Archives for category: Education Industry
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Shawgi Tell: The Untold History of Charter School Failure

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2019 //
16

 

Shawgi Tell, a Professor in upstate New York, thinks the public needs that charter school failure is widespread, commonplace, and underreported. Even now, mainstream publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal treat charter schools reverentially, as if they know how to perform education miracles.

Professor Tell assembles research showing the frequent failure of charters. 

Open the link to see a great cartoon.

He writes:

It is worth noting that both public schools and privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools are victims of expensive, curriculum-narrowing, time-consuming, high-stakes standardized tests produced by large for-profit corporations that have no idea what a human-centered education looks like. Such corporations are retrogressive and harmful in many ways; they are not concerned with the growth and well-being of children, or the future of society.

The research on how damaging and unsound these expensive corporate tests are is robust, unassailable, and constantly-growing.

High-stakes standardized testing has nothing to do with learning, growth, joy, or serving a modern society and economy. Unsound assessments do not prepare young people for life. High-stakes standardized testing does not even rest on a scientific conception of measurement; it is discredited psychometric pseudo-science through and through.

Still, with these important caveats in mind, thousands of charter schools, even when they cherry-pick students with impunity, dodge tests and ratings, and massage or misreport test scores, perform worse on these flawed, top-down, widely-rejected corporate tests than public schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Privatization, Testing

Coincidence? Washington Post Editorial and Jeb Bush Agree that They Don’t Like Bernie on Charters

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2019 //
65

The Washington Post Editorial Board is made about charter schools. They were also over the moon for Michelle Rhee’s authoritarian rule of the D.C. schools, which launched a short career as an outspoken proponent of charters and vouchers. Rhee became closely allied with Jeb Bush, who was also Betsy DeVos’s friend and mentor.

This we should not be surprised to discover that the Washington Post published an editorial blasting Senator Sanders’s critique of charter schools, using almost the same language as the far-right choice ideologue Jeb Bush.

Isn’t it interesting that this Washington Post editorial has almost the same headline as an article from a right-wing think tank  (the Foundation for Economic Education) https://fee.org/about

There’s nothing progressive about strangling charter schools – The …


https://www.washingtonpost.com/…nothing-progressive…charter-schools/…/acb80baa-7…
5 hours ago – Among the more promising efforts to deal with this urgent issue have been public charter schools, which give poor families the choice in their …

There’s Nothing Progressive about Bernie’s War on Charter Schools …


https://fee.org/articles/bernie-sanders-s-war-on-charter-schools-is-hardly-progressive/
3 days ago – Doubling down on efforts to strengthen an inherently coercive system of mass schooling by diminishing education choice is a troubling retreat …
Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Rachel Cohen: The Untold History of Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2019 //
20

Thanks to Los Angeles blogger Sara Roos for calling my attention to this very interesting article by journalist Rachel Cohen. We have had an extended exchange about the article.

Cohen says that the typical origin story of charter schools credits the idea to AFT President Al Shanker. She shows that the idea was percolating long before Shanker began promoting charters in 1988. The idea of public-private partnerships was in the air in the late 1980s and was the underpinning of what was called Third Way politics, as practiced by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

Cohen does an excellent job of describing the milieu in which the charter idea emerged. Shanker was not its originator but he was an important publicist for the idea. Without his support, charters might never have achieved national attention.

Right-wingers today, as Cohen notes, like to credit paternity of charters to Shanker, which is amusing since 90% of charters are non-union. Charter advocates who think of themselves as progressive also cling to Shanker as their forebear, but can’t explain why the charter sector is both non-union and highly segregated.

Cohen fails to mention that Shanker renounced charters in 1993, five years after embracing them, because he realized that his idea had been sabotaged and had turned into a tool with which to bust unions and to privatize public schools. In one of the paid advertisements that he published every Sunday in the New York Times, he wrote that charters were no different from vouchers. And he denounced them.

Strangely, neither the right-wingers nor the progressive charter fans ever acknowledge that Shanker denounced what was allegedly his big idea.

It is important to recall what Shanker had in mind when he supported charters.

1. He saw them as schools-within-schools, not as independent schools operating with their own school board, nor as corporate chains replacing public schools.

2. He saw them as teacher-run schools.

3. He saw them recruiting the weakest and most alienated students, the ones who had dropped out or were at risk of dropping out.

4. He said they should not be authorized without the support of the teachers in the school where they would operate.

5. He said they should not be authorized without the permission of the local school board.

6. He expected that the teachers in the charter school, operating as a school-within-a-school, would be members of the same union as the other teachers in the building.

7. He believed that the charter should run for five years, which would allow it to try out new ideas and share them with the rest of the school.

8. He did not envision the charter school as a permanent entity, but as a five-year or longer experiment designed to allow innovation and collaboration.

9. He did not envision charters run by non-educators, entrepreneurs, corporations, and grifters.

10. He did not envision corporate charter chains.

11. He did not envision a charter industry that is 90% non-union, more segregated than district public schools, and inclined to cherrypick the most motivated students.

When he saw businesses moving into the public school sector, he realized his own ideas had been destroyed by greed.

What he thought initially was a progressive idea was captured by the Waltons, the DeVos family and others on the right who wanted to destroy public schools and unions.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, History, Privatization

Michigan: President of State Board Explains Why It Declined to Spend $47 Million for New Charters

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2019 //
17

 

Casandra E. Ulbrich, president of the Michigan State Board of Education, responded to an editorial in the Detroit News complaining that the State Board rejected $47 million for new charter schools. She explains why the Board declined to spend the money awarded to the state by the federal Charter Schools Program. It doesn’t need new schools or new charters. About 80% of the charters operating in the state are “for-profit.” Furthermore, as Michigan has invested in charters, its test scores have dropped dramatically.

She writes:

This month, the State Board of Education was presented with grant criteria that ultimately could spend $47 million in taxpayer money on new and expanding charter schools. As elected board members, we raised legitimate questions about the need and the nature of these expenditures, following the release of a national research report indicating that over $1 billion of similar grant funds have been awarded to entities that either never opened a school, or opened and then closed.

In the 2002-03 school year, Michigan educated 1,713,165 public K-12 students. Last year, that number fell to 1,507,772. That’s a drop of over 200,000 students. The National Center for Education Statistics predicts that public school enrollment will continue to decline by another five percent by 2025.

Despite these declines, Michigan’s public education system continues to expand. Since 2008, 226 charter schools have opened in Michigan (38 have closed). For every new school, there are additional costs to the system, including administration and, as often is the case with Michigan charters, profit.

All this new school creation has not led to increased achievement for students. In fact, Michigan has seen the opposite. According to the Nation’s Report Card, in 2003 Michigan fourth-grade students were ranked 28th in the nation for reading scores. Last year, we ranked 35th, and in fourth-grade math, 38th….

The second major concern we expressed relates to the results of the last round of federal charter school grants. From 2010-15, 186 Michigan entities were approved for funding under this grant program. Of those, 67 received funding but never opened a charter school….

The editorial also indicates that charter schools “dominate” the list of Michigan’s highest performing high schools. Based on the state’s index system — approved by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos as Michigan’s school accountability system — this simply is not true. Only three charter schools that offer high school grades rank in the Top 100 of Michigan’s federally-approved Index system.

The lesson from Michigan: Choice produces profits, not better education.

Michigan has been Betsy DeVos’s petri dish to demonstrate her theories about school choice. It undermines public schools without producing better results by any metric. But it does enrich investors.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization

Sonoma County Creates Charter to Stop White Flight

By dianeravitch
May 25, 2019 //
36

 

Capitol & Main reports that the Healdsburg school district in Sonoma County in wine country was worried about white flight, so it opened a charter school and put it in the same building with the public school. That’s called co-location.

However, the two schools in the same building have very different demographics.

Taking advantage of California’s co-location rules regarding charters, 266 charter school students share the same campus with the public elementary school’s 323 kids. The two student bodies aren’t exactly similar, however. The public school is 89 percent Latino, while Latinos only account for 36 percent of the charter’s enrollment. The divide vividly extends to learning achievement…

Last year only 23 percent of the public elementary school’s students in grades three to five met or exceeded state math standards, while the figure was 55 percent for Healdsburg Charter kids in the same grades. A full 88.5 percent of the public school students were socioeconomically disadvantaged, compared to just 33.5 percent of the charter school students. And 70.6 percent of public school students were English-language learners, while only 13.7 percent of charter school students were ELLs.

One school mostly for white kids, another mostly for Latino kids. One for the middle-class and affluent, the other for the farmworkers’ children.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Inequity, Privatization

Samuel Abrams on the Coming Charter Expansion in Puerto Rico

By dianeravitch
May 24, 2019 //
3

 

Samuel Abrams, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, writes here about the likely effects of the influx of charter schools in Puerto Rico.

This is the abstract.

With the passage of the Education Reform Act in March 2018, Puerto Rico joined states across the mainland in authorizing charter schools as privately managed government-funded alternatives to conventional public schools. In this article, Samuel E. Abrams describes the origins of charter schools, their formal introduction with legislation in Minnesota in 1991 and evolution since, and their probable impact in Puerto Rico. While conceding that charter schools may diversify the educational landscape and serve many students well, Abrams cautions that charter schools can generate untoward division, as they tend to enroll fewer children with academic and behavioral challenges and more children of engaged parents. The exit of such parents from conventional public schools, he writes, compounds this division, as they take with them their voice to advocate for better schooling for all children. Abrams contends this problem of exit stands to have an especially strong effect in Puerto Rico given that 25% of K-12 students on the island already attend private schools compared to 10% across the mainland.

Citation: Samuel E. Abrams, Exit, Voice, and Charter Schools, 88 Rev. Jur. UPR 894 (2019).

Here is the full article. 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Puerto Rico

Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh School Board Rejects Charter School, But State Overrules Decision

By dianeravitch
May 24, 2019 //
7

The elected School Board of Pittsburgh unanimously rejected a charter school called Catalyst Academy because of concern about its proposed disciplinary policy and its ability to meet the needs of students with disabilities. The School Board’s decision was overturned by the state’s Charter Appeals Board, which was appointed by the former Republican Governor. The members of the CAB have ties to the charter industry.

This is NOT how democracy should work.

Why should a highly conflicted board appointed by a former Governor have the authority to override the decision of a democratically elected community school board?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Privatization

Good News! Bill to Restrict Charter Appeals Passes California Assembly

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2019 //
2

The Legislature in California is considering four bills to regulate the state’s unregulated, unaccountable charter industry.

Under current law, charters can locate wherever they want, without regard to the fiscal impact on the district they choose. They first apply to the local district; if they are turned down because the local district doesn’t want or need a charter, they can appeal to the county board of education. If they lose there, they can appeal to the state board, which Gov. Jerry Brown packed with pro-charter allies. Ten percent of students in the state attend charters, as do 20% in L.A., and even more in Oakland. Small rural districts may authorize charters that are located in districts hundreds of miles away, ensuring that the charters will never have supervision. The rural district collects a fee for every student who enroll in the far-away district.

The first law—AB 1505– passed the Assembly yesterday in a close vote. Its purpose is to give more control to districts to decide whether to allow charters to open and compete with district schools. It passed by a vote of 42-19. The bill required 41 votes to advance to the State Senate. Here is the text of the bill.

For nearly an hour, Assembly Bill 1505 stood just shy of a handful of the 41 votes required to advance to the Senate, in part because of concerns the bill went too far in limiting the ability of charter schools to appeal authorization denials from local school districts to county and state education boards.

Moderate Democrats in particular were reluctant to support the measure. When the bill finally passed 42-19, it was with an assurance from  Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, the bill’s author, that the bill would be amended to include a “fair” appeal process.

“We knew this was going to be a fight because this is a heavily political matter,” O’Donnell said following the floor vote. “Charter schools have a lot of resources that public schools don’t on the political front, and they employ them in the state Capitol, and we saw that today.”

AB 1505, 1506 and 1507 and Senate Bill 756, put forth as a charter regulation package, have pitted teachers unions and supporters of traditional public schools against advocates of charter schools, which are public but mostly non-union. The two education interests are among Sacramento’s most powerful, and until this past election, when union candidates triumphed in races for governor and statewide schools chief, they have largely fought to a draw.

If passed, the package of proposals would make the most significant changes in a generation to the state’s 27-year-old charter school laws. They would give local school boards more power over authorizations, enact a statewide cap on charters, prohibit districts from authorizing charters outside their geographic boundaries—and impose a two-year moratorium if the Legislature doesn’t make specific reforms by the end of this two-year session.

California has more charter schools than any other state—nearly 1,300. Their freedom from regulation or accountability has been zealously guarded by the powerful California Charter Schools Association, which sPends more than $20 million each year lobbying the Legislature.

Will California’s Legislature finally say “no” to Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, and other billionaire guardians of the charter industry?

Sure, the California Teachers Association lobbies for public schools but its resources don’t match those of the billionaires and its  funds come from the dues of teachers, not equities and corporate profits.

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry

Jersey Jazzman Offers Advice to the Media About Covering Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2019 //
3

 

Jersey Jazzman, aka Mark Weber, is a teacher in New Jersey who took the time to earn a Ph.D. So he could decipher the studies and research usedto make decisions about schools.

In this post, he explains to the media how to cover charter schools.

He noticed that Senator Bernie Sanders’ proposal to ban for-profit charter schools unleashed a wave of commentary about charter schools. Many people have no idea what they are. They don’t know that they are privately managed but publicly funded and that most charter schools operate with little or no oversight. It’s a sweet deal to get public money with no one checking the books.

He writes:

I can’t say I’m surprised, but it looks like Bernie Sanders’ latest policy speech on education – where, among other things, he calls for a ban on for-profit charter schools and other charter school reforms — has generated a lot of fair to poor journalism that purports to explain what charters are and how they perform.

Predictably, the worst of the bunch is from Jon Chait, who cheerleads for charters often without adhering to basic standards of transparency. Chait’s latest piece is so overblown that even a casual reader with no background in charter schools will recognize it for the screed that it is, so I won’t waste time rebutting it.

There are, however, plenty of other pieces about Sanders’ proposals that take a much more measured tone… and yet still get some charter school basics wrong. I’m going to hold off on citing specific examples and instead hope (against hope) that maybe I can get through to some of the journalists who want to get the story of charters right.

The first warning is not to accept the claims that CREDO makes, especially not its assertion that it can measure “days of learning.” It can’t.

Second point, don’t accept the assertion that “charter schools are public schools.” They get public money but bot everything that gets public money is “public.” Like Harvard and Boeing.

Third point, do charter schools strip funding from public schools? JJ is not sure but Gordon Lafer is. See his study here on the fiscal drain that charters impose on public school. 

4) The “best” charter sectors get their gains through increased resources, peer effects, and a test prep curriculum — and not through “charteriness.”

Read the rest for yourself. JJ is always worth reading.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Data, Education Industry, Research

Jan Resseger: Teachers in West Virginia Forego a Pay Raise to Block Charters and Vouchers

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2019 //
5

 

Teachers in West Virginia stunned the nation in February 2018 by going out on strike and staying out while demanding a pay raise and a commitment from the Governor and Legislature not to support charter schools and privatization. Theywon a pay raise and they had a commitment from Governor Jim Justice to veto charter legislation. Justice is a billionaire, the richest man in the state.

A year later, the Legislature was ready to abandon its promise not to introduce privatization. The teachers struck again.

Jan Resseger has the story here. 

The Legislature wants to put the camel’s nose under the tent. Just the nose. Promise. Cross my heart.

Don’t believe them. They are lying. Once the privatization starts, the camel gets into the tent. The tiny voucher program becomes a massive voucher program. The experimental charter becomes a major lobbying industry.

Fight for public education.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization, Teachers, Vouchers, West Virginia
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