Eve Ewing is a writer and scholar whose work I very much admire. When her book Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side was published in 2018, I called it the best book of the year. Today, however, she published an article in the New York Times about charter schools that completely misses the point about the damage that charter schools do to public schools.
Basically, she says we should be happy whenever any school–whether public or charter–provides a good education. That is what I believed when I was an advocate for charter schools from the late 1980s until about 2007. It was then that I realized that charter schools were not producing better outcomes than public schools and were diverting money and the students they wanted from public schools. The more I learned about charter operators, their billionaire benefactors, their drive for money and power, and the corruption associated with their lack of accountability, the more I realized that this nation needs a strongly resourced, equitable, and excellent public school system. After thirty years of directing funding to charter schools, we have seen no systemic change of the kind that both Eve and I want.
The overwhelming majority of children in the United States attend public schools (only 6% attend charter schools). Public schools in many states are underfunded and have been since at least 2008–and some for even longer. When states authorize charter schools, they do not increase education funding. The funding pie does not grow. It is divided.
Some districts are in danger of being obliterated by charter operators: think New Orleans, which no longer has any public schools. New Orleans is supposedly the North Star of the charter lobby, but New Orleans today is as segregated and stratified as it was before Hurricane Katrina, and its academic performance is below the state average in one of the nation’s lowest performing states on NAEP.
Eve’s is the first article I have ever seen that celebrated the CREDO finding that only 19% of charter schools get higher test scores than public schools. She says, “Good for the 19%!” But what about the 81% of charter schools receiving public funds that are worse or no better than public schools? Those children and their parents were lured by false promises.
Her article does not acknowledge that many of the most “successful” charter schools are notorious for their disproportionately low numbers of students who are English language learners or have special needs. Nor does it note the high attrition rates or entry standards that winnow out the hardest-to-educate students, like the BASIS schools in Arizona and Texas, which regularly top lists of “best high schools” in the nation. BASIS requires its students to pass multiple AP exams in order to graduate and has high numbers of white and Asian-American students in a state with large numbers of Hispanic and Native American students. When Carol Burris reviewed the BASIS charters in Arizona in 2017, she found that the students at its 18 schools were 83% white and Asian in a state where those groups were 42% of the students in the state.
Eve completely ignores the recent explosion of voucher legislation in Red states. In the 2020 election, Republicans strengthened their control of state legislatures, which have now prioritized creating or expanding vouchers to pay for private and religious schools, for-profit schools, homeschooling, and whatever else parents want to spend public money on. Charters encourage consumerism, making schools a consumer choice rather than a civic good that we are all responsible to fund equitably. Charters pave the way for school choice, including vouchers.
Vouchers in Florida are subsidizing religious schools to the tune of $1 billion a year; voucher schools are completely unaccountable and they are allowed to discriminate against gay students and families and any other group they don’t like. Their textbooks teach creationism, racism, and religious dogma.
The photograph that accompanies her article–for which she is not responsible–features a KIPP school and says that KIPP runs more than 250 schools. Do we really want our public schools to be run by private corporations? Should parents who are unhappy with their school be satisfied to be told “leave and choose a different school”?
As I said at the outset, Eve today is expressing the same views I held 20-30 years ago, so I understand where she is coming from. She wants every school to be a great school. So do I.
She writes that parents:
want their kid to learn a language, study the arts, have a clean building, and books in the library.
What would it look like if we built an education policy agenda dedicated to ensuring those resources for all students? Not just the students who win a lottery, but the students who lose, or who never get to enter because they’re homeless or their families are dealing with substance abuse, and the adults in their lives don’t have the information or resources to participate in a school choice “market?” What if our system was built not to reward innovation for the few, but rights for the many?
What if we insisted that all our schools, for all our children, should be safe and encouraging places? What if our new secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, focused on a plan as audacious as the New Deal, as well-funded as the war on drugs, dedicated to an all-hands-on-deck effort to guarantee every child an effective learning environment? What if we as a society pursued the dream of great schools not through punishment (as in No Child Left Behind), and not through competition (as with Race to the Top) but through the provision of essential resources?
Are we likely to reach those goals if states are funding charter schools, voucher schools, home schooling, for-profit corporations, virtual charter schools, and education entrepreneurs? That in fact is where the current drive for more choice is heading. Multiple state legislatures are solely focused on school choice, not funding. Red states in particular start with charters, then move on to some form of public subsidy for religious and private schools. The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to approve the public funding of religious schools and to obliterate the “wall of separation between church and state.” Will the states increase their funding to account for the funding of all students now attending non-public schools?
Eve Ewing has a powerful voice. I wish she would rethink her message and acknowledge that the only way to achieve her vision is by funding and improving the only schools that admit all children and that are subject to civil rights laws and public accountability: Our democratically governed public schools.
This was a very disappointing article. Many of the references are so old that they do not adequately reflect the current charter school landscape. What bothers me most of all is the passing reference to hedge fund bankrolling of charters, as if it hardly worthy of consideration. In fact, it is the essence of the problem!
The article appears to be the kind of pap that is pushed out by Teach for America alums in return for their highly compensated placements in policy-making positions. I hope her debt is paid now and this will be the last we hear of it.
Wonderful analysis, Ms. McGowan. Thanks for taking the time to add your good information to the conversation.
It is no accident that “big money” supports charters. Billionaires and Wall St. see an opportunity to deprofessionalize teaching, and they dislike unions. They see privatization as a way to lower their tax burden and provide additional streams of revenue for the already wealthy.
More than 90% of charters are non-union.
Thank you, Dr. Ravitch, for your immediate response to the Ewing article in the NY Times. It was jaw-dropping to read that the discussion regarding charter schools is nothing more than an “ideological debate.” This makes it sound like one side is as good as the other; pick your flavor! And I fell off my chair when she admitted many of the charter schools are “more racially isolated.” Huh? I have read essays from people much smarter and learned on this topic than I am say that American schools today are as segregated as they were at the time of Brown v. BOE in 1954.
She writes that parents: “want their kid to learn a language, study the arts, have a clean building, and books in the library.”
Has that changed in the community public schools since I retired in 2005 after 30 years of teaching?
I taught in a school district with more than 70% of the students living in poverty. The middle and high schools where I taught had less than 10% white students, but all the high schools in that Southern California community-based public school district offered foreign languages, had libraries that added new books on an annual basis, and all the schools k-12 offered art classes in addition to organized sports, drama, band, et al.
If foreign languages and arts no longer exist in many community-based public school districts, it’s because of the money siphoned off to support voucher and charter schools that mostly do not perform better and many are worse.
It’s not easy to accept that Eve Ewing is ignorant of the damage caused by private sector charters and vouchers. To me, that means she has to be a closet racist and the only reason she stands up and supports charter schools.
Eve Ewing is not a racist. I don’t think she has been bought off. I am genuinely puzzled by her commentary as she lives in Chicago and knows that the public schools are underfunded; many do not have the amenities she says are vital. They won’t get them if the powerful people in Chicago (Rahm, Arne, former Governor Rauner) continue to insist that charters are the answer.
One can believe that they are not racist while holding views that demonstrate that they have internalized all the racist tropes about education for children who aren’t white.
Somehow Ewing can cite that 19% of charters get higher test scores than public schools without any curiosity as to why almost every one of those charters are located in urban areas serving a small percentage of the very large number of non-white students in those urban areas.
I don’t understand how it does not even occur to her that charters in mostly white affluent suburbs could ALSO get higher test scores, but if lots of white kids were being mistreated and disappearing from those charters and their parents complained, researchers and scholars like her would actually pay attention.
Does Eva Ewing believe that the white and Asian students at BASIS charter schools would be abject failures if they were in public schools with honors programs? Is she certifying her support to expand BASIS charter schools into every suburb in America because BASIS charter schools provide “a good education” to students?
Every school that can dump students they don’t want to teach and entirely end all of their responsibility to those students will do better when compared to a public school. That’s true in suburban areas also, but the difference is that when the students being mistreated and dumped are white, scholars like Ewing don’t presume that it’s fine that those kids are mistreated because some other students who are more deserving are getting a superior education that their parents like.
But when it comes to poor kids in urban neighborhoods, these same scholars seem to believe that mistreating and getting rid of unwanted students is a very small price to pay to make sure the parents of the wanted students are happy.
People with racist beliefs divide African American and Latino students into deserving and not deserving. Thus they support urban charter schools.
People with racist beliefs would never divide white middle class students into the ones deserving of a properly funded education and the ones who only deserve underfunded public schools.
She’s intimately affiliated with the U of Chicago-one of the bastions of free market ideology. “At the heart of the Chicago school’s approach is the belief in the value of free markets (see also laissez-faire). Simply stated, the Chicago school asserts that markets without government interference will produce the best outcomes for society (i.e., the most-efficient outcomes).” (from wiki)
Her turn to that ideology wouldn’t have anything to do with employment aspirations would it?
That would be my guess. . . write an opinion piece, get published in the NYT? What else is up her mental aspiration sleeve to pad the CV? We’ll probably find out in the next six months or so, if she can get herself into the black book contact lists for the various broadcast networks, especially Murdoch’s supposed news network.
Will the NYT print an opposing op_ed or letter from you?
Diane and Patrice Griffith Good question about an op-ed from D. Ravitch.
To Diane, I wonder if you think the author just doesn’t “get” the political implications of privatization of schools in a democracy, or if she has just been schmoozed or even bought-off by the grifting self-dealers who DO “get it,” and are intent on forwarding those implications by whatever means? CBK
No, the Times would not print a rebuttal. They don’t do it. They would tell me to write a letter to the editor.
Letter to the Editor
My letter to the Times
Is “F”, for “writing crimes”
A letter to address
The editor of press
Well, I disagree. I thought it was even handed and mostly fair.
“Yet from all the attention this debate grabs, you would never know that only about 6 percent of public school students attend charters. More students have parents who are undocumented, and far more are disabled. More children live in states where corporal punishment is still permitted in schools. But these students’ needs generally don’t have the kinds of impressive “change agents” associated with them, the smiling faces who attract big donors and awe-struck media coverage. They lose in the financial economy and the attention economy.”
I knew the Biden Administration wouldn’t denounce charters. I was just hoping public schools wouldn’t be completely neglected and ignored as they were under George W Bush, Obama and Trump.
I have less hope for that now because Biden is hiring so many people who worked in the Obama Administration, and the Obama Administration, IMO, was a real low point for public education in this country. I was hoping Biden would go in a different, more positive direction but we seem to still be stuck with the same members of the ed reform echo chamber for yet another decade.
Six percent of public school students do not attend charters. If a student attends a school that is not run by the public, the student is not a public school student. Privatization does not have an upside.
There cannot be two parallel school systems funded and managed equitably.
The charter lobby is thrilled with this article and sharing it on Twitter. They read it as, “forget about the public v. charter debate. It’s a non-issue. Leave us alone and unregulated to do our thing without accountability.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if some money exchanged hands before this article was written.
Well, if it was just about that “6%,” and leaving ed reformers to play in their own little sand box by themselves…but it’s not. Not when they also want to smother public voice in local school board elections by wealthy influencers, when they want to demonize union participation in schools, eliminate civil service protections in local and state gov’ts, colonize elected and appointed positions on city councils and city agency boards, influence displacing of local residents to the periphery to accommodate gentrification, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc
“awe-struck media coverage”
I smiled at this because it’s so true. We have a local newspaper opinion writer in Ohio who calls charters “the darlings” of media, wealthy people, and politicians and it’s 100% true in this state.
All problems with education are attributable to public schools and all successes are attributable to charters. It’s ridiculous, but it’s been promoted like that for two decades now.
A major problem is charter schools is that they do not belong in a democracy. The charter laws make the needs of many take a back seat to the wants of a few. They rob Peter to pay Paul. This is not a recipe for success. When public funds go behind the opaque wall of privatization, there is little accountability, increased waste, fraud, embezzling and a bloated administration.
The so-called choice of a few leaves public schools with fewer program options for the poorest and neediest students including ELLs and classified students. Public schools are an expression of local democratic governance that offers legal rights and protections to vulnerable students. There are no such rights in charter schools. Teachers in public schools have generally met the minimum standards in order to teach through certification laws. There is no such guarantee in charter schools where some staff members may have a few weeks of training.
Public schools serve the public, but charter school businesses serve the company first and the students second. Public schools are the hub of community life, and they are public assets. Charter schools do not belong to communities. They serve the interests of corporations and exploit local communities by sending tax dollars out of the community. Charters lobby representatives for continuous expansion even when it is not justified or needed. A small number of students may be better off in a charter school, but the vast majority of students see their public schools hobbled by the loss of funds and stranded costs. A far better option is to invest in equitably funded public schools. that are accountable to the tax payers.
I think Biden could do a lot to change the rhetoric around public schools. It’s never been fair or accurate. The whole ed reform narrative that all public schools are “failing” and the dismissive references to “government schools” or “factory model” never should have been part of the US Department of Education, yet it was a constant thru Bush, Obama and Trump.
DeVos went even further. She portrayed all public schools STUDENTS as “failing”, constantly depicting them as low performing and violent. Just appalling and 100% political.
We will have to wait and see. I hope Cardona will stand up to the charter lobby in the DOE. He will be the arbiter of policy. We will have to see if Biden will keep his campaign promise of eliminating the federal charter school expansion slush fund.
It was a nice try by the writer to attempt to get some focus and effort directed at public schools, but it will fail.
We can’t PAY our politicians and policy people to do anything productive for public schools. They much prefer to promote charters and vouchers.
95% of the students in this country have no advocates in government because they attend the unfashionable “public sector schools”. She gave it a good effort but we only talk about vouchers and charters in this country because none of the people we hire as politicians and policy people have any interest at all in existing public schools and they PREFER to talk only about charters and vouchers.
The only thing public schools have gotten out of ed reform in the last decade is the Common Core tests. They “gave” us an expensive new test.
Well, I don’t believe in getting rid of books, but Ghosts in the Schoolyard is no longer a book I want to see when I look at my bookshelf. I am turning the spine to the rear.
How about goats in the schoolyard?
Would you also turn their spine to the rear?
Goats or Ghosts?
Schoolyard goats
Are better than ghosts
Goats are gaunt
But ghosts just haunt
Goats eat stuff
And goats are Gruff
But Ghosts just woooo
And frighten you
One of the most powerful lines in Ghosts in the Schoolyard is her reference to the “picture” being painted. She makes reference to the “indicators for school closings” that the CEO cited and that the schools being closed met the criteria.
She follows noting that one has to look at the whole frame! That can be taken many ways – context, root causes, history.
And THAT’s the problem (and perhaps she needs to reread that conclusion to her book)
I suggested to our state legislator who is in as he describes it – the “super-minority” – ( a dot of blue in a see of red) – that in every discussion of charters or vouchers or tax credits he should ask: “What problem are you trying to solve?”
They can’t answer that! Test scores? Discipline? There are NO compelling data that shows charters are “better” and there is absolutely no evidence that charters address centuries of segregation, redlining, housing insurance schemes, neighborhoods decimated by corporate defections and more. Where’s their legislation to fix that?
I suspect one has to follow the money here. I’m curious to know if Ewing is getting funding from a dubious think tank or other big money source. I’ve seen the same thing with John Arnold buying a doctor who is active on social media and the NYT opinion page.
Although I have not read Ewing’s book, I did read Naomi Rooks’s Cutting School and after effectively arguing about the evils of segrenomics, she undermined her arguments with her concluding examples. As I near the end of Derek Brooks’s masterpiece, Schoolhouse Burning, I’m confident I won’t be let down this time.
And this post is a great example of why so many of us are devoted to Diane and her ideas. She’s never been afraid to tell it like it is. That’s something I respect especially in the few times I disagree with her. She hasn’t steered us wrong yet.
For what it’s worth, Ewing isn’t an educator, though she once was; she’s a sociologist. Not that that is an excuse for buying the dreck about charters; but her degree from the privatization folks at Harvard Graduate School of Education might be dispositive.
Any chance Eve would join you for a chat, Diane?
Eve was a teacher in one of the schools in Chicago that Rahm Emanuel closed. You were there, Christine, when she lectured at my alma mater. I thought she was sensitive to school closings and charter openings, and their connection to gentrification. I wrote her this morning but received an automated message that she is on sabbatical and not responding to emails or social media.
Yes, I certainly was there. It is head scratching at the least.
Have you seen the awful news on testing? Announced by Ian Rosenblum, late of Education Trust.
The Biden administration said Monday that states must administer federally required standardized tests this year, but schools won’t be held accountable for the results — and states could give shorter, remote, or delayed versions of the exams.
The decision means that schools will have to find ways to safely administer tests to tens of millions of students, many of whom are still learning remotely. It’s the first high-stakes decision for the Biden education department, coming even before its secretary of education nominee has been confirmed, and a signal that the new administration sees test score data as part of its strategy for helping students recover from the pandemic.
“To be successful once schools have re-opened, we need to understand the impact COVID-19 has had on learning and identify what resources and supports students need,” Ian Rosenblum, acting assistant education secretary, wrote in a letter to state education leaders.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2021/2/22/22296173/biden-administration-state-tests
There seems to be an undertow back to the neolibs of Obama’s tenure.
Dr. Ewing is currently on the faculty at the University of Chicago. Do those of us who teach at post secondary not count as educators?
If Diane ever gets a chance to chat with Eve Ewing, I hope she will ask her one question:
Should urban school districts start offering lottery based magnet schools that drum out students with learning issues and any other issues because the parents whose kids are in those schools like them? Why not make 1/3 or 1/2 of all urban public schools “choice” lottery based schools that simply drum out students who they find too hard to teach?
Eve Ewing’s entire article elevates “choice” without her even mentioning that a parent does not have a “choice” if the charter school doesn’t want to teach their kid!!
So many white scholars divide African American and Latinx students into worthy and not worthy and they pride themselves on supporting charter schools that offer “worthy” students a choice because they have internalized the racist idea that while all white students are deserving of a good education, only the worthy African American and Latinx students are.
What Eve Ewing is advocating is no different than vouchers. The ultimate “choice” with private schools and charters is always whether that school “chooses” to let a student enroll or remain in their school.
But since parents like it, I guess Eve Ewing thinks it is okay to privatize that part of public education?
If that is what she is advocating, she could have been advocating those kinds of public schools.
Great.
Interestingly, Derek Black offers a pre-rebuttal of Ewing’s piece that encapsulates Diane’s comments above (p. 233):
“…Increasingly missing, if not entirely absent, is any discussion of education’s purpose and values–reinforcing democracy and preparing citizens to participate in it. What they miss is that charters and vouchers, for instance, involve an entirely different set of premises about education–and for that matter an entirely different set of premises about government.
“Charter and voucher advocates downplay this value divide and scoff at the idea that their policies threaten public education or democracy. We are all on the same side, they would say. They just want better educational opportunities, with is the pivot to their policy claim that charters and vouchers outperform traditional public schools (emphasis added). A full response to that claim here would just fall into the trap of distracting you yet once again…”
The author lives in Chicago, a city with a free press that actually covers charter school corruption. The Chicago Sun Times and Chicago public radio have covered the $4.5 million dollar fine from the U.S. Dept of Justice on the Gulen Concept charter school chain. She has to be aware of those problems. Gulen schools in the U.S. are as numerous as KIPP schools. For that piece to make no mention of Gulen schools and their problems seems like journalistic malpractice.
Yes, this is a fair-minded rebuttal to a well-intentioned article. Perhaps the chief weakness in Ewing’s piece is her ignoring (as too many people have ignored in this pandemic) the huge necessity of putting such necessities as education, health, and equitable sharing of wealth on a unified, almost “war” footing. How did we lose the sense of America as one nation that helped us survive World War Two (the racism problem very much excepted)?
The author of a New York Times OpEd entitled “Can We Stop Fighting About Charter Schools?” – one Eve L. Ewing – identifies herself as a “sociologist of education.” My admittedly prejudicial assessment is that those words make me expect a foolish essay. She does not disappoint. She seems to claim that schools do a lousy job of educating students who fail in school because of the fight for tax dollars between public schools and charter schools. Among other things she seems to forget that the failure to educate all students as well as we educate our ablest students predates the charter school fad by centuries and that nothing we have tried since – especially charter schools – has made any positive difference. It is unfortunate that K-12 educators tend strongly to ignore scientific cause-and-effect in the practice of their discipline. It appears that the same can be said of at least one sociologist of education.