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Charter Schools: Education's Fox in the Henhouse? By Burt Saxon From Education Week December 28, 2009, Vol. 29, Issue 16 Successful urban charter schools are showing that high demand, high support education works for all students - not just Jewish and Asian and upper-class kids, but all kids who commit to academic success. Some of these schools' achievement gains are very impressive. So why am I, a retired public school teacher of 34 years, cautious and suspicious? Perhaps there's a hidden agenda, one that may be revealed by the following questions: 1. Are charter schools "culling"? Are they taking in lots of low-income youngsters, keeping the high-achievers, and sending the rest back to the regular public schools? 2. Are high-performing charters spending huge amounts of money per student, thereby getting the large achievement gains one might expect from one-to-one tutoring and after-school and summer support? Although many charters receive less public funding per pupil than their public school counterparts, these schools can supplement their budgets with grants - and with private money. 3. Do charter schools create disinformation campaigns against the public schools, so that urban districts will turn over their schools to what appears to be an idealistic crop of young administrators with proven results? 4. Are these idealistic young administrators working hand in hand with the Wall Street investors who already have brought this nation to financial disaster? As The New York Times reported earlier this month, hedge-fund managers play a significant role in the New York City's charter movement. 5. Is the ultimate goal privatization? Have the financiers realized that voucher plans are politically dead, leading them to implement their privatization strategy through charter schools? I doubt that privatization would improve the nation's schools. It certainly would result in the destruction of the public school teaching profession, the last secure, middle-class occupation in America. My own take on effective education reform is based on two seemingly contradictory assumptions: Education is a public good, and competition is a good thing. Perhaps public education should become something more akin to what the U.S. Postal Service now is: a quasi-governmental institution that allows for limited competition. Private companies compete with the post office in overnight, package, and other special deliveries, but regular mail service is left intact. A system like this forces the government-supported component to improve or lose resources. Don't misunderstand me: I'm not a shill for the public schools and the teachers' unions. Teachers in public schools have few incentives to excel. Their pay is fixed, based on experience and degrees. The system in which I worked for over three decades took good care of me, but it did not lead me to work as hard as I could have. Could merit pay be a solution? Michelle Rhee, the controversial chancellor of public schools in the District of Columbia, has offered teachers there the possibility of high salaries in return for their giving up tenure protections for one year. Of course, hedge-fund managers would laugh at my calling the proposed salaries of up to $130,000 high ones, but let's simply ask whether the potential of more pay would attract good teachers. Finding talented math and science teachers is especially difficult; maybe an incentive system would bring in candidates with better math and science skills. But who might be willing to give up the benefits of tenure? How about those Teach For America recruits, who are only going to teach for a couple of years anyway? Even TFA's most well-known critic, Stanford University's Linda Darling-Hammond, admits that the students of certified TFA teachers do better in math. This makes me wonder if a lot of these folks - the successful charter schools, the hedge-fund managers, Chancellor Rhee - are on the same team. If they are, let's ask another question: Is this a better team than the one that's in charge now? The one in which teachers make political contributions to become administrators, while their former colleagues who stay in the classroom have to work second and third jobs to send their children to college? Maybe we do need some sort of incentive system for professional educators. I prefer one based less on standardized tests and more on "customer satisfaction." And I do believe that charter schools should be allowed to compete on an equal playing field. But I absolutely do not believe that any school district should turn over all its schools to a corporation. Special education services would be slashed immediately. Unregulated monopolies - public or private - are not good for the consumer. Privatization does offer the hope of some helpful efficiencies, but a form of public-private competition would be the better answer. Of course there are those who would argue that I am overreacting. I have no proof that the hidden agenda of the charter school movement is to privatize American public education. Some sources (including The New York Times) say the hedge-fund managers see their involvement in charter schools as community service, rather than profit-generating. Only time will tell if this is true or not. I love community service, but I also believe that capitalists are geniuses at finding new markets and ways to put the screws on the working class. I am among the few lucky Americans to have a decent pension and good health care, and I want others to have the same. Privatizing the public schools would not help any of us educated, middle- and working-class folks. It would just move more of us, and our children, into the ranks of the working poor. One of my great professors in college believed that the public schools were nothing less than the foundation of American democracy. Lawrence A. Cremin of Teachers College, Columbia University, knew full well that this nation's education system was imperfect. But he also understood that we have continually tried to reform public schools precisely because we believe in them. Are we ready to give up on an institution that, throughout our history, has promoted and sustained our democracy? Should we not recognize the fact that our poorest students are failing to achieve at high levels largely because we have allowed wealth and income gaps that are morally intolerable to exist in this country? The arguments for privatization sound good at first, but once you give the fox the key to the henhouse, it's virtually impossible to get it back. Burt Saxon taught in the New Haven, Conn., public schools for 34 years, and he has led a seminar on educational policy at Yale University since 1976. _________________________ Charter life -- or death? From the Chicago Tribune June 9, 2009 It got lost a bit in the end-of-session shuffle, but the Illinois legislature just passed some extremely significant legislation on charter schools.
The question is whether the legislation will prompt charters to flourish -- or will crush them.
Illinois law currently allows no more than 60 charter schools in the state -- 30 in Chicago, 15 in the suburbs and 15 Downstate. The total number of charters would double under a bill sent to Gov. Pat Quinn. Chicago would get 45 of the 60 new charters allowed.
The state should have dumped the cap altogether: Illinois has some 13,000 kids on waiting lists for charter schools. But the expansion would at least allow Chicago to continue its very encouraging experimentation with charter schools. The rest of the state has pretty much ignored the opportunity. Here's the rub. The bill also greatly reduces the flexibility of charter schools to hire non-traditional teachers. Right now, at least 50 percent of the teachers in a charter school have to be certified by the state. That requirement would grow to 75 percent.
That would mean fewer options for charter schools to hire the artist or physicist or business leader who wants to switch careers and go teach 7th graders.
A separate bill sent to the governor has other troubling language: If teachers form a union at a charter school, they would have to do so under the Illinois Education Labor Relations Act, which is quite friendly to traditional teachers unions. That might shut out more innovative union arrangements that give teachers more input on school operations but don't provide lifetime job protection to bad teachers.
Charter schools succeed precisely because they cut the rules and requirements that straitjacket traditional schools and they give more flexibility to the teachers, administrators and parents who are key to students' performance. Raising the certification requirements and putting up walls to alternative union models won't improve education. They will push charters into being ... plain, old schools.
We do need more charters, as those 13,000 kids in line will attest. Quinn would do a great thing for education if he issued an amendatory veto that preserved the expansion of charter schools and kept the certification requirements just as they are now.
Proponents of the charter expansion argue that it will put the state in better position to claim some of the $5 billion pot created by the Obama administration to encourage public school innovation. Indeed, when Education Secretary Arne Duncan visited Illinois recently, he said charter expansion was one of the keys to qualifying for this money. Duncan commended the approval of an increase in the charter cap here. But let's do even more.
Governor, let charter schools flourish here. Raise the cap. Period. _________________________ Kids reap benefits of long school year By Jessica Durando, USA TODAY NEWARK — At the Robert Treat Academy, students sporting blue-and-green plaid uniforms fill the auditorium at 8:30 for morning announcements. "Have a sensational day of learning," principal Michael Pallante says to the crowd after they sing Happy Birthday to a fellow student."Let's stay focused. Let's learn. You guys are becoming stars." Some students have been there since 7:30, eating breakfast and receiving extra homework help. About 70% of its 450 kindergarten through eighth-grade students stay until at least 5 p.m. The public charter school operates 205 to 210 days a year, compared with the state-required 180. Some grade levels devote Saturday hours to state testing preparation. Pallante calls the 11-month school year a "blessing for these urban school kids and their parents. We have kids from broken homes, drugs, parents incarcerated. We have everything." More time is necessary for academic improvement, he says. Robert Treat Academy boasted the highest test scores among New Jersey urban public schools in 2008, based on a test called the New Jersey Assessment of Skills and Knowledge. The school was one of only eight nationwide declared "high-poverty, high-achieving" by the U.S. Department of Education. With examples like this, the push for extended learning time is gaining nationwide. Roughly 1,000 schools — 80% charter schools, 20% traditional public schools — have expanded their schedules by more than one to two hours a day or 300 hours a year, according to the National Center on Time and Learning in Boston. Karl Alexander, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, says poorer children need enrichment programs over summer months to compete academically with middle-class children. "The real key is what you do with the extra time," he says. "It has to be high-quality." But in Miami-Dade County, Fla., a three-year program in 39 underperforming public schools that included an extended school day and a longer school year produced mixed academic results, according to a final evaluation released last month. Administrators and teachers experienced fatigue and burnout, and many students did not attend class in the beginning of the summer, the report said. "Principals and teachers also reported that proficient students felt stigmatized by the mandatory additional time, which was viewed as a punishment rather than enhancement," program evaluators wrote. Other report findings showed students scored lower on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests in reading or math compared with other students in the county. KIPP Philadelphia Charter School CEO Marc Mannella says he instituted a longer school year because students were coming to KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) behind by two to three grade levels. KIPP: Knowledge Is Power Program shown as urban triumph Ashley Rainer, 13, says she doesn't mind leaving the house at 5:50 a.m. to take the bus to KIPP Philadelphia. "I feel good about it, because I know when I'm in college and have a job it is going to happen," she says. Other kids aren't exactly thrilled. "Everybody says it (stinks) going to school in the summer, but it benefits me," says Louis Grier, 14, of Robert Treat, where students won't see a summer break until July 1. The concept of a longer school year also has spread to Louisiana and the Recovery School District, which was formed after Hurricane Katrina to give direction to underperforming schools. District Superintendent Paul Vallas added 40 days of instruction to the school calendar. The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, takes the stand that the extended calendar may work for certain school districts but not all. "More hours is not automatically the best answer," says the NEA's Joel Packer. "Maybe we need to reduce class size, change our curriculum. Maybe we need more school counselors and mentors." Joshua Medina, 16, a former Robert Treat student, now goes to The Hill school in Potsdam, Pa., on scholarship. He already has his eye on New York University or Washington, D.C.'s Howard University and hopes to pursue a career in law. "Robert Treat became my home away from home. From birth, I was always a motivated person, but coming to this school really helped me realize what I'm motivated for." _______________________________________ All of the articles below are written by Karin Piper. Karin is a charter school parent whose blogs on “charter mythology” have been featured in various Charter Advocacy Network publications through the Colorado League of Charter Schools. You can contact her at
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, or see her Web site www.charterschoolmom.com. "Does My Charter School Kid Take Away From Yours?" It happened again. I was standing in line at my favorite coffee shop when I ran into a mom from years back. We hugged, air kissed, and OMG’d before asking about each other’s families. We soon determined that neither of us had moved and still lived within a couple of miles. She casually asked:“Where do your kids go to school?” (click link below to read full article)http://www.examiner.com/x-2157-Colorado-Charter-Schools-Examiner~y2009m4d15-Does-my-charter-school-kid-take-away-from-yours "Do Picky Charters Pick Students?" Choosy moms choose charter schools. But do choosy charter schools choose its students? (click link below for more) http://www.examiner.com/x-2157-Colorado-Charter-Schools-Examiner~y2009m4d10-Do-picky-charters-pick-students "Crappy Schools Don't Cream" Do you know which schools are never accused of “creaming” for enrollment?—Crappy schools. I have never, not once, heard of a school with an awful reputation and terrible academic ratings be charged with attracting the best students. I suppose it would be difficult to imagine a school drawing the best of the best and achieve the worst of the worst education results. (click link below for more) http://www.examiner.com/x-2157-Colorado-Charter-Schools-Examiner~y2009m3d30-Crappy-schools-dont-cream |
