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Arthur Camins: Why Democrats Should Oppose Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2015 //
18

Arthur Camins posted this thoughtful critique of the rush to replace democratically controlled public schools with privately managed charters and vouchers for private schools. He expects Republicans to embrace charters and vouchers, given their love of the marketplace. Camins is the director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.

 

But he criticizes Democrats for failing to defend the public nature of a public institution.

 

He writes:

 

 

 

As policy framing rhetoric, the word choice is meant evoke the imagery of democracy and equity. Words are powerful, especially in framing and influencing political debates. Words can conjure positive or negative emotional responses. However, sometimes words clarify and sometimes they obscure underlying values. So it is with choice.

 

In our culture the “the right to choose” suggests an almost inalienable individual right, making for powerfully resonant political rhetoric. However, behind the easy-to-swallow positive connotation of choice, there is underlying message in its use in the context of education. If stated explicitly, the message might cause a little indigestion: Be out for yourself and don’t worry so much about your neighbors or community.

 

I do not say this to castigate parents who choose to send their children to charter schools or the teachers who work in them. However, what is moral or sensible for an individual does not make for sound or just education policy for a society. The moral burden falls not on parents, but on those who knowingly advance the wellbeing of the at the expense of the many.

 

Many centuries ago Rabbi Hillel sagely wrote,

 

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?” Ethics of the Fathers, 1:14.
It is time to reframe the policy dialog from choosing just for me to choosing to ensure better schools for us.

 

There is reason for hope. While choice is a deeply held American value, so is community responsibility. In fact, reference to individualism and community responsibility in politics has ebbed and flowed in recent American history. The New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960’s- catalyzed by the labor and civil rights movements- represented high points for collective solutions, such as Social Security or Medicare, to complex problems. Alternatively, the election of Ronald Reagan initiated a sustained period of individualism. In periods of relative or growing equity and shared prosperity individualism may foster personal interests and creativity. However, in periods of scarcity a selfish brand of individualism diminishes equity by diverting attention from more systemic solutions that can only be achieved by collective action. Such is the case with charter schools. Only some are superior, and there is no evidence that a market-based, all-charter system will lead to overall improvement. On the contrary, charter school expansion is more likely to lead to market volatility and disruption in children’s lives.

 

With individualism in ascendancy, few current politicians challenge structural inequality or run for office on an explicit program of equity. Sadly, faith in the prospect of voting as a route to greater equity is at a low point while cynicism about the viability political process grows. As a result, the self-interested perspective of those with relatively more privilege leads to holding fast what they have. In the context of scarce federal and state education resources, that means protecting their community’s property tax resource advantage. It means maintaining various in-school segregative tracking mechanisms that privilege some children over others. Similarly, from the perspective of the disempowered and disadvantaged in urban areas, charter schools and vouchers may represent an individual choice in the apparent absence of viable community alternatives.

 

Supporters of equity and democracy must depend upon and develop agency and hope for community solutions because when there is only despair, the only rational course of action is individual survival. Ideological supporters of privatization understand this and actively undermine democratic participation and the promise of collective solutions. That is why since the 1980’s they have followed an explicit starve-the-beast strategy to defund public institutions in order to undermine quality, public trust, and confidence. That is why they favor private charter boards over elected school boards.

 

I have come to believe that the struggle for equity must include a tandem strategy of opposition and advocacy.

 

Friends of equity need to oppose funding charter schools, not because choice is inherently a bad idea but because the spread of charter schools is morally corrosive and drains money from other local schools. Since funds are always limited, the opportunities for the few come with the sacrifice of others. “They are stealing your child’s future,” might be an appropriate opposition slogan.

 

Developments outside of education, such as adoption of a $15 per hour minimum wage in several cities, may represent the beginning of a climb out of the valley of individualism. In education, the fledgling opt-out movement in response to the misuse of testing may represent a resurgence of hope in the power of agency through collective action.

 

Progress requires an opt-in campaign for local public schools based on community rather than individualist values. Advocacy should highlight the fundamental characteristics of effective public schools both in the U.S. and abroad and contrast these with prevalent market-based solutions.

 

These are the factors that make for the oft-mentioned great schools and teachers in which children flourish. Many already exist. The public needs to hear their stories. Friends of equity and democracy need to relentlessly offer these factors as a viable alternative for better schools.

 

Change will only happen when a movement demands these factors from the people we elect- from school boards to presidents. What we need is better choices in who we elect to guide education policy. Candidates need to hear from the public: There are better choices than school choice to improve education.

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Democrats, Education Reform, Equity, Privatization, Vouchers

Farewell, NCLB, We Won’t Miss You

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2015 //
41

The House-Senate conference committee overwhelmingly (39-1) endorsed an overhaul of the No Child Left Behind, which was the latest (and worst) revision of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The new ESEA, which still must be approved by both houses of Congress, is called the Every Student Succeeds Act.

 

The ESSA limits the federal role, a direct rebuke to Arne Duncan’s belief that he was the national superintendent of schools. The law retains a large chunk of George W. Bush’s legacy, including annual testing, a practice not found in any high-performing nation. The law no longer requires teacher evaluation by test scores.

 

The Republicans wanted to restore state and local control, while the Democrats ironically defended Bush’s accountability emphasis. The outcome is a compromise.

 

Most everyone seems to have forgotten that the original purpose of ESEA was equity for the neediest students, meaning federal dollars to high-poverty schools. Don’t you long for the day when laws were given descriptive titles, rather than aspirational ones? “Every Student Succeeds” is the flip side of “No Child Left Behind.” What was wrong with “the Elementary and Secondary Education Act”?

 

I don’t want to sound cynical, but I’m prepared to wager any sum that 7 years, 10 years, or 15 years from now, no one will say that every student is now succeeding. So long as nearly a quarter of our nation’s children live in poverty, “success” will remain elusive. So long as experienced teachers are underpaid and disrespected, so long as the anti-teacher lobby files lawsuits to strip teachers of their rights, “success”will escape our grasp. So long as jobs continue to be outsourced and eliminated by technology, we must continue to worry about whether and how young people will be motivated to “succeed.”

 

But for the moment, let’s celebrate the demise of a terrible law that saw punishment as the federal strategy for school reform. Let’s celebrate that no future Secretary of Education will have the power to impose his or her flawed ideas on every public school and teacher in the nation. Let’s thank Senator Lamar Alexander and Senator Patty Murray for finally ending a failed and punitive law.

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Equity, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

EduShyster: Liberty and Justice for a Few

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2015 //
9

EduShyster asks whether charter schools are “progressive.” Would you call the Walton Family Foundation, which hates unions, their biggest financial backer, progressive? Isn’t ALEC, with its model charter legislation, progressive? Would you call charter boosters Governor Scott Walker, Governor Bobby Jindal, Governor Rick Scott, Governor Rick Snyder,and Governor John Kasich, “progressive”?

Charter cheerleaders say they are “saving poor kids from failing schools.” In blue states, they portray themselves as progressive. They don’t bother to explain their strange right-wing bedfellows. They expect us to believe that it is progressive to transfer funding from public schools to privately managed schools.

It is not progressive. It is a classic case of wolf in sheep’s clothing.

EduShyster interviews a venerable civil rights leader in Boston, Mel King, who opposes charters. He says: “If the solution is only meant for a few kids, and all the rest of the kids are left out, where is the liberty and justice for all?”

The reformers’ shining example of charter success is the Edward Brooke school, which posts high test scores.

EduShyster writes:

“Writer Farah Stockman tells the story of the Edward Brooke charter in Mattapan where an all-minority student body posts some of the highest test scores in the city. Stockman skims over the fact that Brooke’s teachers are overwhelmingly white in a city where demands for a more representative teaching force date back decades. She doesn’t mention that minority boys with special needs, who are punished disproportionately in the Boston Public Schools, seem to fare even worse here. Instead, she dwells briefly on the question of whether it matters that a mere 5% of the students at Brooke are still learning English compared to nearly 30% in the Boston Public schools. Stockman concludes that it doesn’t because after all, there are other schools that serve small numbers of English Language Learners. As for what will happen to the rest of those students, she doesn’t bother to say.”

Categories Boston, Charter Schools, Equity

Pennsylvania: Gov. Wolf Fights to Fund Schools

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2015 //
3

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf is locked in a budget impasse with the legislature. For five months, the state has been without a budget, and social services–including achools–are suffering. Apparently, he and legislators may reach a deal by Thanksgiving Wolf wants to increase funding for education and to tax the fracking industry; the legislature doesn’t. After four years of Republican Tom Corbett, the legislature thinks it is acceptable to allow schools to go bankrupt (the easier to privatize them) and that the fracking industry must never be taxed to pay for the natural resources it extracts.

 

The voters don’t agree. A recent poll shows overwhelming support for taxes on gas drillers. 67% agree that the industry should be taxed.

 

Governor Wolf is a bright light in Pennsylvania, fighting for students and the future. For that matter, he is a bright light in the nation.

 

If you want to stay informed about Pennsylvania, sign up for the regular news summaries from the Keystone State Education Coalition.

Categories Equity, Funding, Pennsylvania

Yohuru Williams: An Amazing Speech on the Real Civil Rights Movement of Our Time

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2015 //
10

Dr. Yohuru Williams, historian at Fairfield University in Connecticut, recently delivered a blockbuster speech to a conference on educational justice in New York City.

He begins by quoting FDR on the Four Freedoms, then moves on to weave together the current movements and issues of our day. It is eloquent and powerful rhetoric on behalf of children, justice, and equity.

I promise if you start watching, you won’t be able to stop.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Equity, Justice, Poverty, Privatization

Ben Spielberg: Why Money Matters and Why We Should Spend More on Education

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2015 //
23

Ben Spielberg is a blogger who is knowledgeable about budgets and economics. In this post, he refutes the arguments of StudentsFirst leader Dmitri Mehlhorn that how money is spent matters, but we spend enough now. Spielberg works at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He knows whereof he writes. He says Mehlhorn is wrong, and he backs it up with “The Truth About School Funding.” Read his article to find and follow the links.

Spielberg marshals an impressive array of facts and data to show that we are far from achieving equitable or adequate funding of the neediest schools:

But what is adequate and equitable school funding? Researchers Bruce Baker and Danielle Farie and civil rights lawyer David Sciarra, who produce a National Report Card on school funding fairness, discuss this question at length in their 2015 report. One of the most important principles they note is that, because “[v]arying levels of funding are required to provide equal educational opportunities to children with different needs[,] finance systems should provide more funding to districts serving larger shares of students in poverty.”

School funding in the United States doesn’t come close to meeting this criterion; as Baker, Farie, and Sciarra show, fourteen states have regressive school funding systems, meaning they allocate less money to schools serving disadvantaged students than they do to schools serving more affluent student populations. Nineteen other states have roughly equivalent funding between the two types of schools. Only four states – Minnesota, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Delaware – score high enough across all of the researchers’ criteria (funding level; funding distribution; effort, or funding as a share of the state’s economy; and coverage, or “the share of school-age children enrolled in public schools and the degree to which there is economic disparity between households in the public versus private education system”) to have their funding systems deemed “fair.”

This analysis likely represents an upper bound on the degree of school funding equity in the United States. While California appears to have roughly equivalent funding for low- and high-income schools in the report, for example, there are major funding discrepancies between some of the state’s “basic aid” districts, which serve affluent students, and districts that serve lower-income populations. Within-district variations in spending also go undetected in the report’s metrics, as may situations in which funding that is supposed to follow high-need students doesn’t reach them.

Spielberg shows that Mehlhorn’s comparisons of spending in charter schools and spending in public schools are inaccurate.

What I have always noticed is that the argument “money doesn’t matter” always comes from people who have plenty of money and whose children are in very well-funded schools. I have never heard it said by any parent or teacher in an urban school.

Spielberg concludes:

Finally, it’s important to remember that even if aggregate funding levels were higher, aggregate numbers don’t speak to the distribution of funding. We’ve yet to target and sustain increased funding in schools that serve our neediest students. Especially when it comes to low-income areas, America definitely can – and should – invest more in K-12 public education.

We Should Avoid False Choices and Invest in Kids’ Opportunities

Increased funding, to be useful, must of course be spent in smart ways. Money by itself isn’t a panacea. But it’s important to get the facts right: money matters, and it matters quite a bit.

It is incredibly counterproductive to pit increased funding and smart spending against each other (though Mehlhorn’s piece acknowledges “that money spent properly can be helpful in improving achievement,” it balks at the idea that schools need additional funding), especially when schools serving the most disadvantaged students tend to get the fewest resources. Giving schools more money and making sure they spend that money wisely are complementary, not competing, goals.

Pitting education funding against social insurance and safety net spending, as former Tennessee education commissioner Kevin Huffman did in a recent article, is also absurd. While it’s true that adequate income support and health care matter most for low-income students and that school-based reforms cannot, contrary to Huffman’s assertion, “be the lynchpin of social mobility in America,” schools are still very important. Those truly committed to an equal opportunity agenda should stop taking potshots at its components and start getting to work on raising the revenues necessary to implement it.

As David Kirp wrote recently about pre-K programs: “Money doesn’t guarantee good outcomes, but it helps…In education, as in much of life, you get what you pay for.”

In America right now, we unfortunately don’t pay for the education system our students deserve. Until we do, we won’t get it.

Categories Accountability, Equity, Funding

South Carolina: A Northern Educator Looks Behind “Southern Hospitality”

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2015 //
56

After a career in education in Pennsylvania, Arnold Hillman and his wife Carol decided to move to Hilton Head, South Carolina, after their retirement. They spent 35 years advocating for children in rural schools.

Here are some unsettling first impressions, which Arnold wrote for this blog:


SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY ?????

This will be the 10th week that Carol and I have lived in South Carolina. It just seems like we have been getting settled in, which means unpacking boxes, buying new furniture, reordering our medications and going to copious doctors. The travel through the medical esplanade has been an awakening. We have concluded that the medical care here is superior to that which we received in Harrisburg.

It appears that docs here use the most advanced technology. It is difficult to conceive how much more we will find out as we run through them all. I am now enthused about how I might take the age spots off my hands, or eliminate the need for specs. I was even happy that I will now be able to eliminate some of these pesky growths on my arms and head without having them frozen off. In some ways these are positive things. You can figure out why they might not be.

We are living in a dream world. The community was built starting in 1995. It has every amenity you can think of. It has encouraged us to get into good physical shape. It has so many activities that some people have to take tranquilizers just to keep up. We will not be doing the club circuit as yet. We are more interested in what is going on outside the gates of the community than inside it.

What we found is rather sad. We understood when we moved down here, that Hilton Head Island is an extremely wealthy community. The first bizarre item is that there are tons of thrift shops. I guess when the wealthy change their home décor; they must get rid of their former furniture. It is also a place that houses many older people. That means when they pass (a southern expression) the items in their homes become grist for auctions, so that relatives can turn them into cash. There are even booklets with the names and locations of most of the thrift shops on both Hilton Head and Bluffton (where we live).

Carol and I are pretty much convinced that what we know as “Southern Charm” is just a cover name for racism. The county that we live in is next door to a very poor county. The kids in the schools there – they have county school districts, are 85% minority. In 2010, the graduation rate for the high schools in that county was 39%. Can you believe that, 39%? The well to do and mostly white county, in which we live, serves 21,000 students and is growing at a rate of 500 more students per year. Its schools are either new or are well turned out. Some of the elementary schools that have some poverty seem not to be as well resourced as some others.

The animosity of the community in the poor county can be viewed at every school board meeting. Most of the time, the white board members are attacking the school superintendent. She is African American. She is also very talented and has raised almost every major educational marker since she came here 5 years ago.

Because of her desire to improve the education of the children, she has embarked on a journey that has improved the district as a whole, but has angered those who enjoyed the fruits of a dilapidated system. Things like nepotism had run rampant. The hiring of those without the proper certifications were daily occurrences. School district economic issues were handled behind closed doors. People in the business office were not professionals and budgeting was helter skelter.

This appeared to be o.k. with a board that had seen significant turnover and co-terminus with superintendent turnover.

When the new superintendent arrived from being an assistant in a large city in South Carolina, she began to do away with nepotism. She dispensed with the uncertified staff and got rid of some of the employees that were there only because Uncle Louie insisted on their being hired. This began a minor conflagration with those whose reason for being on the board was to somehow influence the district to send business to them or their friends and family members.

As things started to improve, those who see African Americans with education as “uppity” wanted this all to stop and wanted to put her in her place. This all has a familiar ring to it. At the last election, most of the new board members had a beef with the superintendent. One new member wanted to have her daughter be the homecoming queen, even though she had lost. The mom wanted the superintendent to declare her daughter the winner.

Another member was a longtime volunteer from the wealthy side of the community. He worked at the high school and presented information he had gleaned there to make public presentations about how things were going so poorly. He was asked by the teachers to please leave.

I believe that South Carolina is the only state that buys its buses for all of its school districts. The buses that they purchased are usually used ones and last time they were those from Tennessee. Of the 30 some odd buses in the county, 20 of them are over 20 years old and have over 300,000 miles on them. This puts pressure on rural schools, because you might have some dough to lease other buses, but if not, you are stuck with the ancient ones. If you buy your own buses, the state removes THEIR buses one for one.

Some of our neighbors here in Disneyworld for adults, have never seen or experienced racial bias. I was forced to tell them that they did not look like the people who were being discriminated against. It is our experience that African American women are more likely to tell you what’s going on than African American men. I believe that is because it falls on their children to battle the forces that want to keep them in their place. The moms know what’s ahead for their children and have their feelings on their sleeves.

Carol and I may have some small understanding of discrimination. We have felt it as a result of living in rural communities where there were few or no Jews. There were a few incidents in the schools they went to. They were taken care of by the principals. Sometimes it’s good to be the superintendent of schools. Even the principals began to understand.

We went to a specialist for Carol’s issues in Savannah. Some of the preliminary testing was done by an African American woman in her forties. As the test was quite long, we were able to strike up a conversation with her. I guess, as patients, we were not anyone that she would have to worry about. She was quite frank with us about how the color of your skin meant more to people than what your skills were. She did not complain about having been passed over for a job. She explained that the kind of discrimination that goes on in the hospital must be seen with a wider eye.

Her view was that most of the jobs in the hospital, including physicians and nurses, were the province of those that controlled things. The city itself was set up so that only certain people were permitted to rise to the top. Even with an African American as mayor, the system was always the same. There was kind of a glass ceiling that everyone was just supposed to obey.

There was little of the outward prejudice that one might think was there, but it is more insidious and much less on the surface. Greetings with the terms, ma’am, sir, and so on are plentiful, but the real lack of respect is what happens after the introductions.

“The Corridor of Shame” was a documentary about the schools along rte. 95 in South Carolina. It extends from the North Carolina border to the border of Georgia. It is rife with poverty and schools with insufficient funds. It was also the subject of a lawsuit based on the Abbeville School District that began in 1993 and was concluded just last year. The Supreme Court of South Carolina voted 3-2 for the legislature to produce adequate funding for its schools. The legislature was given to February 2016 to come up with a plan.

The legislature has said that it had no intention of fulfilling that order.
88% of those school districts children are minority. Looks like another victory for Southern Charm.

Categories Equity, Race, South Carolina

Jamaal Bowman: A Call for Educational Justice

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2015 //
2

Jamaal Bowman, principal of Cornerstone Academy of Social Action in Néw York City, was a major speaker at a conference “A Call for Educational Justice.” You may have read about Jamaal in this earlier post.

You will enjoy watching this six minute video, created by film-maker Michael Elliott.

Jamaal Bowman has earned a fine reputation as an educator who believes in children and in public schools. He knows there are no quick fixes when children have so many burdens and obstacles in their young lives. Where to begin, he asks? Start with love. Recognize the brilliance in every child. Prepare them to live in a different world and to change the world they live in.

Categories Equity, Joy, Students

Amanda Koonlaba: Can the People of Mississippi Save Their Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2015 //
7

Amanda Koonlaba, an art teacher in Tupelo, Mississippi, explains here that Mississippi is in a pitched battle to fund its public schools adequately. The issue is joined in a political struggle over Initiative 42, which would require the adequate funding of public education. Initiative 42 is opposed by the forces of privatization, which prefer to open privately managed charters, hand out vouchers for religious schools, and block any increase in funding for the public schools.

Koonlaba writes:

In 1997, the Mississippi Legislature passed a law promising to provide each public school district in Mississippi enough financial support to furnish an adequate education to every K-12 student. That law is called the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP), and has only been followed twice since its was passed. This has resulted in a shortfall of over a billion dollars since 2009. That is a billion dollars that would have provided textbooks, technology, and certified teachers. Instead, Mississippi’s students have just had to do without.

In 2014, nearly 200,000 Mississippians from every county and both political parties took a stand and signed petitions to have Initiative 42 added to the ballot on November 3, 2015. This would amend the state constitution in a way that makes public education a priority instead of an afterthought. Initiative 42 closes a loophole that has allowed the Legislature to break the MAEP law for so long.

After citizens signed these petitions, the very first thing the Legislature did when they went back into session was to pass an alternative to Initiative 42.

The alternative was intended to confuse voters, to protect the status quo, and to prevent any increase in funding for public schools.

The leaders of the opposition to Initiative 42 have ties to the Koch Brothers and Americans for Prosperity.

And ALEC, the enemy of the public good, is involved too.

This spring, the Legislature passed a school voucher bill straight from the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) playbook. ALEC helps corporations, idealogues, and their political allies pass legislation that privatizes schools. This legislation is written behind closed doors and then passed around from state to state. All a lawmaker has to do is fill in the blanks with the name of their particular state. It benefits large corporations and directs public tax dollars to private entities. ALEC is funded by the Koch Brothers. Interestingly, Jeb Bush, who is also closely connected to Americans for Prosperity, attended [Governor] Phil Bryant’s signing of this bill in Jackson.

The passage of Initiative 42 is crucial for the future of the children and public schools of Mississippi. It is a chance for the public to say NO to the 1% that rule ALEC and the other privatization advocates.

It is a chance for citizens and local communities to stand up for their public schools and stop the corporate assault on them.

Koonlaba writes:

Initiative 42 is a light in the darkness of this attack on Mississippi’s public schools. It is a chance for the citizens of Mississippi to stand up to the Legislature and remind them that they work for citizens not privatizers. Mississippians want their public schools to remain public and be fully funded.

However, Mississippians need help sorting through what the Executive Editor of the Clarion Ledger, Sam R. Hall, called “a load of horse crap” from the opposition to Initiative 42. Luckily, several groups are working to help Mississippians do this to get the initiative passed.

The Parent’s Campaign and the Mississippi Association of Educators have been working to educate the public on the initiative. 42 for Better Schools is the actual campaign to pass Initiative 42 and is a coalition of Mississippi public schools supporters and organizations. A grassroots group called Fed Up with 50th emerged to support school funding issues. They write on their Facebook page that

“We are law-abiding, tax-paying Mississippi voters—Republicans and Democrats—and we are FED UP! We are FED UP with failing schools, low graduation rates, poor teacher support, crowded classrooms, crumbling buildings, not enough textbooks or computers—all the things that make us 50th in education year after year. More than anything, we are FED UP that our legislators continue to BREAK THE LAW and underfund our schools, STEALING from our children and SELLING OUT their future to special interests.”
If Initiative 42 passes on November 3, Mississippians will have won a major battle but will have much work still left to do. If it doesn’t pass, the war will be lost.

Initiative 42 is a chance for Mississippians to tell the corporate entrepreneurs that their children and their public schools are not for sale.

If they stand together, the people of Mississippi can beat the 1%.

Categories Budget Cuts, Equity, Funding, Mississippi, Privatization

Charter Teacher: Is Eva Fighting Against Inequality?

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2015 //
5

A teacher in a New York City charter school sent me this article.

He said he was fed up with the claim by charter boosters that they are trying to end inequality. Actually, the opposite is true. He also wanted teachers to know about the website where his article appeared: school building.org, because it is written and edited by teachers.

Here is an excerpt from his post:

“According to the New York City Charter School Center, charters serve less than 9% of the 1.1 million children in the New York City school system. Although FES claims that school funding does not affect a school’s efficacy, it seems obvious that Success owes its achievements in part to its incredible wealth. These two organizations command an overwhelming amount of political attention and financial support, all to benefit a very small percentage of the city. Allowing more charters to open may or may not be a good thing, but it’s clear that it will not significantly impact the inequality of New York City schools.

“Now this may all be old news to people who pay attention to this sort of thing. But the first thing that bothers me about this rally is that Success and FES must be well aware that their work will not significantly affect these “two school systems” that they so resoundingly condemn. Even if we let alone the fact that FES has drawn this division in the public schools for a rhetorical purpose and accept their definition of the problem, it’s obvious that charters like Success only introduce a new form of inequality into the system. That the benefactors of this new network are mostly low-income students doesn’t take away from the fact that the organization functions as a separate entity with better access to philanthropy and political protection than the “tunnel to failure” schools. In this sense, charters are actually the cause of a separate and unequal system; the kind of system that this rally is pretending to fight.

“And yet, Success and FES have mobilized teachers and families with false information and an incomplete portrayal of their role in our unequal society. This leaves me with a few questions. What does it mean for a privileged school to use the voices and bodies of their families to push an agenda that contradicts the message that these families have been told they are supporting? What does it mean for a charter school to use disadvantaged families to further expand their privileges? What does it mean for a school to pretend to support equality while it pushes an agenda that only benefits the few?

“(And of course I’m leaving aside a number of very important concerns. The verdict is still out on whether or not the public should support policies to expand charter schools. It’s also not clear that this particular school, Success Academy, really does have great schools by anyone’s standards other than their own. A lot has been written about the school, and the most reliable report from Kate Taylor portrays what many would feel is not a school they would call great. I’m also ignoring the fact that charter schools, whose selection process affects their population, should not be lazily compared with public schools who have no selection process. Or whether it is ethical for a school that receives public funds to close for the day and pay to bus it’s teachers and students to a political rally. These concerns are worthy of deeper investigation, but that must be for another post.)”

Categories Charter Schools, Equity, Harlem Success Academy
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