You may have noted, if you have followed this blog for a long time, that I am a big fan of Peter Greene. Peter is a wonderful writer, has a great sense of humor, and was a classroom teacher for 39 years in Pennsylvania. In addition to his own blog Curmudgacation, Peter is a regular columnist at Forbes, where he educates business people.
He writes so much so quickly that I sometimes miss terrific columns. This is one that I missed. It was published in 2019 in Forbes. The topic remains pertinent. Just in the past few days, I have had to defend the proposition that charter schools are not public schools. They call themselves public schools, but that doesn’t mean it is so.
Peter Greene explains here why charter schools are not public schools.
Modern charter schools prefer to attach the word “public” to their descriptions. Many of the charter advocacy groups include “public charter” in their title. And truthfully, there are no regulations attached to the term–any school can attach the word “public” to its title without having to worry about any sort of penalty.
So technically, any charter school can call itself a public school. Heck, any private or parochial school can call itself a public school if it’s so inclined. But while modern charter schools are financed by public tax dollars, they are not truly public schools for the following reasons.
Transparency
When City Paper recently reported on the salaries of DC charter teachers and administrators, it required extra digging to come up with the information because charter schools are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. In fact, City Paper reported that a teacher employed by the charter was not even allowed to see the salary scale for her own job. In 2014, when the New York state controller wanted to audit the books of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy, the charter leader took him to court and won, barring the state from trying to see how public tax dollars were spent.
Public schools are required to provide a transparent look at their finances. At times, some outlets have gone so far as to publish the salaries of individual teachers, and that’s perfectly legal. Nor are public school boards allowed to meet privately or in secret. Everything that happens in a public school is paid for with public dollars, and is therefor subject to public scrutiny. Charters deliberately avoid that level of scrutiny.
Subject To State Law
The details here vary from state to state (here’s a handy chart for looking up your own state), but charter schools generally don’t have to play by the same rules as public schools. Non-discrimination, health and safety, and school year length are often (but not always) exceptions–beyond the specific exceptions, charters operate as they will, and may in some states request additional waivers. So, for instance, many states do not require charter teachers to be certified. Public schools, meanwhile, must play by all the rules laid down by the state.
Student Population
Modern charter schools have a variety of techniques for controlling which students they serve. It begins with advertising, which signals which students are most likely to feel like the school is a good fit for them. Charters are not required to provide programs that meet all special needs; they don’t necessarily turn those students down, but if a school tells you that they do not offer the program that your child needs, will you really enroll there? And while lotteries are supposed to select students randomly, lotteries themselves often require committed parents willing to work their way through the paperwork and bureaucracy, so that the system allows parents to self-select for providing the kind of support and commitment that makes students more successful.
Once the student is in the school, there are a variety of ways to nudge the child out. We’ve seen the “Got To Go” list at Success Academy; families can be nudged out with repeated suspensions and disciplinary action.
Charter supporters note that some public schools, such as magnet or special program schools, do not accept all students either, and that is true. However, even if the child is not selected for the magnet school, the district is still responsible for that child’s education and will enroll her elsewhere. If a student has severe special needs that the district cannot meet in house, the district must still assume financial responsibility for providing the child with an education at some specialized facility.
When students walk out the door of a charter school, they cease to be the charter’s responsibility. But as long as a student lives within the public school’s designated area, that student is the district’s responsibility.
Local Control
Public schools answer to the public. They are run by elected school boards who must meet and take action in public. Charter advocates have expressed frustration with this system and even suggest that school boards be done away with. Many public systems have been attacked on this front, with their school boards thrust aside by state takeover or a switch to mayoral control. Such changes make those systems less public, and often are a step toward converting public schools to charters.
Charter schools could be operated by a locally elected board, but they almost never are. Instead, charter schools are owned and operated by private individuals or boards, sometimes located far away from the school itself. Sometimes control of the charter is separated from the community by a series of managerial handoffs–Group X technically owns and operates the charter, but they hire Corporation Y to actually run the school.
When municipal assets like water systems and parking facilities are handed off to private companies to run, we call it by its name–privatization. Turning a school over to a private company to own and operate is no different.
Why Bother?
Why do charter schools and their boosters insist on using the term “public”? Here’s what Todd Ziebarth, senior vice president at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, told Emma Brown of the Washington Post as he argued that charters are public schools.
And it’s a term that matters, he said: Americans have high regard for the importance of public education, and private schools carry connotations of exclusivity that don’t apply to charters.
In other words, “public” carries a host of connotations that are important for marketing purposes. Brown was interviewing Ziebarth in 2016 for his reaction to the National Labor Relations Board ruling that charters are private corporations.
We can talk another day about whether charter schools are helping or hurting, whether they’re good policy or bad. What we should not need to discuss is whether or not they are public.
Next time someone insists that charter schools are public schools, I can send them a link to this article.
There’s another tell that shows what charters are. When COVID began spreading, Congress passed a program for small businesses and nonprofits called the Paycheck Protection Program. The Small Business Administration gave out almost $800 billion to save jobs. Many private and religious schools applied for and received PPP grants, as did churches, synagogues, mosques, and businesses. Public schools were not allowed to apply for PPP money because there was another program specifically for public schools. Some charter schools applied for and received over a billion dollars of PPP money, while also collecting money from the public school fund. The average charter school received far more than the average public school because many of the charters double-dipped from both funds. If charter schools were public schools, they would not have been eligible for PPP money.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Charter Schools are authorized state by state with widely varying rules, from no charter school law to very few restrictions. NYS has two authorizors, the State University Charter School Institute and the Board of Regents, they have completely different regulations, the Charter School Institute seems to function as “belonging” to Eva Moskowitz (Success Academy Network) while the Board of Regents has Framwrorks (http://www.nysed.gov/common/nysed/files/programs/charter-schools/performanceframework2019.pdf) and ffrequently extends charters for less than the five year maximum, the Charter School Institute makes renewals of charters pro forma.
All fall under state law, “All politics is local,” who chairs the Education Committee in your state legislature? Lobby!!
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
What does it mean to be a public school? If you aren’t sure, have doubts, or do not know, read this re-blogged post and learn the TRUTH!
I worked for the federal government and am familiar with federal contracts. If we applied the rules of contracting to charters, several changes would occur:
the requiring agency (either the state or the local school board in this case) establishes the requirement. “Here’s what do we need the contractor to do”
the requiring agency prepares a request for proposals that goes to potential offerors. “Here’s what we need done. Please provide your proposed solution.”
the agency reviews the bids. In something as complex as this, cost would not be the only consideration. Past performance is always a factor. (how well has the bidder done this in the past? what do references say? what complaints are there against the company?) Capacity/capability is a factor. (what is the likelihood this company can perform this service? what is the risk of failure to perform?)
in some cases, the agency supplies the facility (school building) and supplies (textbooks) to the contractor. These remain the property of the government throughout the contract period.
service contracts are typically for three years with the possibility of two non-competitive one-year renewals. So, the contract is rebid after no less than five years.
the agency reserves the right to terminate the contract at any time for non-performance or for its convenience (we simply don’t need that service any more).
the agency has a team that audits contract performance.
Does any of that sound like what happens with a charter? What happens here is Company A says “I want to open a school across the street from your existing school, cherry-pick the students, have you pay for the building, then keep it when I’m done with it. If you don’t agree, I’ll whine to the state regulators. I’ll win there.”
The initial idea of a charter (a place for experimentation) has totally been lost. The idea that a charter is a contract is missing too.
My bullets didn’t appear. Sorry this is sloppy.
THERE’S NO SUCH THING as a “public charter school”. Charter school operators spend a lot of taxpayer money telling taxpayers that charter schools are “public” schools — but they are not. As the Supreme Courts of Washington State and New York State have ruled, charter schools are actually private schools because THEY FAIL TO PASS THE MINIMUM TEST for being genuine public schools; that it — They aren’t run by school boards who are elected by, and therefore under the control of and accountable to voting taxpayers. All — ALL — charter schools are corporations run by private parties. Taxpayers have no say in how their tax dollars are spent in charter schools.
CHARTER SCHOOL FRAUD: The impartial, non-political watchdog Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education issued a report warning that so much taxpayer money is being skimmed away from America’s genuine public schools and pocketed by private corporate charter school operators that the IG investigation declared that: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting goals.” It is billionaire hedge fund managers who are behind the charter school scam —they are skimming hundreds of millions of dollars from public schools and are betraying America’s public schools and the children of America.
CHARTER STUDENTS LOSE GROUND: The Stanford University Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) — which is funded by pro-charter organizations — has reported that in the case of popular online charter schools, students actually lose ground in both reading and math — but online charter schools are the fastest-growing type of charter school because they make it easiest to skim away public tax dollars. CREDO has been conducting years-long research into the educational quality of charter schools and yet even this charter-school-funded research center’s findings are that in general charter schools don’t do any better academically than genuine public schools.
THE RACIAL RESEGREGATION of America’s school systems by the private charter school industry is so blatant and illegal that both the NAACP and ACLU have called for a stop to the formation of any more charter schools. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA summed it up, stating that charter schools are “a civil rights failure.” The catch-phrase “school choice” was concocted by racists following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that required racial integration in public schools. After that, racist organizations used racist politicians to conduct a decades-long attack that underfunded public schools and crippled their ability to provide the full measure of education and to “prove” that public schools were “failing”. That public school “failure” is an issue manufactured by racists organizations and politicians is well-documented in the book “The Manufactured Crisis”.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/03/29/report-the-department-of-education-has-spent-1-billion-on-charter-school-waste-and-fraud/#ab1fbdb27b64