The following article by Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris of the Netwotk for Public Education appeared this morning at Valerie Strauss’s “The Answer Sheet” blog at the Washington Post:
Mike Bloomberg recently announced his plan to revive American public education, which he says is “broken.” His fix for a system that enrolls more than 50 million students? He will spend $750 million to expand charter schools to 150,000 students in 20 cities over the next five years.
The former New York mayor is a smart businessman. He must know that moving 150,000 students into charter schools won’t transform the public schools that enroll the overwhelming majority of students. The likeliest effect of his gift will be to drain resources and students from the public schools still struggling to recover from covid-19. This would make matters worse for the 50 million students who don’t receive his beneficence, and it’s unlikely to help most of the 150,000 who do.
Bloomberg tells us that he will not fund just any charter school. He announced that his donation would fund only high-quality charters — the same promise made by the federal Charter Schools Program that has wasted about $1 billion on charters that never opened or failed.
New York’s Success Academy is his example of a charter chain that “works.” Citing the chain’s high test scores, he ignores the dozens of news reports that have exposed Success Academy’s practices that include violations of students’ civil rights and privacy; complaints of racist and abusive practices by present and former staff; push-out practices that include dropping misbehaving students off at police stations; “got to go” lists that discriminate against students with disabilities; and repeated suspensions of students for minor infractions.
Success’s “success” rests on harsh discipline codes that push noncompliant children out the door. But remember that Bloomberg once bragged about his police policy of throwing minority youth against the wall and frisking them.
Bloomberg’s own school reforms included sort-and-select policies, such as screened middle schools and test-in gifted programs that dramatically reduced access for students of color. When the NAACP — the oldest civil rights group in the country — filed a discrimination complaint against the city and its eight specialized high schools, Bloomberg’s response was “life isn’t always fair.”
Bloomberg has claimed that students of color made great equity gains under his mayoral leadership. He boasted to Congress that the achievement gaps between White and Asian students on one hand, and Black and Hispanic students on the other had been cut in half.Story continues below advertisementnull
But data from the respected National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) disproved those claims. And what about state test scores? According to the New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO), the gaps widened.
Bloomberg’s legacy was one of chaos by design, as he imposed one reform after another in an attempt to disrupt his way to success. The New York City school system was reorganized four times during the mayor’s 12 years in office, depending on which adviser from the corporate world had the ear of the mayor or the chancellor.
Bloomberg applied the same philosophy of “weed them out” (championed by GE CEO Jack Welch, who was a frequent adviser to the city’s Department of Education) to the system as a whole. He shut down scores of struggling schools and large high schools that enrolled the students with the greatest needs. He replaced the closed schools with hundreds of new small schools and charter schools. As large high schools were shuttered, programs for advanced students, bilingual students, and students in need of special education were often cast aside.
The mayor and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, applied corporate thinking, surrounding themselves with management consultants and business school graduates who knew as little about education as they did. Their efforts demoralized educators in the system, who felt disrespected by Klein and Bloomberg.
Now, eight years after his last term as mayor ended, Bloomberg again has inserted himself into the education reform debate to fund one of his favorite ideas — charter schools.
The unaudited “wait lists” he uses as justification for his charter ardor have been debunked repeatedly. Some of those lists have duplicate or triplicate names; others have students who have moved away or enrolled already in another school. In 2020-21, Texas charter schools had over 100,000 more empty charter seats than filled seats. Eighty-five percent of the charter schools in Los Angeles have open spots. According to charter advocate Robert Pondiscio, only about half of the families accepted by Success Academy enroll their child.
And the recent uptick in enrollment Bloomberg cites? Much of the pandemic increases were in the for-profit online sector he says he will not support — increases that are already disappearing.
Nor has Bloomberg been swayed by the preponderance of research studies (not a few cherry-picked) that shows charter schools do no better than public schools, Even though, as scholarly studies demonstrate, charter policies attract and retain more motivated and better-supported students. NAEP tests show there is no difference in the academic performance of students in public schools and charter schools. In fact, as NAEP shows, when students reach grade 12, public schools significantly outperform charter schools.Story continues below advertisementnull
Even as Bloomberg promises to pour money in charters, the federal government continues to spend nearly a half-billion dollars a year to start and expand charters. More than one in four charter schools fails by year five, and halfare gone by year 15, according to research by our Network for Public Education. The hundreds of charter scandals that occur each year have not modified his rhetoric of school accountability.
If charter schools do no better on the whole than public schools; if many of them fail for financial or academic reasons only a few years after opening; if their lack of oversight and accountability makes them targets for grifters; perhaps it is the charter idea that is “broken,” not America’s public schools, which have been central instruments in advancing our nation’s unfulfilled dreams of equal opportunity and a well-informed citizenry.
By Valerie StraussValerie Strauss is an education writer who authors The Answer Sheet blog. She came to The Washington Post as an assistant foreign editor for Asia in 1987 and weekend foreign desk editor after working for Reuters as national security editor and a military/foreign affairs reporter on Capitol Hill. She also previously worked at UPI and the LA Times. Twitter
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Mike Bloomberg’s education policies are broken, flawed and corrosive. He, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Bill Bennett, etc., ad nauseam, should retire to a deserted island in the Pacific and pontificate all they want about coconuts and sea gull guano.
Even “deserted” Islands aren’t really deserted, being inhabited by turtles, seagulls and other wildlife who undoubtedly enjoy their peaceful island paradises.
I would not wish those “fellows” (and Betsy is clearly a fellow, although she is in denial) on even the lowly seagull.
What did the seagull ever do to deserve the Fellowship of the Bling?
Much better that they “retire” to outer space (where they are all dying to go, at any rate) where they can drift endlessly through interstellar space and not disturb a single living creature — or even a robot (robots have feelings too, you know)
Thank you, Diane. Bloomberg has his butt where his head should be.
Or maybe he two are in the same place.
Good one, SomeDAM Poet.
If only it were true.
Unfortunately, I think Bloomberg is pretty smart and knows exactly what he is doing.
It’s the same old tired routine: pay a little bit of the upfront cost to get the ball rolling and then suck the public in to pay the vast majority.
It’s the same game Bill Gates played with Common Core.
These people are very uncreative but they actually don’t have to be because the public keeps going after the very same artificial bait.
Good analogies and analysis, poet.
He is not wasting any money. He is reinforcing an established industry of consensus-manufacturing toadies who will be chopping at the bit for the next installment of easy money.
$1000 per year per student is not going to cover much of the total yearly cost of educating each of those 150,000 students. Not when the total yearly per pupil cost is undoubtedly greater by an order of magnitude.
So, where’s the vast majority of the money going to come from?
Oh, yeah, right.
The public school kitty.
Like the rest of his billionaire pals, Bloomberg obviously believes that members of the American public are all idiots.
And who knows, he might very well be correct.
key words here: reinforcing and easy money
I posted Valeries article at OEN, and in the comment section posted your summary/analysis with a link here. https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/The-problem-s-with-Bloomb-in-General_News-Education-For-All_Education-Funding_Educational-Crisis_For-profit-Education-211210-301.html#comment799685
Thank you!
The abuse and psychological damage to teachers, parents, and children caused by Sucess Academy should be enough to list Success Academy and its CEO and management as domestic terrorists and to have the CIA use a Tier 1 military combat team from its SAC to neutralize that threat to the United States.
Michael Bloomberg: the grift that keeps grifting.
And more.
The billionaires are making the carpetbaggers look like trick or treaters.
I woke up this morning with a thought. Michael Bloomberg did not give $750 million to charters; he said he was going to give $750 million to charters. That’s an ad gimmick, not an investment. He’s trying to revive a dying sector.