You may recall that sociologist and author Eve Ewing wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times that said it was time to end the debate about charter schools and celebrate all good schools, whatever they are called. This is one of the talking points of the charter industry, which prefers the public not to notice how many charter schools close every year, how many are low-performing, and how many are run by non-educators who turn a handsome profit.
The New York Times published letters to the editor about the Ewing article. Only one was favorable, written by Jeanne Allen, who runs a charter advocacy organization called the “Center for Education Reform,” funded by rightwing billionaires and Wall Street financiers. CER promotes all kinds of school choice and is hostile to public schools.
The first letter was written by Denis Smith of Ohio, who has appeared on this blog:
To the Editor:
Re “End the Fight Over Charter Schools,” by Eve L. Ewing (Op-Ed, Feb. 23):
Why do we allow two separate but seemingly parallel systems of education, using scarce public funds that are taken from traditional public schools to fund charters, a seeming experiment gone awry? Why do we allow one entity that is accountable and has governance conveyed from the voters in each community and allow the other to avoid the same transparency and accountability?
Here in Ohio, charters are exempt from 150 sections of law that the public schools must be in compliance with to legally operate, yet the public schools are required to support charters with the school district’s transportation system and other services at no cost.
So no, we can’t stop fighting about the subject of charters until we have the same rules for both. If one is exempt from wholesale sections of the law, then by definition it is not a public school but something else, a school that acquires public funds to operate yet has its own rules and is free from much oversight.
Denis D. Smith
Westerville, Ohio
The writer, a charter school critic, is a former consultant in the Ohio Department of Education’s charter school office, responsible for assuring legal compliance in the operations of these schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Excellent response by Denis which highlights the unaccountability of the charters as compared to the REAL public schools. Charter schools are dumped on communities without the consent of the tax payers. They have their own private boards of directors and CEO (superintendent). Charter schools don’t have to answer to the duly elected school board or the district superintendent; thus, charter schools represent a separate school district unto themselves. How is that democratic? Oh wait, right wingers hate democracy and don’t want too many people voting.
Agreed. Brilliant. I might have liked to see a mention of student cherry-picking by charters (along with the ability to remove those who threaten to harm their test/graduation numbers), especially those at the high end. But this is well done.
I agree that talking about cherry picking is so important. In fact, in my view the support of the Democrats is entirely dependent on that cherry picking NOT being acknowledged. (When “she who must not be named” alluded to charters cherry picking during the 2016 campaign, the anti public school folks knew they had to shut it down pronto for fear that education reporters might actually notice. How silly of them because education reporters never notice anything unless their billionaire approved ed reform sources tell them something is important.)
Charters are at best mediocre, and often failures, without the results of charters that cherry pick their students averaged into their results.
That’s why cherry picking is never talked about despite being so obvious that it is almost criminal that education reporters claim that they aren’t really sure that top performing charters do cherry pick students but those education reporters are absolutely certain that if cherry picking does happen, it certainly isn’t worth talking about since their billionaire-approved sources in the ed reform industry told them it wasn’t important, and that’s good enough for them!
Cherry-picking? Are you sure? They seem to be doing so well….
IDEA Public Schools Achieves 100 Percent College Acceptance for 15th Consecutive Year
For the first time in school history, more than 54 percent of seniors have been accepted to a Tier One or Tier Two college.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/idea-public-schools-achieves-100-percent-college-acceptance-for-15th-consecutive-year-301243836.html
Go to their website and see if they provide information on the number of students who began ninth grade at a given school. Compare that with the number of students who made it through four years to the end of their senior year. Then take 54% of that number. But often, this information is withheld from prying eyes.
It’s a numbers game. If you start with 100 kids and four years later, 40 remain, you’ve lost 2/3 of your student body. Why do they leave? Some are pushed out, some are held back, some are suspended until they get the hint and go. Public schools don’t have these high attrition rates.
I don’t believe anything from the IDEA charter chain. It has a long history of doctoring its graduation rates, and never mentioning the very high attrition of its students once they enter college. Furthermore, IDEA has an established record of lavish expenditures on its executives. Remember when it planned to lease a private jet so it’s leaders wouldn’t have to use commercial airlines? Or the season box seats to seethe San Antonio Spurs basketball team? Didn’t the leader collect $1 million as a bonus when he stepped down?
Corporate governance indeed! Betsy DeVos loved IDEA so much that she gave it over $200 million to e pandemic into communities where charters were not wanted.
SpewingTruth,
Do you know I read the entire press release in your link — twice! — and I still have no idea how many seniors at Idea Charter Schools got into college.
But I know that 100% of them did! And I know that there are 19 campuses! And the unknown number of seniors filled out over 12,000 college applications. And an unknown number of seniors got over 5,000 acceptances from those 12,000 applications. And an unknown number of seniors got 5 Ivy League acceptances and over 1,500 acceptances to “selective and highly selective colleges”.
So how many seniors is that in the 19 campuses of this charter? Who cares???!
It might be 100 students, it might be 200 students, it might be 3,000 students. But education reporters surely know that the total number of seniors at 19 Idea Charter schools is not something that anyone should know because the charter didn’t tell them what it was! I expect many articles written about the 100% college acceptance rate without a single mention of how many seniors that is because reporters have been brainwashed to believe that information not offered up by pro-charter folks is therefore not important.
Which explains why education reporters at prominent media like the NYT and Chalkbeat have never been curious about attrition rates — charters told them that attrition wasn’t important, and they accept it without question. And luckily, they aren’t science reporters so they don’t worry that their appalling ignorant reporting will ever be called out. They only worry that a charter CEO with billionaire friends might get mad at them.
In Houston, the Gulen charters opened their own college, and 100% of their students were accepted!
Bear in mind that there are thousands of colleges that have very low or no admission standards.
The laws governing charter schools are very different in different states. The 244 charter schools in Wisconsin are governed very differently than the 373 charter schools in Ohio or the 89 charter schools in New Jersey.
The charter lobby buys political complicity at every level of governance to enable top down imposition of privatization. The issue is rarely put to a public vote. Complicit politicians suppress public participation on the issue. They circumvent democratic process in order to move public funds into private pockets without resistance. This is a corrupt practice which special interests dictate, and local communities are forced to pay the bill without a say.
yes: the charter lobby buys, the matter gets no vote, the politicians circumvent….
I’m sorry but it seems a lot of talk that comes in response to Eve Ewings of the world ignores the rather obvious elephant in the room sporting the neon sign that flashes: “Black folk, charter schools accelerants.”
So where is the demand to have “courageous conversations” about this particular elephant in the room? Why does the elephant exist? What history has gone unlearned? Why such obvious willingness to embrace charter schools’ behavioristic practices? Why such enthusiasm to contribute to destroying democratic principles and practices? What psychology underlies the selfishness involved? Etc.
Of course, Obama was (is?) the chief exemplar charter schools accelerant.
Ohio is utterly dominated by the ed reform lobby. One of the shell games they play is they off-load charter costs to districts and then claim charters cost less than public schools.
“The proposed budget attempts to fix this by mandating the creation of transportation plans. Charters and private schools would be required to establish their school day start and end times by June 1, and then communicate those times to the district. Districts would then use this information to develop transportation plans for students no later than July 1.”
Every single session they pass laws to benefit charters and load additional charter costs onto districts. Then the same ed reform lobbyists can appear in front of the legislature next session and claim charters are a better, more efficient use of public funds.
It’s gotten so bad that entire sessions go by where lawmakers accomplish nothing at all that is even relevant to public school students, because the ed reform lobby insists all focus must be on the schools they prefer- charters and private school vouchers.
90% of Ohio students and families are no longer served by the state legislature or governor’s administration. They’re treated as the disfavored sector- the sector ed reformers hope to “wind down” and replace.
What does this mean for Ohio PUBLIC school students? No one cares. Those students are rarely mentioned, unless it’s to mandate that they sit for standardized tests.
The sum total contribution of ed reformers in this state as it applies to PUBLIC school students is tests and unfunded mandates. There is no upside for students who attend public schools.
Diane, has Eve Ewing responded directly to you?
I have not heard from Eve Ewing.
That’s a disappointment. I had held her in high regard.
“yet the public schools are required to support charters with the school district’s transportation system and other services at no cost.”
This is a huge issue that is completely missed by education reporters who by and large do not understand numbers very well, as they have shown when they dutifully report stories about over the top charter school “success” those reporters are convinced are proven by “studies’ which they believe prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt because someone “smart” (i.e. very rich and/or connected to very rich people) told them so.
(An example is Jersey Jazzman’s study that he now acknowledges doesn’t really prove what Fordham says it proved).
Here is what happens:
Pre-charters there are 1000 public school students in the district who all need transportation, which averages $100 per student. Total cost $100,000.
Then 200 students leave for charters. There are still 1000 students in the district who all need transportation at a total cost of $100,000. But now only 800 students pay for it, so the transportation costs are now $125 per student, paid for out of their per pupil allotment. And the charters now have a savings of $100 per student because they don’t have to pay for transportation costs out of the per pupil allotment.
And that means that the 800 students in public schools are charged $225 more for transportation than 200 charter students. That means their public schools have less funding for other things, and they look over at the charter and another 200 public school students decide to leave for charters.
So now there are 600 students in public schools and 400 in charters. There are still 1000 students in the district who all need transportation at a total cost of $100,000. But now only 600 students pay for it, so transportation costs for those 600 students is $167 per student! Because those 600 students are ALSO paying for the transportation of the 400 charter school students, whose schools now have $267 more to spend on each student than public schools because they don’t pay for transportation.
And this doesn’t just happen with transportation — it happens with many costs where a shrinking number of public school students are still burdened with the same TOTAL cost of services as the number of charter school students whose education is subsidized from their public school budgets keeps growing.
This shouldn’t be very hard to understand and if we had better education reporting in this country, perhaps ed reformers and privatizers would be forced to defend this instead of simply making unsupported charges about how public schools “waste” money that education journalists accept as the gospel truth, because they lack any ability to delve into numbers and just believe whatever someone who is rich and powerful (or a favorite of rich and powerful people) tells them about those numbers.
^^Actually, I’m guilty of poor number sense as well.
Correction to above:
Imagine a scenario where the cost of transporting 1,000 students is $100/student or $100,000.
Public and charter schools get $1,400 per student, but public school students pay the cost of transportation for all students.
If all 1,000 students were public school students, all would pay $100 for transportation and all of their schools would have $1,300 remaining in the budget for other education costs.
If there were 800 public school students and 200 charter school students, public school students would pay $125 for transportation and have $1,275 remaining for other costs, while charter schools would have $1,400 remaining for other costs.
If there were 600 public school students and 400 charter school students, public school students would pay $167 from their budget to cover the $100,000 transportation costs and have $1,233 remaining for other costs, while charter schools would have $1,400 remaining.
The more students there are in charters, the more a shrinking number of public school students must spend some of their scarce resources to subsidize all the services that they get for free.
It isn’t just that there are fixed costs of running classrooms and building maintenance. It is that there are growing costs because the more students in charters, the more that public school students are charged to pay for services that charter school students benefit from but don’t have to pay for.
Yes, and adding that even if a child leaves the real public school for a charter school, it may be one less kid to teach but the fixed costs of the actual public school still remain. There’s no saving from having kids leave for charter schools, it’s a drain, drain, drain. But I repeat myself.
Charter drain is the opposite of “thorough and efficient” education. As you illustrate in your post, public schools lose as charter gain. The process imposes inefficiencies and waste by leaving public schools on the hook for fixed or stranded costs. As Diane has said, we cannot pay for good public schools and parallel schools for the same dollar. Public school building are in a serious state of disrepair.
“Underfunding of public school buildings hits $38 billion annually, as banks salivate. The American Society of Civil Engineers, which handed out a C- grade to the nation’s infrastructure in its latest quadrennial assessment, gave school infrastructure a D grade.”https://www.inthepublicinterest.org/underfunding-of-public-school-buildings-hits-38-billion-annually-as-banks-salivate/
Still waiting for even one scalable (and legal) charter innovation that can be used by public schools to improve teaching and learning.