Valerie Strauss posted an important essay on her blog “The Answer Sheet” by Steve Bumbaugh, a former member of the D.C. Public Charter School Board from 2015 until early this year. Bumbaugh graduated from Yale University and Stanford School of Business. His parents were ministers.
He writes:
Let’s travel back to September 2017. I was in Southeast Washington, D.C., scheduled to tour a school in an hour. I remember visiting 25 years ago when it was part of the D.C. public school system. That school was closed in 2009 — one of dozens closed in the last 15 years — and now several charter schools occupy the campus.
At the time of this visit, I was a member of board of the D.C. Public Charter School Board (PCSB), having started my tenure in 2015 and serving until early this year. In that capacity, I visited dozens of D.C.-based charter schools. Sometimes, I left those visits saddened, even defeated.
This was one of those times.
Over several decades of work at the intersection of education and poverty, I have learned that much of a school’s character can be divined through its start-of-the-day ritual. So on that day in 2017, I arrived early and sat in my car, far enough away that no one seemed to notice me, but near enough so that I could observe the comings and goings. Several young Black women arrived at school with their children who look to be 5 or 6 years old. They were greeted by staff members, and I observed them having what appeared to be tense conversations with the women. Some of these women left with their children in tow. Others handed their children over to staff members and departed.
When I entered the school for my scheduled visit, I was greeted by one of the founders, a 30-something man with energy and charm. He was joined by the school’s board chair, a distinguished senior partner from one of D.C.’s blue-chip law firms. They took me on a tour of several classrooms. I noticed that the leadership of the school was entirely White as were many of the teachers. All of the students were African American, most from families that struggle financially.
For the most part, the school looked like most other “no excuses” charter schools in the nation’s capital, dotting low-income African American neighborhoods, and in other places across the country.
These schools start with the belief that there is no good reason for the huge academic gaps between privileged and poor minority students — and that strict discipline, obedience, uniform teaching methods and other policies could erase the gaps. A feature of many of these schools, and one evident on this site visit, are lines painted on the hallway floors. Students are expected to walk on these lines as they move from classroom to classroom. Any deviation is likely to result in punishment. The only other places I had seen this before was at correctional facilities.
I entered a preschool classroom where students were gathered in a semi-circle on a rug. Like curious 4-year-olds everywhere, the students turned their heads to scrutinize us. Many smiled widely and some even waved. The teacher snapped at the children, demanding their attention. I was startled by her aggression. They were, after all, 4-year old children engaging in age-appropriate behavior.
That evening I called a staff person from this school who I’ve known for several years. I asked her to translate the scenes I witnessed outside the school. The conversation went something like this:
–“Those scholars probably had uniform violations. The staff persons were probably telling the moms to go home to have the kids change.”
–“I didn’t notice that they were wearing anything different from the other children.”
–“Well, they may have had the wrong color shoes. Or maybe they had the correct color shirt, but it didn’t have the school’s insignia on it.”
–“They have to go back home for that?”
–“Unless they want to spend the day in a behavior support room.”
Incredulous, I pressed my friend for details. I discovered that children as young as 3 years old could spend an entire day in seclusion, away from their classmates, if they were wearing the wrong color shoes. I am dumbstruck. Is this even legal?
This sort of interaction between students and staff was not uncommon in no-excuses charter schools I visited over the years.
Occasionally I did visit schools that combine academic rigor and kindness with student bodies that are mostly Black and low-income. But those schools were the exception. I’ve seen schools where children are taught to track the teachers with their eyes, move their mouths in a specific way, and engage in other humiliating rituals that have little educational value.
I visited a school that suspended 40 percent of its 5-year-old children who had been diagnosed with disabilities. At some schools, when children are sick, their parents were forced to produce a doctor’s note because school leaders believed the parents were lying. But some of these parents were uninsured and there weren’t — and still aren’t — many doctors in their neighborhoods. Obtaining a doctor’s note required them to take their children onto packed public buses so they could go to public health clinics or emergency rooms.
Schools that still do this are telling these parents that they are not trusted. And while children in these schools are taught computational math and textual analysis, they also learn that they are congenitally profane.
Charter schools arose a generation ago in Washington, D.C. when the city was poor and in the grips of a decade-long homicide epidemic. I was part of a group of 20-somethings frustrated with the lack of progress in the city’s long-troubled public school system. We had been creating programs for the D.C. Public Schools system that dramatically outpaced the district’s regular academic outcomes, and we wanted to turn these programs into actual schools.
We talked about forging solutions with parents and students, working to retain every single student, exhorting patience about building the infrastructure from which improved academic outcomes would spring.
But little of this vision was attractive to an emerging cadre of funders and policymakers who placed huge bets on charter schools. They submitted to a vision, not based on a shred of evidence, that Black and Brown children would thrive if they were taught “character” and “grit.” The way to do this, apparently, was to create an assembly-line model of instruction with rigid rules. Children who could not abide by these rules were “counseled out” to return to traditional public schools. Now about one-third of D.C. charter schools are in the no-excuses category, enrolling at least half of the charter student population. (Some of these schools say they are changing, but I haven’t seen real evidence of that.)…
The D.C. Public Charter School Board was created in 1996, at a time when homicide rates in the District were so high the city was dubbed the “murder capital.” It is no wonder the D.C. Public Charter School Board jumped on the “no-excuses” bandwagon.
What have we gained from this system? As of 2018-19 — the latest data available on the website of the charter school board website — only 8.5 percent of Black high school students (about 80 percent of the student population) in charter schools were deemed proficient in math and 21 percent in English Language Arts, according to scores on the standardized PARCC exam.
There are some charter schools that are doing amazing work, but the system itself is ineffective. The vast majority of our students are not remotely ready for the rigors of college coursework.
After untold millions of dollars of investment and the creation of scores of schools — there were 128 operating this year — it is time for us to admit that this experiment is not working as it should.
So what must be done?
The District must rethink its charter schools, and more specifically, charter schools must be integrated. “Chocolate City” has been replaced by a city where upper-income White residents and a more diverse spectrum of Black residents exist in equal numbers.
One of the few scalable policies that dramatically improved academic outcomes for Black students was the integration of American public schools in the 1970s and ’80s. The Performance Management Framework that ranks the quality of each charter school should ensure that schools reflect the demographics of the city as it is today, particularly given that charter schools are not constrained by neighborhood boundaries that enforce segregation in traditional public schools…
“Separate and equal” should not stand in one of the most liberal cities in the United States.
In addition to recommending the racial integration of charter schools, Bumbaugh proposes that low-income parents of charter schools students be added to the D.C. Public Charter School Board.
Moreover power needs to be distributed more evenly. At first glance, the concentration of institutional power is not evident at the Public Charter School Board.
Most of the board members, including the current executive director, are Black or Latino. A closer look — and I am including myself in this observation — reveals that we are not remotely similar to most of the families with children attending D.C. public charter schools. Fully 80 percent of these families are African Americans who qualify for free and reduced lunch, which is not the same as at risk, but which is generally seen as a proxy for school poverty.
The people who are on the charter school board are highly educated professionals. Since I began serving on the panel — which has seven rotating volunteers, all appointed by the D.C. mayor — there have been 10 sitting members, half of whom attended Yale, Stanford or Harvard universities, or some combination of the three. We are well-versed in the contours of institutional power and know how to operate inside of its rarely articulated but clearly delineated boundaries. We’ve been rewarded for decoding these rules and abiding by them, which is precisely why we are selected for these coveted roles. We provide cover through optical diversity.
But if we really want to embrace equity, it’s time to rethink the make-up of the Public Charter School Board. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser will have a unique opportunity to reshape this board over the coming year as five of its seven members will be termed out.
We need a board with members who reflect the communities served by D.C. charter sector. As cities move away from elected school boards to mayoral appointments, it’s critical that the voices that used to represent low-income communities continue to be present.
In the District, 80 percent of families attending charters are eligible for free and reduced lunch, but the charter school board has not in its 25-year history appointed a single board member who lives in poverty. Why not adjust the PCSB’s contours to reflect the communities in which these schools are located instead of incessantly asking poor Black people to acclimate?
Imagine that: Charter schools authorized by those most affected by them.
It’s time to dump the charter sector and invest in the real public schools where most of the kids are being educated.
Hear, hear.
A lack of charters would primarily be felt only by those making money from them. Public education could then have all their money to spend on public education, as it should be.
yes, what we have seen for years is that it is because the US gov’t pushes charter schools and offers up money that scam artists and opportunists set up more and more charter options: loyalty to the money is there, but kids are a much less important secondary issue
“But little of this vision was attractive to an emerging cadre of funders and policymakers who placed huge bets on charter schools.”
Does the writer think it was naive to expect the schools NOT to reflect the funders and policymakers? He thought the funders and policymakers would fund and promote schools that operate in ways the funders and policymakers don’t support? Why would he believe this? It’s ridiculous.
Of course charter schools reflect the “market based” views and ideology of ed reform funders and policymakers. It was inevitable.
All of the Walton ed reformers sound the same and promote the same things because the Walton family hires people who share their views on the superiority of privatized school systems and don’t hire people who don’t.
That this is surprising or dismaying to certain ed reformers is remarkable. There seems to be some basic, profound misunderstanding of the difference between “private” and “public”.
“I went to work for a group of wealthy private funders and market true believers and then was dismayed to discover they operate as wealthy private funders and market true believers”
I think he’s going to have to do more than adding a few board members who attended public universities to change this dynamic.
Under the guise of opportunity, charters were established to send public money to private groups. In urban areas with high priced real estate, charters were designed to socially engineer the student population and promote segregation. By separating students, developers make a fortune by including a mostly white students to attend the selective charter school near their upscale homes. While Black and brown students get the ‘no excuses’ cheap charters in a prison like environment. When cheap charters get poor results, there is no media blitz about failing schools, Public schools in poor neighborhoods get closed, but the “failing” charters stumble on to make money for connected people. Privatization is a scam!
In a district with a large poor population, community schools are a far more effective way to work with families and students. Successful integrated public schools know how to do this through outreach and by offering needed services in the school. Privatization robs the public schools that serve the neediest students in order to pay for charter schools while charter schools provide very little benefit. Charter schools are more of a financial product than public schools that are guided by the communities they serve. Privatization serves to separate students while professionally operated public schools bring diverse students together.
Washington, DC, and other big cities should be able to have a community school board that has a voice in how schools operate. White communities generally have elected, not appointed boards. Mayors tend to make well connected political appointments, not community members. Black and brown majority schools deserve equivalent representation.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. I thought charters were a great idea, until I realized that this was exactly the way that the charters getting supposedly extraordinarily results were acting, and what was most reprehensible is that they were doing exactly what the “friend” of this writer was doing and completely blaming the children and their parents and exonerating those who treated the children that way.
The problem is that demonizing the children and their parents is only necessary when the charter’s ultimate goal is promoting their own success. Charters that care about the students more than they care about the financial compensation of their CEOs and high ranking staff don’t do this, but they also don’t get the rewards that come with promoting themselves as saviors with 99% success rates.
The worst thing is that the press — especially the NYT — has been completely on board in promoting these charters as miracle workers. If the NYT had education reporters with the integrity and insight of their science reporters, the ridiculous hyping of billionaires’ favorite no-excuses charters would not have happened. And if the NYT had science reporters with the lack of basic statistical knowledge that their education reporters seem to have, then the NYT science reporters would still be writing endless stories hyping the miracle COVID cure of hydroxychloroquine — NYT science reporters would have been like their education reporters and would have been overly impressed that hydroxychloroquine was a miracle cure for COVID because all the people who took hydroxychloroquine and were allowed to remain in the study got better, and they know that the ones who didn’t get better and disappeared from the study or stopped taking hydroxychloroquine did so because they just didn’t want to get better, and it was all their own fault.
If science reporters were like education reporters, the NYT science reporters would believe that it was none of their business at all how many patients with COVID were originally given hydroxychloroquine and mysteriously disappeared from the study that showed that hydroxychloroquine cured 99% of the COVID patients because the NYT science reporters would believe what the promoters of hydroxychloroquine told them in which the patients who left the study were at fault!
To science reporters acting like education reporters, it would not matter how many patients started in the study or how many were actively discouraged from even participating in the study despite having COVID and being desperate to be one of the patients taking hydroxychloroquine, but mysteriously “changing their mind” after meeting the people running the study. The only thing that matters is the patients who were allowed to stay in the study and whether they got cured.
If NYT science reporters were like their education reporters, it would never occur to those science reporters that the COVID patients who drop out of a study of whether hydroxychloroquine cures COVID, or the COVID patients who thought they were going to be in the study, only to find themselves actively discouraged from participating in the study, are just as important as the ones who are allowed to remain because they are getting better!
(Thankfully, the NYT science reporters actually understand how proper studies are done, and are not stenographers like the education reporters who cover no-excuses charters by legitimizing studies that hide attrition rates as if they were top secret and not basic information that is necessary in evaluating any study’s legitimacy.)
About the NYT science reporting editors – would we see something different if Covid money wasn’t enriching big corps like Pfizer, Astra Seneca, J &J, Merck and Moderna?
“But if we really want to embrace equity…”
Would we imprint ideas or opinions, in the strict
sense of the word, PREJUDICES, on the minds
of children?
Would we cultivate them to capitulate to badges
and names, titles or credentials?
Would we expect an ordained demeanor of prostrate
obedience to our “superiorty”, since WE have been
conditioned to believe our degrees cast a glow
of superiority over less titled mortals.
Would we make assertions such as “I’m the expert”
my decisions, are somehow sacrosanct and necessarily
beyond reproach.
If the ultimate fealty WAS equity
(freedom from bias or favoritism)
power, imagined or otherwise, would go POOF as
power demands inequality to exist.
Fortunately for himself, like all good sons of ministers, Bumbaugh has finally seen the light (hallelujah, praise the Lord and pass the collection plate!) and moved on to a more lucrative position at College Board (SVP, College and Career Access, $465,473 total salary)
I’m sure he will feel right at home there (even though, as College Board President David Coleman famously noted, “No one gives a &#!t how you feel”)
Hallelujah, Prai$e the Lord
It took a while
But I $ee the light!
And now I $mile
Cuz future’$ bright
The College Board
Is where it’$ at
Can ill afford
To turn down that!
You saved me time by reporting his salary, SDP. That is the common thread w/ this V-8-moment hucksters. They’re here for the children—as long as they make $300k+ per year. Show me ONE who’s willing to take an 80% cut in pay to be more in line w/ today’s teachers.
Noteworthy as well: his fellow fellows at the 2016 Aspen Institute. THESE are reformers?! Save your but-I’m-not-like-them insights, dude.
https://www.crpe.org/news/pahara-and-aspen-institutes-announce-new-class-leaders-pahara-aspen-education-fellowship
Success!
Once you have made it
You rarely look back
Your outlook is jaded
For those in the pack
You only look forward
To left and to right
To leeward and starboard
A self-serving sight
To port and to starboard
I eagerly await Bumbaugh’s criticism of the College Board.
Ha ha ha.
Dogs know not to bite the hand that feeds them. Cats. . . that’s a different story.
No atonement by Bumbaugh?
Is the essay, his performance interpretation of being woke?
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
what makes publicly funded, private sector charter schools different than traditional public schools? Read this Reblogged post to discover an answer that should shock everyone but malignant narcissists, psychopaths, and sociopaths.
The compliance culture of charter schools does the opposite of preparing students for “college and career readiness in the 21st century economy blah blah blah.” It takes away their agency. It silences their voices and numbs their critical thinking abilities. Docile, complacent servants and painted line walking prisoners do not strong countries make.
A charter school’s written policy states “Students will not be allowed to enter the school if they are not wearing the proper uniform.”
Unlike the observed Washington D.C. charter school turning parents from school for their children being being out of uniform, California public school parents can not be required to comply with a school uniform policy unless the school district policy informs the public school parent they have a right to opt out of a school’s school uniform policy.
A charter School in Oakland California, Bay Technology charter school is one of many California charter schools that enforce a school uniform policy without an opt out school uniform policy.
To not to provide such an opt out clause in the many charter schools in California appears to this non-lawyer a violation of “free education” entitlement of students under Article XI, Section 5, California Constitution.
That only public schools have under the education code a requirement to provide within a school’s school uniform policy a parent opt out clause is in my view in violation of the charter school parent’s 14th amendment right to the same opt out right under law as public school parent.
Stanford and Yale graduate, parents steeped in religious careers- I, for one (probably Poet too), could anticipate Bumbaugh’s verbiage- the children “learn they are congenitally profane”. It echoes the religious school message, “We’re all sinners.” FYI, only the vulnerable are made to pay an earthly price i.e. women, POC and the LGBTQ community.
Yale, harvard and Stanford teach colonialism – atonement never required.
How many Black people are in the website photo array of the management team at College Board?
Bad news for Laurene Powell Jobs. Carlos Watson’s Ozy media shut down. The widow Jobs is described by media as a hefty investor in the business.
Media’s reporting suggests the Ozy company or, some of the firm’s principals may face legal issues.
Watson, a graduate of harvard and Stanford, resigned Oct. 1 from NPR’s board.
Jeanne Allen and Michael Moe interviewed Watson this year on their In Piazza podcast.
In providing background info. about himself, Watson described selling his Achieva business to WaPo/Kaplan.
Other Allen-Moe podcasts this year included interviews with Reed Hastings, Jeb Bush and Steve Perry. Also interviewed were a Senior Fellow at National Review who is the Director of the NR’s Center for Religion, Culture,….. Other interviews were with a co-founder of Palantir Tech (a company associated with Peter Thiel) and managing directors of Achieve Partners and University Ventures.
Michael Moe is founder of GSV, an “investment platform in Silicon Valley”. In the Watson podcast, Moe may have implied he was an investor in Watson’s business. (Moe said they had been friends for 20 years.) Moe is co-founder of the ASU GSV summit which a business magazine boasted was the “Davos of Education”. Moe is founder of GVS University and GSV MBA.
In the Spring of 1978 I successfully co-lead an initiative in Chattanooga, TN to end our City Council appointed school board for an elected one. The democratic board demonstrated no real improvement over the previous board. Not long into its tenure, some of the elected members were caught up in a corruption scandal when they and district administrators took millions from the district coffers. In fact when I went back to visit my brother-in law would joke, “So you’re to blame.” As an educator of 38 years it has a been my experience that board policy typically follows the recommendations of the appointed administration until public outrage eventually brings about knee jerk personnel changes or the superintendent burns out. The challenges mentioned by Valerie Strauss, both evident in 1990s urban violence and contemporary no-excuse policies in charters or non-charters, are typically the result of a leadership culture that is all about compliance. This, revealed in numerous teacher surveys, is evident from the principal through state board. The over-bearings existence of no-excuse charters shows that this management culture continues in for profit and non-profit charters. We will not improve the public schools if we continue to simply move the deck chairs above the classroom. Management systems have been a profound part of the problem in public schools, and now charters, because we do nothing to improve the plight of teacher preparation and long term support. When I entered the classroom in 1982, there was already significant literature about teacher attrition and, as with today, there was significant evidence that we were losing the best and the brightest within the first five years. Enrollment in colleges of education is now down 37%. At the risk of being redundant, most exit surveys for teachers show that the predominant reason for leaving is the behavior of leadership. It goes to reason that part of the leadership conundrum is that we run many of the best future candidates off before they try to lead. It’s a vicious cycle. We have to begin putting far more resources into teaching preparation and then pay them professional wages. We have to promote healthy work environments and do all that we can to provide teachers autonomy in their classroom. If we don’t work to improve the teacher pipeline, the leadership failures will continue. No boards, no matter the diverse representation, can solve the leadership vacuum that has persistently hindered progress. As with Finland, we have to invest in the foundation if we have any hope for any schools going forward.