Peter Greene writes faster than most people can read, and what he writes is always worth reading. In this article, he describes a remarkable occurrence: the pro-charter Thomas B. Fordham Institute debunked a study by charter advocates claiming that deregulation spurs innovation in the charter sector.
In his latest article, Greene writes:
It’s an ordinary day when a pair of charter school boosters conclude that charters work best when mean old government doesn’t make them follow a bunch of rules and stuff. It is an ordinary day when someone points out they’re full of regular non-innovative baloney. It is a less ordinary day when the baloney is being called out by a piece in the house organ of the Thomas Fordham Institute.
So let’s pretend for a moment that the question of regulations vs. charter innovation is a real question. David Griffith, the Fordham Associate Director of Research, frames this as the old tension between autonomy and accountability, which makes more sense than talking about charter school innovation, because after a few decades of charter proliferation, the amount of innovation they have produced is somewhere between jack and squat. Despite being billed as “laboratories of innovation,” charter schools haven’t come up with much of anything that public schools were not already well aware of.
The study argues for less regulation of charters. Greene responds:
The more regulation, the less innovatiness in charter schools. For charter fans, it’s simple–more options means they can move more product, and while I get their point, it is also true that we would have far more innovation in the food industry without all those government regulations about poison and stuff.
The study was thoroughly demolished by David Griffith, Fordham’s associate director of research.
Greene writes:
Griffith makes a similar observation. Their technique of quantifying “innovation” gives the charter points for being unusual, and that’s problematic:
From a purely normative perspective, an obvious problem with the authors’ approach is that it is content neutral. So, for example, a school that was grounded in Satan Worship would count as highly innovative (provided it didn’t start a movement), as would one that imparted no knowledge whatsoever (as seems to be the case for many virtual schools).
And he doesn’t think “innovation” means what they think it means either, noting that many of their “innovations” aren’t particularly new but instead include “longstanding programs such as Core Knowledge (est. 1986), Waldorf (1919), and Montessori (1907), not to mention “single-sex” education (Harvard, circa 1636) and “project-based” learning (the Pleistocene).” (That is Griffith’s snark there, not mine).
Kudos to David Griffith and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Pleistocene. Good one. So was the line about regulating food to keep out poison and stuff. Charters aren’t 100% mainstream in every sense. They do some things differently.
Closing mid school year without warning is pretty innovative. So is getting a whole bunch of money to never open. That’s innovation. Paying yourself a million dollars a year to run three schools is definitely different than normal. The hundreds and hundreds of scandals in the Network for Public Education database are collectively suggestive of not just innovation in the charter sector, but of downright mutation from the very foundations of education and, for that matter, sense. Extreme innovation, that.
Phantom wait lists for charter seats are not what my public school would do. Innovative. And where does one even begin to describe how, uh, unique are the methods of no excuses charter chains like KIPP and Success Academy? Boggles the mind how they innovate against students and families.
The get rich innovation for charter schools (and vouchers) was making someone wealthy or richer off of public money and not holding them accountable for fraud.
How many of the CEOs and mangers of charter schools that were caught and found guilty of fraud ended up spending any time in prison and had to pay back all of the public money they stole if any was left in an account that could be grabbed by the authorities?
I suspect few to none, since in court the LLC (the charter or voucher corporation is what’s often held accountable) and not the Individuals behind the schemes. The frauds end up moving on to the next scheme in another city or state and keep most if not all of the public money they stole — probably hidden in offshore numbered accounts.
I can’t count how many times I’ve read that the best way to get rich is with other people’s money.
David Griffith’s masters degree in public policy is from Georgetown.
The key word in what he wrote is “Satanist.”
Camps are diverging. At the beginning, it seemed feasible to form an alliance between the Koch/Hoover network and, politicized right wing religionists who believe everyone should conform to values they ascribe to their religion. The latter want to achieve control through theocratic government and organizations.
The real possibility of tax-funded “Satanist” schools created tension between the two camps. Right wing religionists in the U.S. want an authoritarian, White patriarchy. Regulation in accordance with their world view blends with authoritarianism.
Libertarians want economic domination of the 90+%. Interpretations of God talk in order to dictate the way things are run aren’t their thing.
It won’t take long for groups like Fordham, the USCCB, Hoover etc. to smooth out their differences and advance their plans for authoritarianism. Jefferson warned us. In every age, in every country, the priest aligns with the despot. And, Ireland during the Great Hunger showed us how it benefits both.
I am a supporter of charter schools because I see them as a way for teachers and parents to build schools not “bogged down” in all the administrative bureaucracy, waste, incompetence, and just plain bad ideas that flow from the well paid but clueless “administrators” in district offices. But charter schools need to be held accountable for results. They should not be able to select their students and they should have to take the same standardized tests as public school students.
However, what we really need to do is follow the lessons of other high performing countries. They tend to have a national system that provides a high quality curriculum and high quality assessments but very autonomous and decentralized schools. In the USA, we have powerful district central offices that, in my experience, do more harm than good. Districts need to focus on transportation, lunch, etc.,. The state departments should focus on high quality standards, curricula, assessments, teacher prep, and equalizing funding. The teachers at each school should be responsible for how the material is taught and how the school is run (working with parents). If we did this, we would solve a lot of the problems that lead people to seek charter schools.
Many people wrongly assume that anything private is better than anything public. But charters may close suddenly, mid year. They are, in many states, allowed to hire uncertified, inexperienced teachers They pick and choose their students and kick out those they don’t want.
What’s the sense of having two or three school systems in one district?
I understand the frustration with school districts, and in particular, with the very big ones. What often happens with these is that every time someone at the district has a bright idea, it gets added to the list of crap that teachers have to do. And over decades, that list becomes extremely long and onerous. I made a list here, once, of district-level requirements of teachers in Hillsborough, Flor-uh-duh, and people were astonished. There was so much crap on that list that there was precious little time left in a week to do anything else. Sleep, eat, do mandatory crap required by the district (“Make sure to fill out your Individualized Professional Development Plan interim reports by the March 1st deadline. Templates for these are available at hillsborough.weownyou.mordor.net.
Particularly egregious are the distinct-mandated requirements that teachers and administrators and schools follow a LOT of procedures related to the standards and testing regime, such as posting Common [sic] Core [sic] standards on whiteboards and in lesson plans, administering practice tests, using approved CCSS texts, holding “data chats,” preparing “data walls,” and other such counterproductive and time-wasting claptrap.
And, ofc, what one gets from district-level curriculum guidelines is the habits of the tribe, however backward.
And you can count on the fact that if there are five textbooks available in a given subject area, the district will hold a vote among its administrators and choose the worst of these and then force everyone to use it.
Back in the 1970s, there was a great debate in this country about whether we should have district-based or site-based (school-based) school governance. Guess what? The schools lost. The districts won. And that was a major step toward the disempowering of teachers, toward the utter elimination of teacher autonomy.
Teachers: you now have the authority to do precisely what I tell you to do.
But that’s not what most charters are about, Michael. Many, perhaps most, are simply profit-making enterprises, and teachers in them often have LESS autonomy to innovate and MORE pressure to conform to idiotic administrative mandates (among the many reasons for this: teachers in charters have no unions and no tenure protections are at will employees). Would that it were so that they are centers of innovation and free of burdensome bureaucracy (charters have their own in the form of CMOs–charter management organizations).