A few months ago, Steven Singer wrote a critique of privatization that Facebook refused to let him post. It wa titled “School Choice is a Lie.” This Post was blocked by Facebook, and Steven was banned from Facebook for a week. It has happened again!
Steven wrote this post, “The False Paradise of School Privatization.” Once again, Facebook has banished him. Please read the post and put it on your Facebook page if you have one.
In 2000, when George W. Bush ran for President, we heard about “the Texas Miracle.” We were told that testing every child every year would produce high test scores and close the achievement gaps. Believing in the claim, Congress passed No Child Left Behind, which required testing every child every year from grades 3-8.
Then came “Race to the Top,” which ratcheted up the testing punishments, requiring that teachers be evaluated by student test scores.
In 2011, the National Research Council warned that test-based accountability was not working and was unlikely ever to work.
Congress ignored its report. In 2015, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, continuing the practice of annual testing, a practice not known in other nations.
What has 17 years of high-stakes testing produced? Narrowing of the curriculum to what is tested. Cheating scandals. Gaming the system. Teacher demoralization. Teacher shortages.
Billions spent on testing instead of teaching.
But nowhere closer to the “top.” Even the NAEP scores went flat in 2015, the first reversal in many years.
The latest international test results show no gains in reading. None.
This failure belongs to Reformers.
Jeff Bryant has a warning for Democrats: Beware of corporate education reform.
Leave it to the Republicans.
Don’t promote privatization and charters. Don’t bash teachers. Don’t beat up on unions. You erode your base.
He points to Denver and Virginia. In Denver, a candidate for school board won, even though she was outspent nearly 5-1.
In Virginia, Ralph Northam made clear his opposition to charters.
Listen, Democrats.
The Associated Press conducted a study of racial segregation in the schools and concluded that charter schools were responsible for intensifying segregation.
Charter schools are among the nation’s most segregated, an Associated Press analysis finds — an outcome at odds, critics say, with their goal of offering a better alternative to failing traditional public schools.
National enrollment data shows that charters are vastly over-represented among schools where minorities study in the most extreme racial isolation. As of school year 2014-2015, more than 1,000 of the nation’s 6,747 charter schools had minority enrollment of at least 99 percent, and the number has been rising steadily…
In the AP analysis of student achievement in the 42 states that have enacted charter school laws, along with the District of Columbia, the performance of students in charter schools varies widely. But schools that enroll 99 percent minorities-both charters and traditional public schools-on average have fewer students reaching state standards for proficiency in reading and math.
“Desegregation works. Nothing else does,” said Daniel Shulman, a Minnesota civil rights attorney. “There is no amount of money you can put into a segregated school that is going to make it equal.”
Shulman singled out charter schools for blame in a lawsuit that accuses the state of Minnesota of allowing racially segregated schools to proliferate, along with achievement gaps for minority students. Minority-owned charters have been allowed wrongly to recruit only minorities, he said, as others wrongly have focused on attracting whites.
But charter advocates respond that the segregation in charters is voluntary and therefore acceptable.
There is growing debate over just how much racial integration matters. For decades after the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that segregated schools were unconstitutional, integration was held up as a key measure of progress for minorities, but desegregation efforts have stalled and racial imbalances are worsening in American schools. Charter schools have been championed by the U.S. education secretary, Betsy DeVos, and as the sector continues to grow it will have to contend with the question of whether separate can be equal.
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools spokeswoman Vanessa Descalzi said today’s charters cannot be compared to schools from the Jim Crow era, when blacks were barred from certain schools.
“Modern schools of choice with high concentrations of students of color is a demonstration of parents choosing the best schools for their children, rooted in the belief that the school will meet their child’s educational needs, and often based on demonstrated student success,” Descalzi said. “This is not segregation…”
Charter schools, which are funded publicly and run privately, enroll more than 2.7 million nationwide, a number that has tripled over the last decade. Meanwhile, as the number of non-charter schools holds steady in the U.S., charters account for nearly all the growth of schools where minorities face the most extreme racial isolation.
While 4 percent of traditional public schools are 99 percent minority, the figure is 17 percent for charters. In cities, where most charters are located, 25 percent of charters are over 99 percent nonwhite, compared to 10 percent for traditional schools.
School integration gains achieved over the second half of the last century have been reversed in many places over the last 20 years, and a growing number of schools educate students who are poor and mostly black or Hispanic, according to federal data.
The resegregation has been blamed on the effects of charters and school choice, the lapse of court-ordered desegregation plans in many cities, and housing and economic trends…
Howard Fuller, a prominent advocate of charters and vouchers whose organization was funded by rightwing foundations for millions of dollars said that “It’s a waste of time to talk about integration.”
He might have also said it is a waste of time to talk about charters and vouchers, which have not provided educational excellence for large numbers of black children. Boucher’s actually depress test scores, and the charter “successes” are those that winnow their students down to the survivors. There is no large-scale charter succcess story. School Choice has failed black and brown children.
The AP study gave breakouts for individual districts. I can’t find the link, but will keep looking. Here is the data for the schools of Jacksonville, Florida.
“Between the 181 public and charter schools in Duval County, 13 percent of them reported a black student population of 90 percent or higher in 2014, while none had a 90 or higher white population. Of the 10 most segregated schools in Jacksonville, seven of them were either charter or magnet schools; the other three being traditional neighborhood schools.
“Looking at the data a different way, 1 percent of white students attended a school that is overwhelmingly white while 23 percent of Duval County’s black students attend a school where at least 90 percent of the student body is black.”
The Douglas County School Board voted unanimously to shut down its voucher program, the only one in the nation authorized by a school district. This was a big setback for the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, which lavished funding on the DougCo schools.
Douglas County is one of the wealthiest districts in the nation.
Anti-voucher parents and educators swept the rightwing school board out of Office in the November elections.
“The Douglas County school board Monday put to bed the district’s controversial Choice Scholarship program, ending a six-year battle to set up the nation’s only district-approved voucher program.
“The vote to end the voucher program, and the legal battle that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, was unanimous: six to nothing. One board member, Kevin Leung, did not participate in the deliberations or the vote, fulfilling a campaign pledge that he would sit out the vote because he is a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the school district.
“Leung is one of four board members elected on a campaign pledge to end the voucher program. He initially asked to be excused from Monday’s meeting but was asked to be present as the board would also discuss its search for a permanent superintendent.
“The other three — Chris Ciancio-Schor, Anthony Graziano and new board Secretary Krista Holtzmann — all voted to end the program along with board President David Ray, Vice President Wendy Vogel and Board Treasurer Anne-Marie Lemieux.
“The Choice Scholarship was authorized in March 2011 by a conservative majority elected in 2009 and backed with tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from wealthy pro-voucher Republicans including Alex Cranberg of Aspect Energy and Ed McVaney, founder of software company JD Edwards.
“The program would have given a taxpayer-funded voucher, valued in 2015 at around $5,000, to up to 500 Douglas County students who lived in the district and attend Douglas County public schools for one year.
“The Choice Scholarship was the first in the nation to be authorized by a school district. Most voucher programs are created by state legislatures and are targeted to low income students in failing schools.
“Douglas County, the fifth wealthiest county in the nation, did not include an income qualifier for its voucher.
“Until recently, school board races have generally been low-key (and low-dollar) campaigns. But the big dollars spent in Douglas County and Denver on this year’s races signaled the beginning of radical change in those two school districts around the issue of school choice. In Douglas County, the hot button issue was the voucher program; in Denver, it was charter and “innovation schools.” The Denver school board hiked the number of charter schools from 17 to 60, beginning in 2010, and the number of innovation schools, similar to charters, from seven to 49.
“In June 2011, the parents group Taxpayers for Public Education filed for an injunction against the school district to block the program’s implementation. The case wound its way to the Colorado Supreme Court, which in 2015 ruled the program unconstitutional based on the state’s Blaine amendment, which bans the use of taxpayer dollars for religious purposes, including religious education.
“The district, the third largest in the state, with more than 60,000 students, received $1.8 million in donations for its legal expenses from the Daniels Fund and the Walton Family Foundation. The district appealed the Colorado high court’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sent the case back to the Colorado Supreme Court last June.
“Prior to Monday’s board vote, which took place just after 7 p.m., the board listened to more than an hour of pleas from those who wanted to make sure the new board members held to their pledge, as well as from those who wanted the voucher program to have a chance to work.
“During the board’s public comment period, every speaker who addressed the voucher program asked the board to end it.”
Here is the report from Chalkbeat Colorado.
“Public funds should not be diverted to private schools, which are not accountable to the public,” said board member Krista Holtzmann.
“The state Supreme Court, which during the summer was directed by the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit the case, will have the ultimate say in whether the legal challenge will end.
“However, the court usually does not consider moot cases, said Mark Silverstein, legal director for the ACLU of Colorado, a plaintiff in the case.
“The board’s action is a blow to conservative education reform advocates and voucher supporters in Colorado and across the country. Proponents of vouchers had hoped a victory at the U.S. Supreme Court would set a national precedent.
“The legal question at the center of the voucher debate is whether a local school district can send tax dollars to private-religious institutions. A majority of the schools that enrolled in the Douglas County voucher system, known as the Choice Scholarship Program, were religious.
“The state Supreme Court in 2015 ruled that the district could not because the Colorado Constitution forbids it. The U.S. Supreme Court gave voucher supporters renewed hope this year when, in a similar case, it issued a narrow ruling for a preschool run by a church.
“A network of voucher supporters has argued that such constitutional prohibitions, known as Blaine Amendments, are rooted in Catholic bigotry and are outdated.
“Americans for Prosperity, a political nonprofit [the Billionaire Koch brothers] that advocates for free-market policies including private school vouchers, announced Friday it was spending “five figures” to warn Douglas County parents about the board’s decision to end the program.
“The new school board must put the needs of school children before any political belief,” Jesse Mallory, the group’s Colorado director, said in a statement. “Ending this program before it even has a chance to succeed and provide real change in our communities would be extremely shortsighted. If the board believes they should deny children more educational opportunities, AFP-Colorado will hold them accountable.”
“Opponents of vouchers, who showed up in force Monday night, presented a lengthy list of claims against private schools and vouchers. Some argued that private schools discriminate against students. Others suggested vouchers were part of a scheme to privatize education.
“What happens to the educational quality of children in the community school where there is less money to work with because of the voucher outflow?” said one speaker, Barbara Gomes Barlow, who has grandchildren in Douglas County schools. “It is diminished. It’s a fiction to believe that vouchers open up choice for all students. They do not.”
“Monday’s meeting comes nearly one month after four anti-voucher candidates — Holtzmann, Anthony Graziano, Chris Schor and Kevin Leung — resoundingly won seats on the board. Their opponents campaigned to keep the legal fight alive.”
Mayor Rahm Emanuel continues his crusade to push public schools out of Chicago.
In a wave of closings and consolidation, the mayor found room for a new charter school run by a megachurch and a hip hop artist. The mother of the hip hop artist serves on the zchicago Board of Education.
“Chicago Public Schools on Friday moved ahead with school closing and merger proposals that would affect thousands of kids next school year.
“Under a previously announced plan, four South Side schools would close over the summer and the district would send hundreds of displaced students to surrounding schools. One building would be demolished to make way for a new high school, and privately operated charter schools would take over two other sites, under the district’s plan.
“Students at two predominantly African-American elementary schools near downtown would merge with more diverse campuses. One of those buildings, in the growing South Loop area, would gradually convert into a new high school.
“In addition, Hirsch, one of the city’s lowest-enrolled high schools, would share space for a privately run charter school program that’s backed by a local megachurch and a foundation headed by hip-hop artist Common…
“Hirsch, one of the city’s most underenrolled neighborhood high schools, would open its campus to the Art In Motion charter school next fall. CPS said the charter program, which is backed in part by the New Life Covenant Church and Common Ground Foundation, would first open to seventh- and eighth-graders before expanding to include a high school program.
“Mahalia Hines, a member of the Chicago Board of Education and mother of the hip-hop performer Common, also serves on the board of her son’s foundation.”
Does Illinois have conflict of interest laws?
I spoke to the California School Boards Association yesterday, at its annual meeting in San Diego. I love San Diego. It is on the ocean and always beautiful, with a temperate climate. I had dinner the night before I spoke, with Cindy Marten, the superintendent of the San Diego district. As in the past, we had dinner at Miguel’s in Old Town. The one thing I have never been able to find in NYC is good Mexican food. When I first moved to NYC in 1960, after marrying a Native New Yorker, a friend told me that Texans in the city were always looking for Mexican food and always disappointed. In San Diego, I am never disappointed.
I spoke to a very large and friendly audience at the Convention Center. A few thousand people. I didn’t see any empty seats. When the video is released, I will post it. I was preceded by Marshall Tuck, who is running for State Superintendent and sure to have the support of the charter industry. We spoke in the Green Room, and he assured me that he would lead the fight to ban for-profit charters. The charter industry in the state is unregulated and unaccountable.
In my speech, I went through the history of NCLB and Race to the Top, and the damage they have done to students, teachers, and public schools. I then dissected the negative impacts of standardized testing and its utter uselessness as currently implemented. I pointed out that the achievement gap can never be closed with standardized tests because they are designed on a bell curve, and the bell curve never closes.
I then ticked off the many charter scandals in the state, the inevitable result of a total absence of supervision. I listed scam after scam. I reiterated the conclusions and recommendations of the NAACP report on charters.
My theme was the relationship between public schools, citizenship, and democracy.
When I concluded, I received a standing ovation.
Later, I was sitting in the lobby, waiting to meet a friend from Los Angeles and chatting with people who had heard me speak. One woman stepped up and said, “I walked out on your speech. It was too political. There’s no room for politics her.” She turned on her heel and left. I happened to be sitting with another member of the same school board, and I asked him, “What did she find ‘too political?’”
He said, “She’s a Trump supporter. You mentioned Trump in your opening remarks.”
That was true. I started by mentioning that Trump wants to cut federal funds for education by 13%, and he wants to shift $20 Billion to charters and vouchers.” These are factual statements. But the board member objected and walked out.
I can accept that people disagree. What I find hard to understand is an unwillingness to face plain and incontrovertible facts.
Anyway, I’m writing this on the airplane home. The CSBA was incredibly gracious. I met hundreds of people who are passionate about public schools. I’m looking to them to carry on the fight for better schools in their communities and at the ballot box.
Several elementary schools in San Jose, California, are on the chopping block. Meanwhile, charter schools are booming. Local school boards are helpless to stop the charter growth. If the local board says no to the charter, the charter appeals to the county board. If the county board says no, the charter appeals to the state board, which almost always says yes. Governor Jerry Brown appointed the state board. It is very charter friendly. Unless the next governor reins in the charter industry, it will wreck public education in California.
Steven Singer holds up to daylight the “staggering naivete” of the critics of public schools. Most have never been teachers; some have never actually been inside a public school. But they have an answer: Blow everything up! Turn education over to for-profit corporations.
Singer writes (with many links):
There is a popular idea going around that public schools need to change because they’re outmoded, obsolete and passé.
While public schools certainly could do with a great deal of change to improve, this criticism is incredibly naïve.
It’s the intellectual equivalent of displaying a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses prominently on your bookshelf without actually having read it.
It’s like demanding everything you eat be gluten free without actually having celiac disease or a wheat allergy.
It’s the conceptual analogue to learning a trendy “word of the day” and trying desperately to fit it into your every conversation regardless of need or propriety.
America’s public school system is incredibly complex. And like most complex things, any criticism of it is at least partially correct.
There are ways in which the system is antiquated and could use updating. But to claim that the entire system should be scrapped in favor of a largely untested, disproven and – frankly – profit-driven model is supremely stupid.
The criticism seems to be well encapsulated in a flashy animated video from Big Picture Learning, a Rhode Island-based charter school network operating 165 schools in 25 states and nine countries. The organization has been heavily praised by the likes of former President Barack Obama and philanthrocapitalist Bill Gates.
He goes point by point through the major criticisms and refutes each one.
He starts with the absurd claim that public schools have been around a long time, so they must be obsolete. He points out that the Constitution has been around even longer, and no one suggests that we should junk. It has been amended periodically, but then so have public schools, even moreso than the Constitution.
For instance:
The criticism goes like this. The public school model was created in the Industrial Age and thus prepares students to be factory workers. All day long in public schools students follow orders and do exactly what they’re told. Today’s workers need different skills. They need creativity, the ability to communicate ideas and collaborate.
First, while it is true that the American public school system was created during the Industrial Revolution, the same thing can be said for the United States, itself. Beginning in 1760 and going until 1840, manufacturing began to dominate the western economy. Does that mean the U.S. Constitution should be scrapped? Clearly our form of government could do with a few renovations, but not by appeal to its temporal genesis, to when it was created.
Second, IS it true that America’s public schools expect students to do nothing but listen to orders and follow them to the letter?
Absolutely not.
In fact, this is exactly what teachers across the country DON’T want their students to do. We work very hard to make sure students have as much choice and ownership of lessons as possible.
We often begin by assessing what they know and what they’d like to know on a given subject. We try to connect it to their lives and experiences. We try to bring it alive and show them how vital and important it is.
Do we exclude creativity, communication and collaboration from our lessons?
Absolutely not.
In my class, creativity is a must. Students are required to write journals, creative fiction, and poetry. They draw pictures, maps, posters, advertisements. They make Keynote presentations, iMovies, audio recordings using Garage Band, create quizzes on Kahoot, etc. And they often do so in small groups where they are required to collaborate.
The idea that students are somehow all sitting in rigid rows while the teacher blabs on and on is pure fantasy. It betrays a complete ignorance of what really goes on in public schools.
And there are five more big points. He takes on each of them and demolishes the critics.
Karen Wolfe, parent activist in Los Angeles, writes here in response to an ill-informed article in the Napa Valley Register by columnist Dan Walters. I read Walters’ article and it did not reflect what I knew about California. He thinks that the angels of light are on the side of privatization, battling the mighty “education establishment.” He thinks that “civil rights groups” support the privatization of public schools. This doesn’t make sense, inasmuch as the billionaires and privatizers are out to destroy public education in California. Rather than say so myself, from a distance of 3,000 miles, I turned to someone, Karen Wolfe, who is up to date on the state of the “school wars,” to respond to Dan Walters’ views.
She wrote:
California’s school war flares up on three fronts
Dan Walters is right that there is a fierce battle over public education in the state of California that is sure to heat up as the 2018 elections draw nearer. However, the framing of an entrenched establishment pitted against altruistic reformers is naive or misleading.
The real fight is over who gets the money in the state’s second largest budget line and what that means for our notion of government.
Do we update our public school system around the protections and oversight built into its foundation? Or do we privatize the system, handing over money and children to a free-market of charter school choices on little more than a promise to be responsible and effective?
Setting aside for the moment that the purpose of public school is more than achievement on standardized tests, one factor to consider is that the charters aren’t doing any better than the traditional public schools, according to the often-cited CREDO study (Urban Charter Schools in California, 2015).
Cal State Sacramento’s Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Julian Vasquez Heilig, told me that in many cases California charters have a negative impact on student learning. Even where any impact is positive, it is minuscule, he said. This is especially important when the push for more charters is compared to other education reforms like universal pre-kindergarten or class size reduction. Both of these have been found to show far larger positive impacts.
In fact, those are among the reforms sought by the Equity Coalition, a group referred to in the op ed. But the author doesn’t mention those reforms. Nor does he tell readers the primary objective of the group’s lawsuit: A larger overall education budget.
It seems no matter the topic of education policy, the so-called reformers claim that charter schools are the only answer.
This view puts them in close alignment with US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Her home state provides a stark example of the failure of privatization. Education historian and author Diane Ravitch writes, “Since Michigan embraced the DeVos family’s ideas about choice, Michigan has steadily declined on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.” From 2003 to 2015, the state’s NAEP rankings on fourth grade reading and math have dropped from 28th to 41st, and from 27th to 42nd, respectively, she writes.
And what about the money?
Every day, new reports of financial scandals at charters are posted by Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education. A study last year by consumer watchdog In the Public Interest, found that California taxpayers have paid $2.5 billion for charter school facilities alone. Much of that went for buying or leasing facilities in areas that already had surplus classrooms. The Spending Blind report also underscored the CREDO findings, stating that the education offered at three fourths of the charters was worse than that provided at nearby district schools.
Walters also asserts that civil rights groups are behind the push for more charters. This, too, is a talking point of the privatizers. While it’s true that there is an affinity for charters among many civil rights groups, the nation’s oldest and foremost civil rights organization, the NAACP, has called for a moratorium on new charter schools. Following a nationwide series of public hearings, the NAACP said it “rejects the emphasis on charter schools as the vanguard approach for the education of children, instead of focusing attention, funding, and policy advocacy on improving existing, low performing public schools…”
In any discussion about education policy or politics, the well-informed will recognize the talking points in the carefully constructed narrative meant to accelerate the transfer of one of the most important functions of government into a market-based enterprise.
California’s election of a new State Superintendent next year will amplify the school wars. That race pits Tony Thurmond, a former school board member on the pro-public schools side, against Marshall Tuck, formerly of Bain Capital, on the privatizers side.
There is even more at stake in the race for Governor. Both front runners, Antonio Villaraigosa and Gavin Newsom, have ties to charter funders. Villaraigosa has a long track record of trying to advance the corporate reform agenda and Newsom’s education platform is less clear. Current State Treasurer John Chiang has called for greater transparency and accountability for charters to even the playing field with pure public schools.
The future of public education is at stake in the 2018 elections. Underneath the stories the candidates tell, the issue is, who do we trust more with California students: profit-seeking corporations or locally elected school boards?
Karen Wolfe is the Director of PSconnect, a community engagement program for public schools in Los Angeles.
