Jersey Jazzman, our reliable New Jersey blogger, has the story about the decision by Camden’s school board to turn down four charters that the Christie administration and the local Camden Democratic boss badly wanted.
The charter lobby may have overplayed its hand. Looks like popular pushback. Looks like local board doesn’t want to hand over the keys to charter operators. Showdown ahead.
The Education Law Center, an independent organization that advocates for the children of New Jersey, obtained a copy of a proposal that the Chris Christie administration made to the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation in Los Angeles.
The plan calls for aggressive state intervention in the state’s lowest performing schools. Acting Commissioner Chris Cerf wants to set up an “achievement district” for the low-performing schools. These schools would likely be closed and handed over to private managers as charter schools. The state plan calls for eliminating collective bargaining in these schools.
The amount requested was $7.6 million, of which the Broad Foundation has thus far supplied $1.6 million.
This should not be a difficult sell for Cerf. He is a “graduate” of the Broad Foundation’s unaccredited Superintendent’s Academy. And the chairman of the board of the foundation is his former boss, Joel Klein.
It’s somewhat strange that people like Cerf (and Arne Duncan, for that matter) think that a school gets “reformed” or “turned around” by firing the staff, closing the school, and handing it off to a charter operator. Cerf is a smart enough guy, and he surely knows that charters on average don’t produce better results than the public schools they replace unless they push out the low-performing kids.
One of the news stories says that Cerf wants to use New Orleans “recovery school district” as a model for New Jersey, but I wonder if he knows that 79% of the charters in New Orleans were graded either D or F by the state, and that New Orleans ranked 69th of 70 districts in the entire state.
How long can this shell game go on?
I understand that the people in the Abbott districts (the poorest cities where the lowest-performing schools are) may be accustomed to getting pushed around by the state, but how will the people of New Jersey feel about Christie and Cerf bringing in a raft of charter school operators to privatize what used to be their public schools?
If you have been following these posts for the past few days, you will recall that New Jersey Acting Commissioner Chris Cerf claimed that legendary union leader Al Shanker would be on his side, supporting more of the (non-union) charters that Cerf wants to open all over New Jersey.
I wrote a post pointing out that Al Shanker was an original proponent of charters but turned against them in 1993 when he realized that they would become the leading edge of privatization.
I then got a tongue-lashing by someone from New Jersey for daring to say that Al Shanker would not be on board with Chris Cerf and his boss Governor Chris Christie in their campaign to turn more public schools over to entrepreneurs.
And then, blogger Mother Crusader discovered that Al Shanker’s widow, Edie Shanker, had already spoken up and reminded the world that Al would not have supported the “reform” movement.
But best of all, I just read in Jersey Jazzman’s piece that Al’s daughter Jennie Shanker posted the following comment on the article challenging my views:
As I mentioned in an earlier post, a New Jersey reformer came to the defense of Acting Commissioner Chris Cerf and insisted that if Al Shanker were alive today, he too would be an advocate for charters and choice just like Chris Cerf and Governor Christie.
No one knows how she came to this conclusion, since Al Shanker did not look kindly on non-union schools (90% of more of charters are non-union) and he came out in opposition to charters in 1993.
Now Mother Crusader, the parent activist in New Jersey, has introduced a new voice into this discussion: Edith Shanker, the widow of Al Shanker.
Mother Crusader–known to family and friends as Darcie Cimarusti–did some research and found a statement in which Edie Shanker (as she is known to her friends) called a foul on the reformers who were trying to use Al’s name to support charters.
As I have said again and again, each of us has the power to change the national conversation. Together we are unstoppable.
Darcie Cimarusti and Jersey Jazzman and other parent and teachers bloggers are doing that in New Jersey. They are our Paul Reveres. They are shining a light on the back room deals and exposing the hype and spin. Thanks to them for their persistence and courage.
Chris Cerf, the acting commissioner of education in New Jersey, published an article today defending charter schools, which have become very controversial in his state. They have become controversial because the state is trying to push them into suburbs that have great public schools and don’t want them, and they have become controversial because the public is beginning to revolt against for-profit charters, especially for-profit online charters, which Cerf is promoting.
People in New Jersey are beginning to realize that every dollar that goes to a privately managed charter school is a dollar taken away from their own public school. Because the budget is not expanding, it IS a zero sum game. Fixed costs do not decline when children leave the school.
Despite Governor Chris Christie’s frequent belittling of New Jersey teachers and schools, New Jersey is one of the highest performing states in the nation on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress. So, citizens of the state have good reason to oppose the Christie administration’s efforts to turn more taxpayer dollars over to private entrepreneurs.
In his article, Chris Cerf writes:
“...it is often forgotten that one of the first advocates for public charter schools was Albert Shanker, the former New York City teachers’ union leader, who supported charter schools as a way to empower public school educators to innovate.”
Chris Cerf needs to know what Albert Shanker really said about charter schools. This is what he would learn if he read pp. 122-124 of my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System:
1. Albert Shanker was president of the American Federation of Teachers, not the New York City union, when he first proposed the charter school idea in 1988.
2. Shanker proposed that any new charter should be jointly approved by the union and the school district. More than 90% of charters today are non-union. Shanker would not have approved any school that did not respect the rights of teachers to bargain collectively.
3. Shanker proposed that new charters should target the hardest-to-educate students: those who had dropped out or were failing. He never imagined that charters would have a selection process or that charters might avoid students with disabilities or English-language learners as is now the case in many charters.
3. Shanker wanted charters to collaborate, not compete, with existing public schools. He proposed them as a way to solve the problems of public schools. Whatever they learned, he said, should be shared with the public schools that sponsored them.
4. MOST IMPORTANT: In 1993, when Shanker saw that the charter idea was going to be used to privatize public education, he turned against charter schools. He opposed the takeover of the charter idea by corporations, entrepreneurs, and for-profit vendors. He became a vocal opponent of charter schools when he realized that his idea was embraced by “the education industry.” In his weekly column in The New York Times, Albert Shanker repeatedly denounced charter schools, vouchers, and for-profit management as “quick fixes that won’t fix anything.”
Here is an idea for Commissioner Cerf. You can fix the charter idea if you align it with Shanker’s original idea.
First, insist that all new charters are endorsed by the local school district and the union representing teachers.
Second, bar all for-profit management.
Third, insist that all charters recruit and enroll only the lowest-performing students, the students who have dropped out, and the students who are doing poorly in their present public school.
Fourth, require that charters collaborate with the public schools and share whatever they learn.
Fifth, to truly revive the spirit of Shanker’s proposal, bar all corporate-owned charter chains. Authorize only stand-alone charters that are created by teachers and parents in the district to serve the children of that district. No chains, just local charters committed to that community.
So, yes, Commissioner Cerf, you are on the right track when you quote Albert Shanker. Now, if you take his advice, you can save the charter school idea from the privatizers and profiteers who are giving it a bad name.
You have heard this from me before, and you’ll hear it again. People who are in charge of public schools are placed there to lead them. They are there to help them get better. They are appointed or elected to solve problems, not to abandon public schools.
When they take charge, they are supposed to be (in Phillip Schlecty’s term), moral and intellectual leaders of the public schools.
They are not appointed or elected to hand off their responsibility to the private sector. That is not leadership. That is an abandonment of responsibility. That is a clear indicator of leaders who lack the knowledge to improve schools and who lack the moral sense required of those in public office.
Yet this is the plan for Camden, New Jersey. Ten schools will close now, undoubtedly more later. The New Jersey Department of Education has a plan prepared by one of its Broad-trained administrators (as the article cited below mentions, the Broad people have colonized the NJ DOE). Since the Broad Foundation is known for training people to privatize public schools and put school systems into bankruptcy, the plan should not surprise. Yet it does. It rings with the business-type phrases that are supposed to assure the public that the writer knows what he is talking about. In fact, what the document shows is a Department of Education that does not know how to help public schools, that doesn’t believe in helping public schools. It shows leaders who are clueless about education. The plan begins by saying that asking how to improve the schools is the wrong question. That’s old-style thinking. The new way of thinking is to hand the public schools over to private management; surely, they must know how to get those test scores up. If they don’t, the schools can always be closed again and turned over to someone else.
This is what is known today as school reform.
http://www.courierpostonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012305010023
http://www.courierpostonline.com/assets/pdf/BZ18861851.PDF
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 