Jonathan Chait writes for New York magazine, where his latest article appeared, opposing the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed regulations for the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). CSP currently spends $440 million annually to underwrite new charter schools. Chait titled his article “Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools,” but it might as well have been titled “Biden Abandons the Betsy DeVos Legacy on Charter Schools.”
Chait also attacked the Network for Public Education, which had issued two reports (see here and here) documenting the waste, fraud, and abuse in the CSP, based on the Education Department’s own data. NPE found that almost 40% of CSP funding went to charters that either never opened or closed within a few years of opening. In the life of the program, almost $1 billion had been wasted. In addition, NPE pointed out the scandals associated with some high-profile for-profit charter operators, as well as the use of CSP money to open white-flight charters.
This year, for the first time since the CSP was created nearly 30 years ago, the Department proposed to ban the funding of for-profit charter management organizations and of white-flight charters. The regulations also ask applicants for an impact analysis that describes what effect the new charter is likely to have on existing public schools and why the new charter is needed. These sensible reform proposals sent the charter lobbyists into frenzied opposition, claiming falsely that these regulations were meant to destroy all charter schools. This was nonsense because they would have no effect on the thousands of existing charters, only on applicants for new federal funding, that is, charters that do not yet exist.
Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, sharply denounced the lies and misrepresentations of the “trade organization” for the charter industry. But, despite her reproach, the charter industry still promotes dishonest diatribes about the Department’s efforts to reform the CSP.
Carol Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education, was incensed when she read Chait’s defense of the charter industry’s effort to protect the for-profit managers who have abused CSP funds and of the operators that have used CSP funding to provide white-flight charters.
She wrote the following response.
In his recent column, “Biden Abandons the Obama Legacy on Charter Schools,” Jonathan Chait is perturbed that the U.S. Department of Education referred Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum to me for comment on an article he was writing about the Department’s proposed regulations for funding new charter schools. He then scolds Barnum for not disclosing that the Network for Public Education has received donations from unions. He calls Barnum’s story “neutral.” Chait’s source for this big scoop? The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Jonathan Chait then parrots the “wild exaggerations and misrepresentations” that Rosa De Lauro called out last week after expressing her support for CSP reforms during the Education Department’s 2023 budget hearing. The Appropriations Chairwoman noted that “this kind of information campaign is a familiar tactic for the trade organization [National Alliance for Public Charter Schools]. It does represent charter schools that are run by risky low-quality for-profit education management organizations.”
You know those “wild exaggerations.” I wrote about them here. Obviously, Chait did not read the mentioned Barnum piece, which was solid reporting, and he certainly did not read the proposed regulations carefully (which Representative DeLauro described in a letter to Secretary Miguel Cardona about the charter industry’s misrepresentations). Or he just chose to twist facts and truth.
Now let’s talk about what Jonathan Chait failed to disclose as he opposed the CSP regulation reforms, using the same misinformation that has appeared in other op-eds.
His wife worked for Center City Charter Schools as a grant writer when that charter chain received two grants from the Charter School Program (CSP), the program whose loose rules he is now defending. Download the 2019 database that you can find here and match the years of dispersion to the resume of Robin Chait. But the undisclosed conflict continues to this day. Since 2018, Robin Chait has worked for West Ed which evaluated the CSP during the Betsy De Vos era. And her employer, West Ed, once got its own $1.74 million grant from CSP.
But back to NPE funding. During some recent years we got modest donations from unions to bring teachers to our conferences. At our very beginning, we received start-up funds from the Chicago Teachers Union through a fiscal sponsor, Voices for Children. That ended in 2015. We will always be grateful to our friend, the late Karen Lewis, for that jump-start. Karen foresaw the growing attacks on public schools and teachers as an ominous trend and wanted to encourage allies to support a bedrock institution of our democracy.
We appreciate any tax-deductible donations we get. You won’t get favors, but you will always get a thank you. Our income comes from individual donations from our large number of supporters—educators, parents, family foundations, and other citizens who have a deep and abiding love for public schools.
This is not the first time Chait has been called out for not disclosing his wife’s connections with charters. But given the topic and her work in organizations connected with the Charter School Program, this is the worst omission yet. Shame on New York Magazine for not making him disclose and for letting him play fast and loose with the truth. And shame on Chait’s hypocritical critique of Barnum even as he hides the family connections with the program he defends.
Boy, the level of EFFORT that ed reformers have put into fighting regulation of federal charter funding is unbelievable.
Imagine if they worked this hard on anything that was revelant to public schools and public school students.Nah.Never happen.
Tens of thousands of paid advocates for “public education” and they produce absolutely nothing of practical or worthwhile value for 90% of students. We go from ed reformers lobbying for vouchers to ed reformers lobbying for charters, over and over again. What they never seem to do is any advocacy or productive work of any kind for public schools.
What’s the sum total work performed on behalf of public schools since the pandemic? The “anti-CRT” speech regulations in public schools. That’s what they’ve accomplished this year.
“Tens of thousands of paid advocates for “public education” and they produce absolutely nothing of practical or worthwhile value for 90% of students. We go from ed reformers lobbying for vouchers to ed reformers lobbying for charters, over and over again.”
What ed reformers do is marketing by proxy. Saving poor black children is simply a proxy war for power and money. They bombard the media space with so much BS and bombast it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. As a result they avoid the hard questions about what they actually deliver- nothing, nothing, nothing. (h/t Karen Lewis for the blank piece of paper; the perfect image of these empty suits)
Ed Reformers set up these public & media driven arguments by throwing out “choice”, CRT, dangers from trans youth, whatever. And everyone then argues about what ed-reformers are going to do for US education. And these arguments are on such a different plane from reality.
It’s absurd to me that replacing school board oversight of public education with a private management company will somehow solve any of the structural problems we face today.
Biden Takes a Teeny-Tiny Baby Step Away from the Failed Obama Legacy
There we go, fixed the title for ya, Chait!
In 1996, Bob Dole stood in the Republican Convention and blamed teachers Unions for the sum total of the woes in America. Not the teachers themselves, you understand, it the unions.
So they are still at it. Same tired song after all these years of so-called reform. It’s the teachers unions.
I think the problem is that the general population used to see the business end of a horse on a regular basis and could therefore more easily recognize the issue of this portion of the anatomy.
Interesting that the very worst thing Chait could think of to throw at NPE is that we are funded by teachers’ unions, as if they were criminal organizations. We are not funded by the NEA or the AFT, although if we were, there would be no reason to apologize for it. The unions represent the nation’s teachers, professors, nurses, social workers, etc. Their dues support their national organizations. Now what would truly be shameful would be taking money from billionaires like the Waltons, Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, Reed Hastings, Michael Bloomberg, and others to do their bidding. They use their money to undermine public schools and unionized teachers. I think the nation and our society would be healthier if every worker belonged to a union that represents their interests and fights for higher wages, pensions, and benefits.
Chris Christie spent 8 long years as governor bashing the teacher union, the NJEA, on an almost daily basis. It was just hideous. Phil Murphy is a relief from CC, none of the teacher, union or public school sliming that CC engaged in.
One of the great tragedies of that act was that Dole did not believe it. Just as he was not opposed to some form of universal health care. But the moment he decided to abandon his role a party leader to run for president again, he had to roll with the tide of his party. It was the beginning of a widespread trend we see today: people abandoning their principles, ethics and intellect in favor of doctrinaire party propaganda.
You can’t be a Republican running for office today unless: you deny the validity of the scientific method (climate change, evolution, , or at the very least grossly distort it; you deny, with a straight face and the needed moral outrage, what everyone can see with their own eyes; you believe women are subservient to men; you pledge fealty to a particular version of god; you believe that history begins now, the past was irrelevant except for the white man’s heritage which is in danger of being wiped out; you think the Idiot, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, as well as the likes of people like Greene, Scalise, Hawley, and Cruz are great thinkers.
And 40%–at least 40%–of Americans think agree.
Sickening but true.
J.D. Vance- Peter Thiel’s Manchurian candidate.
“Betsy DeVos has the talent, commitment, and leadership capacity to revitalize our public schools and deliver the promise of opportunity.”
Jonathan Chait’s entire argument seems to boil down to “How dare the Biden administration not trust this supposedly honest charter CEO and the billionaires who fund her like I do! I trust the very same people who wrote op eds and gave interviews and repeated this lie over and over again and they don’t need no stinkin’ oversight!” And Chait’s unconvincing argument seems to boil down to he trusts those charters – despite their dishonesty about Betsy DeVos – because right wing billionaires trust them. The same right wing billionaires who fund Republican politicians who want to cut the programs that help poor families. The same right wing billionaires who fund Republicans who have undermined and demonized the movement to reform policing tactics where non-white teens (and adults) experience far more aggressive police tactics than whites do.
Chait trusts the “honest” charters that billionaires adore, the same billionaires who support Republicans trying to disenfranchise the most vulnerable families. But he doesn’t trust the teachers’ union. Just because.
Chait doesn’t seem to give us any reason to trust the “honest” charters whose CEO endorsed DeVos and fought hard to get her confirmed. I don’t think the teachers’ union is perfect, but I would trust an organization funded by teachers unions over the pro-charter organizations funded by right wing billionaires who support right wing Republican politicians and policies that very much hurt low income families and oppose policies that help them.
Chait believes the opposite – the right wing billionaires and their minions who happily receive their largess to run charters are who we should trust.
I want to point out that Jonathan Chait’s piece is exactly how the right wing “works the refs”.
Matt Barnum and Chalkbeat are in no way “anti-charter” — if anything, Chalkbeat has a pro-charter view in that they have always reported on pro-charter studies and talking points without doing any real reporting that would call out the misinformation and misleading charter claims of superiority. Like the NYT, they regularly write stories that present those claims of charter superiority as if they are fact, with some throwaway disclaimer that “teachers unions disagree”.
Barnum wrote a neutral piece and Chait is working him to make sure in the future, Barnum thinks twice about writing any story that presents the reality when the reality is not favorable to the charter interests Chait is protecting.
I see no real argument for Chait’s beliefs except his demonization of the union. “Teachers’ union bad, right wing billionaires and charter CEOs who rabidly supported Betsy DeVos are good” is not a convincing reason.
As my mom used to say (paraphrased as it was usually directed at me) “He’s full of himself and is full of. . . it!”
The comments section universally lambasted the article. NYMag readers are onto the charter game, and onto Chait’s role in it. He should probably be submitting this sort of article to The 74.
Good to know. There are three Dem senators who endorsed a resolution commending charter schools on their special week: Booker, Feinstein (who seems to be out of it), and Booker (who was once close to DeVos).
When Senator Bennett tweeted his commendations to charters, he got scores of negative replies.