Peter Goodman is a long-time commentator on education issues in New York City and New York State. In this post, he raises important questions: Have charter schools met the goals set when they were authorized? Should they have the right to exclude students they don’t want? Why should the city fund two competing school systems?
As you can see by the response of an editor at the pro-charter New York Post, part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, charter supporters oppose this idea and find it outrageous. What do you think?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is an excellent article, and he makes some sound arguments for making a change to a system that is harming public schools and students. NYC already has far more choices of schools that any charter school can provide. Goodman offers some sound suggestions.
“*Increase learning opportunities for all students, with special emphasis on expanded learning experiences for students who are at-risk of academic failure;
*Encourage the use of different and innovative teaching methods;
Provide schools with a method to change from rule-based to performance-based accountability systems by holding the schools established under this article accountable for meeting measurable student achievement results.”
These suggestions were never part of the discussion when charters were proposed. The only solution accepted was to privatize schools for certain students, and it was adopted without any legitimate evidence that privatization would benefit poor students. After many years of privatization, we know that charter schools only succeed by gaming the system: selecting those with the most potential, excluding the neediest, most challenging students and producing faux data about their results.
His suggestion about making making districts smaller and more manageable may have some merit as well. He is not talking about the failed small schools experiment. He is referring to ability to offer a greater capacity to review and address the needs of struggling students. I worked in a smaller diverse school system. Part of our success with struggling students was our ability to be nimble and respond quickly to better serve struggling students. NYC is such a vast system with oversized classes that it is easier for students to get lost in the shuffle. NYC should reduce class size and hire more staff to address the needs of lower performing students in order to improve academic outcomes.
From the linked post, this:
“A few years ago I was at a forum; a public school parent and a charter school parent were involved in a discussion. The public school parent was arguing,
”Charter schools throw out kids who are discipline problems, don’t take kids with disabilities and English language learners and substitute test prep for meaningful instruction.”
The charter school parent responded, “That’s exactly why I send my children to charter schools.”
It is astonishing to me– and an example of how lousy and/or lazy the education reporters in NYC are — that this is not the STARTING discussion. Instead, the elephant in the room — that parents don’t want their kids in school that have too many kids who need lots of resources — is censored from all news stories as if it is not allowed to be mentioned, despite the indisputable evidence that the charters that are “successful” demand parents meet a high bar of engagement to even enroll their child, and that the students who enroll themselves meet a high bar to be allowed to remain in the charter.
If you give parents a choice of a well-resourced, free school that only will teach students they deem good enough, many parents will want that. Especially when their “other” choice is an underfunded public school with a exponentially increasing percentage of students whose needs mean they are more difficult and expensive to teach. Of course, the problem is that those charters don’t want to teach all the kids of parents who want to be there.
Years ago, I assumed this obvious fact would be the main part of the narrative long ago. I had not counted on the implicit racism of many education journalists, the SUNY Charter Institute Board members, and the charter operators themselves. They presented a reality where the needs of the invisible “unworthy” students must be sacrificed for the good of the chosen ones who made the charter look good. It was “doing well by doing good” with the requirement that the primary goal was to make the charter look good and the secondary goal was to teach the kids who served the primary goal of making the charter look good and to identify the students who did not serve that goal of making the charter look good and eliminate them.
Getting back to the beginning quote: NYC public schools did a much more open and honest version of giving parents what they want, when they instituted public middle and high school choice. Some schools were for the students most academically motivated, with few behavioral problems. Some weren’t. But what made these schools very different from dishonest charters is that they did not claim to be working miracles. And the schools that did have students with more issues were given more resources and more funding, and were not demonized as failures because they couldn’t match the results of the schools that did select students. With honesty, solutions can be found.
The press jumped on the bandwagon to promote the charter lie that charter success was due to their teachers and system and CEO and not due to the families who were allowed to be in the charter.
I have no idea if the complicit reporting of journalists like Eliza Shapiro was due to laziness, cowardice, ignorance, poor journalistic training or something else, but why did she never report what was right in front of her face? There was ONE charter operator that was getting outsized results that no other CHARTER operator in NYC was getting. If there had been ongoing stories about how KIPP, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First all still had the inept leadership and teachers that resulted in them not coming anywhere close to matching Success Academy’s results, how would the false narrative have changed? If Eliza Shapiro had even once tried to get the SUNY Charter Institute board members on record to explain why they weren’t handing all KIPP and Achievement First charters over to Success Academy since they were the only ones getting those results, what would have happened?
The other charter operators remained silent and complicit because they felt confident that reporters like Eliza Shapiro would never directly compare their mediocre results to the supposedly stellar results of Success Academy. Even though that would be the obvious comparison for any non-complicit journalist to ask. Why can’t other charters match these results? Because the reporters know that the answer to that question would destroy the false narrative. What is the answer? Two possibilities I can see:
The other charter operators and teachers are really terrible and despite the fact they have all the same freedom as Success Academy, they have no idea how to run a school and should happily give up their schools to Success Academy who will run them correctly instead of the lousy way the other charter operators run them.
Or:
The other charter operators, while they benefit from the natural self-selection that all charters do, do not cherry pick ENOUGH. They are not as ruthless as Success Academy in identifying the students who need to be on got to go lists and making those unwanted students leave.
Is there another reason? Lucky for the charter movement, reporters don’t care to ask because the answer isn’t one that rich billionaires believe is newsworthy.
If a journalist was ignorant enough to write stories about Bronx Science in which they constantly exclaimed that the teachers and administrators were performing miracles because the students performed so much better than the students in other Bronx high schools, they would likely be told what idiots they were for understanding that these kids were not selected for academic strength.
But journalists don’t mind showing their ignorance when they fawn over supposedly real “miracles” at Success Academy because no one says the obvious – that comparing that charter to public schools is nonsense and why isn’t this reporter comparing their results to all the charter schools that have the same freedom to match them, but don’t.
Does it take integrity, or just a basic understanding of math, to see that if the highest performing charter is losing an extraordinarily high percentage of students, that’s a huge red flag? Not a cause for journalistic celebration of “miracles”.
We need a truthful discussion of how selective schools work, whether they are charters or public schools. And then a truthful discussion of whether there is a need for a separate “selective” charter system when the NYC public school has a long history of having good schools that challenge the most motivated and well-behaved students.
Charters arose on a lie that they had a solution for all the other kids – the ones who were supposedly failed by their public schools. And instead the charters simply left those kids behind and lied about it. With help from a complicit media and the SUNY Charter Institute.
It is certain that corporate reform does not reform. It is time for every progressive legislative body to, at the very least, explore alternatives to the status woe.
Charters are simply drawing public $$ to private pockets …the victims are the kids
Of course. The billionaires who serve on the boards of charters in NYC should pay their rent, at the very least, instead of taking the money from the public schools.
That’s a small step. The bigger one, as you write, is that charters should serve the students with the greatest needs, not seek out those who are likely to have the highest scores.
The charters serve the students with their (the charters’
) greatest needs*
high test scores.
Reblogged this on What's Gneiss for Education and commented:
It seems that if we believe the narrative the charters push, we should flip the system on its ear. Let the charters be the default schools for the kids who can’t function in ghe public schools. Let’s have the public schools be able to cream their student populations, select only the students they want to have…the “easier” students, and have the charters be required to take those kids kicked out of the public schools.
Charters with their smaller classes and “freedom” to innovate will finally be able to help those kinds of kids. And since they are public schools (as they keep on telling us repeatedly) they can’t gripe about taking in the hard nuts, the Special ed kids, the ones with behavioral issues, etc.
Greg, what a great idea!
This was the original intent of the charter schools: to find innovative ways to reach the harder to teach students.
Or that was the original claim, at least.
“ What do you think?”
I think we should return to the original intent of the charter school program:
“ The concept of the “сharter school” first originated in the 1970s by a New England educator by the name of Ray Budde. His idea was for groups of teachers to set up contracts or “charters” with their local school board to discover new approaches and ideas in the field of education. Its roots lie in the progressive idea that by empowering the educators with additional freedoms they can achieve a much higher rate of student success.”
I believe that competition is counterintuitive in the field of education. Charters and public schools should be working and planning, together.
At the very least I think the current charter schools/networks should be held to the same oversight as the public schools. They’re receiving our tax dollars…which isn’t meant to be a gift. We need to see how that money is being spent and what the outcomes are.
Actually; I should amend that:
I believe that competition is counterintuitive in the field of educational administration. More cooperation is needed, there.
Competition may produce a better mouse trap but it doesn’t create better schools. A good school is the work of many hands—students, parents, teachers, principal, administrators, staff, and the community. Most important is a society that values education and invests in its schools so they are beautiful joyful spaces with well experienced personnel. In our society, we have states trying to transfer their responsibility for schools to anyone who wants it. Those states will have ill-educated people and that will dim their future prospects.
Exactly and well said, Diane.
The business world says, “education is a business”. But they don’t understand the profession. It would be helpful (putting it mildly) if they would restrict their access to the supply side (their field of expertise) and left the actual service of educating the kids to the professionals who specialize in that field.
When the business world says “education is a business”, people should believe them.
The prime goal of a business is to make money. Everything else is secondary.
Origin stories often involve con artists. (See Genesis)
My guess is that some of earliest proponents of charter schools were simply con artists looking for a way to tap into public money.
Great poem. Is the devil red or orange?
I started teaching in the early ‘90s. There was an overwhelming need for special ed teachers. Kids with severe difficulties controlling their emotions and actions. Many of them had been born of crack addicted parents. Many had fetal alcohol syndrome. “ADHD” would soon be an acronym known to the public.
We were given a LOT of autonomy simply because this was uncharted territory. Not that we didn’t have a curriculum to follow. It’s just that we needed to be creative, on a day to day basis, in order to create some semblance of structure and cooperation. A learning environment.
That’s how I see the original intent of the charter movement. The author(s) were looking for anything that would work during a period of severe social unrest (the ‘70s were no picnic). There was a sense of purpose.
I look at the profiteers in education the same way I do realtors and developers in NYC. They follow the artists. We move into a marginal or worse area because that’s all we can afford. Others catch wind of some very creative things happening in area venues…and business picks up.
One step leads to another and the next thing you know; the area has become more desirable to live in. Renovations and jacked up rents/mortgages create a new neighborhood that the artists can’t afford, anymore. So they move on to less greener pastures
There’s always someone out there looking to profit off of a creative endeavor. And their actions can often crowd out and banish the original intent of the creators.
The Original Con Artist
Satan was an artist
An artist of the con
And really tried his hardest
In Eden, at the dawn
I didn’t complete the first step of my comparison:
All that autonomy we experienced in order to create order from chaos in the classroom? Out the window once Bloomberg took control of the schools and put his business model into effect. Then the gradual change from the new technology serving the teacher to teacher serving the now established technology.