Dr. Keith Benson of the Camden (NJ) Education Association. In this essay, he analyzes the rise of Black leaders who represent the privatization movement and compares them to those who continue for a just and equitable public school system.
Whic side are you on?
Jan Resseger cogently summarizes the reasons that Denver teachers went on strike.
They struck against Corporate Reform.
Jan Resseger explains the power of conventional wisdom, which persists even when its effects are harmful and its premises disproven.
She sees Race to the Top as the quintessential bad idea locked in place in almost every state.
How to restore good sense and expunge bad policies?
She shows how her own state of Ohio has been severely damaged by Duncan’s policies.
The Difficulty of Cleaning Arne Duncan’s Awful Policies Out of the Laws of 50 States
A few months ago, the New York Times published a very credulous article about the “successful” state takeover of Camden, New Jersey. This was surprising because the superintendent who took charge had never run a school or a district before. Age 32, he had worked for Joel Klein.
Jersey Jazzman was doubtful. There has never been a successful state takeover.
So he waited until the state audit was completed. And his doubts were confirmed.
Here is JJ’s post about Camden:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-failure-of-state-control-in-camden.html
The so-called Renaissance schools in Camden were supposed to take all neighborhood kids. They don’t.
He writes:
This is the Times’ article:
Steven Singer nails Rahm Emanuel’s false apology. Rahm claims he is no longer a Reformer yet continues to think he has to get tough on somebody to produce the test scores he wants. When I visited the Washington Post recently, I heard Rahm discuss his great education successes in Chicago, in conversation with the woman he appointed as superintendent of schools (talk about softball exchanges!). Not a word was said about his historic and vicious decision to close 50 public schools in one day, all of them located in communities of color. The gossip was that he was trying out for the next Secretary of Education role. His name will live in education history and it will remind us of his terrible actions as a privatizer, a hater of public schools, and a man who holds teachers in contempt.
Rahm Emanuel’s recent op-ed in The Atlantic may be one of the dumbest things I have ever read.
The title “I Used to Preach the Gospel of Education Reform. Then I Became the Mayor” seems to imply Emanuel has finally seen the light.
The outgoing Chicago Mayor USED TO subscribe to the radical right view that public schools should be privatized, student success should be defined almost entirely by standardized testing, teachers should be stripped of union protections and autonomy and poor black and brown people have no right to elect their own school directors.
But far from divorcing any of this Reagan-Bush-Trump-Clinton-Obama crap, he renews his vows to it.
This isn’t an apologia. It’s rebranding.
Valerie Strauss notes on her blog “The Answer Sheet” that charters are losing their luster. With the ascent of Choice Champion Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, Democrats are losing interest in charters.
Almost 90% are non-union, and Democrats are not as keen about charters as they were when Obama was president. DeVos has made clear that her goal is privatization, and charter schools advance her goal. Today, Democrats running for office are backing away from charters.
The number of charters is not growing as it once did.
Most embarrassing are the escalating charter scandals. The public has begun to realize the absurdity of giving out public money without oversight or accountability.
There is most definitely a backlash. The NAACP call for a moratorium was part of the backlash. So was the referendum in Massachusetts in 2016, where voters overwhelmingly rejected an effort to lift the cap on charters.
Part of the backlash stems from the realization that more money for charters means less money for public schools. Another part is the public revulsion against the billionaires behind the charter movement, whether its DeVos or Bill Gates or the Waltons or the Koch brothers.
No matter what lies are spread, most Americans don’t want to abandon their community public schools to entrepreneurs and corporations.
Denver teachers are likely to go out on strike, CNN reports, due to absurdly low salaries.
They can’t afford to live in the city where they teach.
A city and state that refuses to pay a decent middle-class wage to its teachers doesn’t care about its children or its future.
Of course, Denver is the city that Corporate Reformers admire because it has adopted the “portfolio model” of charters intermingled with public schools, instead of paying its teachers appropriately.
CNN reports:
For 14 months, teachers in Denver have been negotiating with Denver Public Schools for more pay. On Saturday, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association said talks had broken off and they’ll walk on Monday.
Angie Sullivan manages to write a regular eloquent letter to every legislator in Nevada.
She teaches young children in a high-poverty school in Las Vegas.
Here is her latest:
Will Pinkston is a member of the elected board of the Metro Nashville public schools. He has a long history of working in state and local government. He was there when Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen brought all the major education groups in the state together to apply for Race to the Top funding. He was there when optimism was high that Race to the Top would launch a new era of collaboration and progress. He was there when Bill and Melinda Gates came to congratulate the Volunteer State on winning $501 million to redesign its education system and when Arne Duncan hailed it as a state that was ready to move forward in a “dramatic and positive” direction. He heard Tennessee described as “Arne Duncan’s Show Horse.” Initially, he had high hopes.
He was there for every twist and turn in education policy in Tennessee for the past decade. He watched the meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of State Commissioner Kevin Huffman. He saw the war break out between Huffman and the state’s teachers, when Huffman ratcheted up his efforts to punish teachers when test scores didn’t go up. He was there for the disaster of the Achievement School District. He saw Michelle Rhee bring her pro-voucher crusade to Tennessee. He saw the state’s testing system turn into a fiasco. He witnessed a backlash from teachers and parents against everything associated with Race to the Top.
He saw Race to the Top turn into Race to the Bottom. The legacy of Race to the Top was divisiveness, rage, and chaos.
This is a long article, but well worth the time it takes to read.
Initially open to the promise of charter schools, he began to see that there were stripping the district of resources.
He writes:
When I ran for and got elected to the school board in 2012, I did it for what I thought were the right reasons. As a public-school parent and alumnus of Metro Nashville Public Schools, I saw an opportunity to represent the part of town where I grew up. After leaving state government, it seemed like a logical extension of public service — and a chance to see how the still-nascent Race to the Top reforms might help propel a large urban school system struggling with persistent achievement gaps. In retrospect, I was terribly naïve.
As it turned out, I ended up on the front line in the war over public education in America. In part because of Race to the Top, it would take years and countless political battles before we could begin focusing on large-scale school improvement in Nashville. The school system was, and still is, chronically underfunded. When I took office, the superintendent at that time was near the end of his career and had been operating for years with no strategic plan. Board members knew he was overwhelmed by the intensity of the reform movement.
Instead of being able to focus on academic standards, effective school turnaround strategies and other key tenets of Race to the Top, the school board faced a tidal wave of charter applications from national operators seeking to rapidly dismantle the school system. Our biggest problem: Haslam’s so-called “open-enrollment law” stripping away caps on charter schools, a rare legislative victory for the governor fueled by Race to the Top’s irrational exuberance.
As it turned out, I ended up on the front line in the war over public education in America.
Haslam’s 2011 law creating a wide-open spigot of charters came just two years after my former boss, Gov. Phil Bredesen, supported a loosening of charter caps in the run-up to Race to the Top. In a sign of Tennessee’s importance to the national reformers, then-Secretary Arne Duncan in 2009 personally lobbied Democrats in the state legislature for the loosening of caps. The eventual effect in Nashville was total chaos.
To put it in perspective: In 2009, Music City had just four charter schools. Following the loosening of state charter caps, the number quickly swelled to a dozen. By 2014, as a result of Haslam’s post-Race to the Top open-enrollment law, the number ballooned to 27 — a nearly seven-fold increase in just five years. During that time, cash outlays for charters by Metro Nashville Public Schools soared more than 700 percent — rising from about $9 million to more than $73 million. Within a few short years, annual cash outlays for charters would soar to more than $120 million.
As an aide to the previous governor who struggled to deal with runaway Medicaid costs a decade earlier, I knew it was impossible to grow any part of government at an unchecked rate without destabilizing the budget in other areas of government. And at a time when our existing schools were universally considered to be underfunded, I wasn’t going to feed charter growth at the expense of zoned schools.
Whistleblowers later told me that charter advocates were plotting to create what they called “New Orleans without the hurricane,” referring to the nearly wholesale charterization of the Crescent City’s school system following Hurricane Katrina. I found their plan to be reckless and shameful, not to mention fiscally and operationally unsustainable. By 2015, three years into my school board service, I stopped voting for new charter schools altogether.
13
Die-hard charter advocates pride themselves on using simplistic poll-tested messaging to push their agenda. I know because from 2010 to 2012 I served on the founding board of a so-called “high-performing” charter school in Nashville — an experience that led me to question the entire movement.
In the charter sector’s vernacular, the main objective is creating “high-quality seats.” Frequently, in Nashville and around the country, charter advocates accuse urban school board members of protecting “adult jobs” at the expense of kids — a swipe at teachers’ unions. They place a premium on charter schools that are “no excuses” by design and that emphasize “grit” as a top characteristic for students.
According to their world view, charters are the silver-bullet solution to improve K-12 education. What they don’t acknowledge is a growing body of evidence that proves charters, on the whole, aren’t doing better than traditional schools. They also don’t admit that charters cherry-pick in admissions in order to enroll students who are more likely to succeed, and then “counsel out” kids who aren’t making the grade. Each spring in Nashville, school board members are inundated with reports from principals complaining about charter schools sending kids back to zoned schools prior to testing season.
Even if you accept the false notion that charter schools are better than traditional schools, the financial math just doesn’t work. Because of Haslam’s ill-conceived policy, charter growth in Nashville by 2013 was consuming nearly every dime of available new revenue for the school system — leaving little new money for our underfunded traditional schools.
Each spring in Nashville, school board members are inundated with reports from principals complaining about charter schools sending kids back to zoned schools prior to testing season.
After working in and around state and local governments for nearly 20 years, I also was suspicious of the legality of charter laws relative to overall school funding. For example, in Tennessee our state constitution guarantees a “system of free public schools.” But in my view, charters were taxpayer-funded private schools.
Using my position on the Nashville School Board, I pushed for a legal analysis that found the state’s 2002 charter law imposes “increased costs on local governments with no off-setting subsidy from the State … in violation of the Tennessee Constitution.” Put differently: Charters were unconstitutional due to the negative fiscal impact on traditional schools. The legal theory hadn’t been tested in court, but I predicted it would be only a matter of time.
Rabid “charter zealots,” as I began calling them, had enough. Beginning in fall 2013, the national charter movement unleashed an army of paid political operatives and PR flacks to harass the local school board as payback for raising fiscal and legal questions. Nationally, charter advocates saw the situation in Nashville as an existential threat.
The Tennessee Charter School Center, the attack arm of charter schools in Memphis and Nashville, organized a bullhorn protest on the front lawn of Metro Nashville Public Schools’ central office to shout down school board members deemed hostile to charters. A blogger on the group’s payroll attacked the board under the blog handle “Lipstick on a Pig” — shamefully likening our majority-minority school system to a swine. Charter students, pawns in a carefully orchestrated smear campaign, earned extra-credit points by leafletting school board meetings with negative fliers attacking board members.
As a veteran of two statewide gubernatorial campaigns, I recognized the bare-knuckled political tactics. The goal of the charter zealots was to provoke school board members and other opponents into public fights in order to create distractions and draw attention to their cause. For a while, it worked. Skirmishes played out regularly in the boardroom, and spilled into the local news and social media.
When the “charter zealots” ran their own slate of candidates for the board, they targeted Pinkston, who barely squeaked through. But the other anti-charter, pro-public education candidates won, and the board was able to focus on the needs of the public schools, not just squabbles over how many charters to open.
This is an important story that deserves a wide audience.
Dana Goldstein has been covering education for 13 years. At the beginning of her career, bashing teachers’ unions and praising charters was in. Now red-shirted teachers have canceled that narrative and reminded her (not me) that only 6% of the nation’s children are in charter schools.
She doesn’t reflect on the damage that charters do to public schools by diverting resources from them and leaving them with fixed costs, larger classes, feeer teachers.
She writes:
I first met Alex Caputo-Pearl, the strike-leading president of the Los Angeles teachers’ union, in 2011, when I shadowed him for a day at Crenshaw High School.
I was working on a book about the history of public school teaching, and Mr. Caputo-Pearl, then a social studies teacher, had a fascinating personal story. He had served in the very first class of Teach for America recruits, in 1990, and was part of a small group of original T.F.A. members who were, 20 years later, still working in urban public school classrooms.
But Mr. Caputo-Pearl didn’t remain in the Teach for America fold. He became a union activist and a critic of T.F.A., charter schools and the entire landscape of test-driven accountability for children and educators. At Crenshaw High, he helped develop a social-justice curriculum in which students organized their learning around the question of how to improve conditions in their low-income South Los Angeles neighborhood. It was unapologetically activist — outside the mainstream of what education reform looked like at the time.
The school district later ended that program, and in 2014, Mr. Caputo-Pearl was elected president of the United Teachers Los Angeles, the local union. He represented a new, more militant generation of teachers’ union leaders. This month, he led 30,000 educators in a weeklong strike for higher pay and more classroom funding, and against the growth of the charter school sector. It’s a story I covered with Jennifer Medina, my fantastic National desk colleague in Los Angeles, and our editors Julie Bloom, Dave Kim and Marc Lacey.
I’ve been reporting on education for 13 years, but I am absolutely stunned by the extent to which teachers’ strikes and walkouts are now a day-to-day part of my job. The Los Angeles action was the eighth mass teacher protest I’ve reported on in just 11 months, shutting down schools for one million students across the country. The reappearance of Mr. Caputo-Pearl in my professional life was just one of several uncanny moments that have made me, at age 34, feel old in beat-reporter years. So much has changed in education, as the focus shifts from calling out and overhauling bad teachers and schools to listening more carefully to what educators say about their working conditions and how students are affected by them.
I was at the Democratic National Convention in 2008, when one of the hottest tickets was to a panel discussion in which rising stars in the party, including Cory Booker, then the mayor of Newark, spoke harshly of teachers’ unions and their opposition to charter schools, which are publicly funded, privately run and generally not unionized. Union leaders argue that charters draw public dollars and students away from traditional schools like Crenshaw High.
Back then, it was hip for young Democrats to be like Barack Obama, supportive of school choice and somewhat critical of teachers’ unions. But now, the winds have changed pretty drastically. The revival of democratic socialism within the party has left many elected officials — even Mr. Booker — much more hesitant, it seems, to critique organized labor. Across the country, red-clad teachers on strike, sometimes dancing and singing, have won the affection of grass-roots progressives over the past year, leading to a new political dynamic around education, just as the Democratic primary field for 2020 emerges. The emphasis now is on what education experts call “inputs” — classroom funding, teacher pay, and students’ access to social workers and guidance counselors — and less on “outputs,” like test scores or graduation rates.
The truth is, both inputs and outputs are important. In some ways, continuing to cover the war between union leaders and charter school supporters frustrates and exhausts me. Charter schools are a growing part of our educational landscape because parents are always looking for more good options when it comes to how and where to educate their children. On the other hand, while politicians and wealthy philanthropists have always given outsize attention to charters, they educate just about 6 percent of American public school children, some three million students. In many ways, the battle is ideological, over what role choice should play in our education system. Will public-sector competition between charters and traditional schools lead to improvement, or simply provoke a melee over scarce taxpayer dollars? So far, both outcomes, I’ve observed, are very real across the country.
A few months ago, I was doing research in The Times’s digital archives when I came across our 1995 obituary of Fred Hechinger, an eminent education reporter and columnist here. I printed it out and clipped a paragraph, which I keep at my desk for inspiration whenever my energy flags after more than a decade on this beat.
“I began to realize that a country’s approach to education in general, and especially to its children, could tell more about its social, political and economic background than a whole battery of interviews with politicians,” Mr. Hechinger once said.
He was right. So I continue on.
Diane Ravitch's blog 