare schools in their studies. Instead, researchers use statistics to compare a real charter school student to a virtual (imaginary) student based on many students attending a limited subset sample of neighborhood public schools. Considering the limited impact, criticism of CREDO’s methods, and lack of blind peer review— Chait problematically leans on the CREDO as important evidence demonstrating charter school success.
New Orleans is not a charter success story. Chait mentioned New Orleans as a charter success story. Notably, New Orleans charters and Louisiana have been last and nearly in most educational data (NAEP, ACT scores, and Advanced Placement scores, dropout, and graduation). Further, a near majority of charters schools in New Orleans are rated D or F. Does that sound like a success story to you? Where education reformers actually succeeded in New Orleans was in realizing their goal to close NEARLY ALL the neighborhood public schools and replace them with (primarily poorly performing) charters.
Virtual and for-profit charters are performing poorly. Chait is correct when he says, “One variant of the charter-school model — schools operated by for-profit organizations, which account for about 12 percent of the category — tend to do badly. Another kind, “virtual” charters that conduct classes online, are regarded by experts almost uniformly as a scam.” Research using federal data by the Network for Public Education (NPE) will soon show that the national percentage of for-profit charters is actually underestimated nationally by charter school lobbying groups— it is a larger proportion than reported by Chait (stay tuned). For research on the problematic performance of for-profit schools and virtual schools, I recommend you take a look at research by Kevin Welner (University of Colorado) and Gary Miron (Western Michigan University).
Charter school admissions and student retention is not as simple as “lotteries” and “voting with your feet.” Thus, due to widespread access and inclusion issues. Charters are NOT a perfect laboratory for research or— on average— bastions of student success. While students may enter charters via lottery, student attrition is an extensive problem for charter schools. For example, we conducted an analysis of state data and published the work as a peer reviewed study in the Berkeley Review of Education. We found that approximately 40% of Black students left KIPP before graduation and identified a similar problem in other independent and network charters. This is not an unusual finding in peer reviewed research. I asked several nationally known scholars of school choice research to share articles that the public could consider in the debate surrounding charter access and inclusion. You can read that crowd sourced list of research here. The research they cited indicates that charter schools have extensive issues with access and inclusion.
The Chait talking point that charter schools provide an ideal laboratory for elite studies because of lotteries is not grounded in fact. First, from my experience, charter schools don’t particularly like to be studied by academic researchers. One of my former doctoral students at the University of Texas at Austin sought to study access of special education students to charter schools in Texas. She contacted hundreds of charter schools in Texas and less than ten agreed to participate in her dissertation research. Also, years ago I had agreed to conducted a study to explain extensive African American student attrition at KIPP Austin. KIPP Austin changed their mind once they discovered we planned to publish the study in a peer reviewed journal. Second, Chait points out a policy brief about charters and the achievement gap. It is notable that the review he cited stated at the outset that, “a number of which share a no excuses philosophy, tend to produce the largest gains.” It is well known in the peer reviewed research literature that “no excuses” charters school serially crop and suspend students of color which creates a creamed population of students. Scholars of colors such as Laura Hernández (Learning Policy Institute), Janelle Scott (University of Pennsylvania), Terrenda White (University of Colorado), Kevin Lawrence Henry (University of Wisconsin), Chris Torres (Michigan State University), Joanne Golann (Vanderbilt University), and Chezare Warren (Vanderbilt University) have extensively studied the “carceral” practices, pedagogies & experiences of parents/students of color in no excuses charters (The words of Professor Janelle Scott in this thread on Twitter). A quick Google search of any of these scholars will reveal their important and critical work about charter access and inclusion the incorrect framing of the issue by Chait.
In summary, due to extensive access and inclusion issues, the predominance of the peer reviewed research has demonstrated that charter schools have been problematic for students of color and less importantly are NOT a perfect laboratory for studying student success due to student attrition and exclusion. Furthermore, the proposition that charters can produce dramatic learning gains on average and without expunging students is STILL in serious question in the field of education policy analysis considering the extensively documented access and inclusion issues in the peer reviewed research. Thus, Chait’s arguments on access and equity largely deal in charter school talking points rather than research and data deep dives.
Was school choice created to empower students and families of color or instead derived from other ideological goals? Writing in the 1960s, the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, followed by John Chubb and Terry Moe in the 1990s, argued for a profit-based education system where resources are controlled by private entities rather than by democratically elected governments. They recommended a system of public education built around parent-student choice, school competition, and school autonomy as a solution to what they saw as the problem of direct democratic control of public schools.
According to Chait concern about charter schools is primarily from “white liberals.” Actually, there is a long-term history of opposition from communities of color to private-management of public resources and charters schools. NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois, in his essay Negroes and the Crisis of Capitalism in the U.S., extolled the virtues of collaborative social and government action. He railed against the role of businesses and corporate control that “usurp government” and made the “throttling of democracy and distortion of education and failure of justice widespread.” Martin Luther King Jr. argued that we often have socialism in public policy for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor. Du Bois and King would have recognized the current pattern we see— charters (on average more segregated than nearby neighborhood schools) located primarily in urban and poor areas rather than wealthy suburban enclaves. Conservative think tanks and other neoliberal proponents pressing for market-based school choice in the name of “civil rights” ignore this history of African American civil rights leaders advocating for collaborative, democratic systems of social support and distrusting “free market” policies. Furthermore, the NAACP has for years been consistent in its critique of charters schools. At the 2010 convention, the NAACP national board and members supported a national anti-charter resolution saying that state charter schools create “separate and unequal conditions.” More recently, in 2014, the NAACP connected school choice with the private control of public education in a national resolution. A 2016 national resolution, voted on by more than 2,000 NAACP delegates from across the nation, called for a charter school moratorium based on a variety of civil rights-based critiques such as a lack of accountability, increased segregation, and disparate punitive and exclusionary discipline for African Americans.
Give me a break with this “nonprofit charter school nonsense.
Here at Bob’s Real Good Flor-uh-duh NONPROFIT Charter Skool, we is not for profit because Bob’s pays enuff to hisself fer runnin’ the mangemint orgunuzashun and to his girlfriend Darlene each year fer writing curriculums that they’s nothing left over. After the expenses of the company Bugattis that Bob and Darlene both drive (tell you whut, them’s some fine cars!), they’s not enuff left to buy a jug of shine.
Charters like to call themselves public schools EXCEPT when it comes to a) holding open meetings and b) publicly disclosing their finances, including the salaries and perks of charter management officers, and c) related-party transactions, as when the charter school leases its space from the CEO’s brother or mistress.
Without such transparency, of the kind that every traditional public school has, any talk about “nonprofit charter schools” is just a smokescreen.
cx: and c) DISCLOSURE OF related-party transactions
When the public money gets dumped into private bank accounts, the public ceases to have any measure of accountability or information. This sounds like taxation without representation to me. Public institutions are accountable to the public. Why should the public be compelled to send public money to private companies with little accountability? It is an opaque system that encourages waste, fraud and embezzling.
Democrats need to stop acting like only for-profit charters are the culprits. The distinction between for-profit and non-profit is a distinction in name only. All charter schools are for-profit entities regardless of what they call themselves. Democrats should wake up to the fact that many charter management companies are blatant crooks that hide behind a wall of private enterprise. Unaccountable privatization of education is way to scam tax payers out of their tax dollars while it harms public schools.
key point: calling them non-profit is a distinction in name only. And yet this tiny distinction allows “progressive” legislators to keep them in place.
I just saw in a press conference today that the Biden administration is cutting ties with private prisons. Wouldn’t it also be great if they eliminated the federal slush funds that go toward private charter school expansion!
Yes!!!
A blast from the past:
I am hoping that the Biden administration will cut off the $440 million a year for charter school expansion. Most of that money goes to corporate charter chains.
Yes, it was Betsy’s slush fund.
It should be ended.
If it is not, we will know that the big money has bought key Democrats in Congress.
If ed reformers reach their goal and privatize the whole K-12 education system and it ends up worse and less equal, will they admit they were wrong and re-establish public schools?
You know they won’t. They won’t even admit there are any possible downsides to privatization. They present it as a fantasy. All upside. If we lose public schools, they’re gone forever, and we’re stuck with whatever privatized system this collection of academics and consultants and ideologues come up with.
Choose wisely. Once a sector is privatized it stays privatized, because A LOT of contractors will be lobbying to keep it privatized. None of these people rely on public schools- they don’t even use them. They want to “transform” your kid’s school with all these gimmicks and cheap junk and fads- they’ll continue to use the traditional private schools they attended and send their own children to.
Ask yourself if people who have spent entire careers employed by billionaire foundations have any understanding of the average public school family. Ask yourself why they all sound the same, and why there’s no real debate in the ed reform echo chamber. Ask yourself if your local public school is BETTER or WORSE after 20 years of this dogma being sold and no dissenting voices permitted.
If nothing else attempt to get past the slogans they all recite in lockstep on “the money follows the child” and ask real questions. Ask them how much money. Because the ed reform vouchers are low value- they are a massive cut in public education funding.
There is no discussion of this in ed reform circles- it’s ALL ideological and abstract theory. You won’t find any numbers in it. But ask, because your public school doesn’t “cost” 5000 or 7200 per student. That’s imaginary.
What you’ll get will be a stripped down, cheaper menu of “school services” that functions only because they hire virtually anyone and and pay them low wages. That’s what they want for low and middle income families. Strip away all the touchy feely rhetoric and this is hard Right political dogma. Cheap services, cheap labor, junk contractors.
You’ll get a voucher all right. It’ll be for 7k. It’ll operate as a 50% cut in public education funding.
Current average annual per pupil expenditure for public K-12 education (includes local, state, and federal spending): $14,840
The Michigan ed reform voucher was 5k. They’ve been telegraphing massive cuts in public education funding for years. It’s just that you have to wade thru endless BS about “equity” to find the numbers.
Isn’t it weird? They all recite “the money follows the child” but no one asks “how much money”? Harvard, Stanford, America’s most expensive universities and no one mentions numbers. Odd, right?
Are they innumerate? Is that why they’re telling the public that public schools will remain funded under privatization schemes when that is obviously not true?
Here’s a question you’ll never find in the ed reform echo chamber:
“Is there any possible downside to privatizing K-12 education in the United States?”
These people are supposed to be academics. None of them ask this question? That ALONE tells you it’s an echo chamber. Not asking about downside risk for what is a radical Right wing national privatization plan is unforgivable. It’s unheard of- yet there is ZERO questioning of ANY of it in the echo chamber.
This experiment they’re conducting can’t be reversed. And they’re all so incredibly arrogant they haven’t even asked the first question about what they’re pitching in the trash (public schools) and what they’re replacing it with (contractors). There’s risk in this for the public. The hearts and flowers picture they’re presenting is a fantasy. They won’t suffer if the Grand Plans fail- you will.
What ed reformers tell you is you will be able to “choose” a public school. That simply isn’t true. They have no provisions in these privatization plans to support existing public schools. They have no earthly idea what you will be able to “choose” because they’re creating a completely unregulated market for school services and betting it ends up working.
The number don’t work. If you have a comprehensive public school where you live and this lobby siphons off half the funding you’re not going to have a comprehensive public school when they complete this social engineering project. That’s why they don’t talk about numbers.
When you hired these people did you anticipate that they’d destroy the existing system and replace it with a low value voucher for services? Because that’s what you’re getting.
Maybe it will be “better” maybe it will be worse, they don’t know. They’re just following their ideological beliefs about markets. You’ll be stuck with the “results”.
Thank you, Professor Heilig, for this brilliant piece!
Thank you very much for posting Julian Vasquez Heilig’s very important article again. His fact-based arguments need to be cited again and again, and politicians and their staffs must read this and understand it so they can better stand up to those who – like Chait- are mouthpieces for charter propaganda.
I have noticed that Jonathan Chait entirely embarrasses himself by acting exactly like the Trump-supporting Republicans whenever his rapidly pro-charter views are challenged with facts. Chait cannot refute the arguments that challenge his pro-charter stance, instead he calls names and accuses his critics of being “pro-union”. Whenever Chait is challenged, his responses remind me of the Trump-supporting Republicans who attack those who call out their lies not by refuting them but by calling them “socialists”.
I am sure if Chait found the word “socialist” more acceptable as an attack word to us when he is unable to defend his pro-charter propaganda against critics,
Chait would be calling Heilig a “socialist” to discredit him. Instead, Chait stoops to calling Heilig other names because Chait can’t defend his pro-charter views except to call other people names.
Would Jonathan Chait be praising hydroxychloroquine if his wife worked for the drug company that manufactured it and citing the discredited studies to promote it? I suspect he would if he could get away with it, but he would not be able to get away with it because real reporters have already discredited those studies as unwarranted hype that proves nothing.
It’s a shame that real education reporters lack both the knowledge and any ability to understand what is wrong with the studies they claim prove “success”. Their knowledge of how proper studies are done is similar to Donald Trump’s and whatever someone they like tells them is true, is then held out as absolutely true. And like Donald Trump, when Chait is challenged with facts, he attacks those offering facts with an insults whenever the facts don’t agree with what Chait and Trump just “know” is true.
Here’s the Florida plan:
“Florida Senate Republican leaders are set to push sweeping legislation this year that could bring what many advocates consider to be the holy grail in the school choice movement: education savings accounts for students.
The 158-page proposal would merge the state’s five key school choice programs and make them all state-funded. It would also convert the scholarships into more flexible education savings accounts that families could use to pay for children’s private tutoring, therapy, private schooling or even college savings.”
They’re replacing “public education” with a debit card.
I think ed reformers should have to explain this to the public. Was this the plan all along? Did they misrepresent their agenda to the public for the last 20 years?
When we hired or elected these folks they told us they would “improve public schools”
What they’ve actually done is aggressively move toward abolishing public schools and replacing them with a cheaper debit card.
Why weren’t we told this was the end goal?
Notice the other bait and switch they’ve pulled off here. The public was told “education savings accounts” would be privately funded. Florida will now be pulling that funding out of existing public schools. The entire “education savings account” sales job was misleading at best and deliberately deceptive at worst.
https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2021/01/26/senate-bill-would-expand-florida-school-vouchers/
Notice something else about the Florida ed reform plan: nothing for students in public schools.
State government in Florida, led by the ed reform echo chamber, are pushing an “education plan” that offers NO benefits to students in public schools and a huge downside.
Public school students will pay for this ed reform experiment. They’re taking it right out of your schools, from your students.
The real betrayal of ed reformers isn’t to public school parents- it’s to public school students. Our students are funding their experiments.
Flawless! I particularly appreciated the section about “white liberals” and civil rights organizations. The lies on that topic are widespread. I shared Julian’s optimism about most of what was done on the education policy committee during the campaign. It was moving in the right direction, if incrementally. The question is whether our new president will support public education or pull the rug out from under it and do what neoliberals have done for decades of failure, run from the left and then govern from the right.
Heilig’s important critique of Chait reveals what is an underlying racism to Chait’s praise of charters:
“The Chait talking point that charter schools provide an ideal laboratory for elite studies because of lotteries is not grounded in fact. First, from my experience, charter schools don’t particularly like to be studied by academic researchers. ….. Also, years ago I had agreed to conducted a study to explain extensive African American student attrition at KIPP Austin. KIPP Austin changed their mind once they discovered we planned to publish the study in a peer reviewed journal. Second, Chait points out a policy brief about charters and the achievement gap. It is notable that the review he cited stated at the outset that, “a number of which share a no excuses philosophy, tend to produce the largest gains.”
At least when Robert Pondiscio wrote his book about Success Academy, he carefully documented all the ways in which students are “selected” in high performing charters that are supposedly just as open to all students as BASIS Charters are.
The real problem for charter promoters like Chait is that it is hard for them to deny their racist beliefs when they are confronted with the fact that the top performing charters have higher attrition rates than charters whose performance is lower. Charter promoters refuse to compare apples to applies — charter schools to other charter schools — and instead do the “manufactured” studies like CREDO does in which students in the highest performing charters are only compared to students in some of the worst performing public schools.
Charters are remarkably frightened of anyone knowing their true longitudinal attrition rates, and the rates that they flunk students and force them to repeat years. So Chait and other biased journalists make sure never to ask for them.
If charters were as good as Chait claims, they wouldn’t be so determined to hide this.
If Chait read a study of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment that said 99% of patients who completed a study were cured, would Chait ask “but how many patients STARTED in that study?” Not if his science reporting is as terrible as his education reporting. Chat would likely say “I have proof that hydroxychloroquine works miracles and I don’t care if 100 patients started and 50 disappeared, because if the ones remaining got well, that’s all I need to know to accept that a miracle occurred and asking any inconvenient questions about why so many patients would stop taking a medicine with 100% cure rates is not my job as a reporter.”
If the news media was not complicit, they would assign science reporters to cover charters instead of people like Chait who clearly would not understand a statistic or study without a charter promoting explaining to him what everything means and telling him that attrition rates are absolutely irrelevant and nothing he should bother his little brain to think about as his little brain can’t handle thinking about attrition rates.
I’m sure the makers of hydroxychloroquine just wished that Chait’s wife worked for them instead of charters and he could promote the drug promoter’s studies that “proved” how great that medicine worked, too! After all, if Chait believes attrition doesn’t matter, he must believe that the cure for COVID-19 has already been found.
Charter proponents like to use the excuse that people need to escape from their zip codes. The test scores their side also support are used by real estate companies to depress the values of those zip codes. They are offering a false solution to a problem they are helping to create. That is the direct opposite of conscionable.