Charter Schools in Perspective

Very readable, grounded, and very well-organized. I skimmed just a few sections and look forward to returning to this study as often as possible.

Congratulations, and thank you to all involved.

“have given way to admission of disastrous failure”

A look at the official Swedish site shows no such admission. Nor, AFAIK, are state governments in Australia putting money back into state vocational education, or admitting any systemic problem. Nor do I expect to, as the policy is not driven by educational outcomes, but by ideology and the need to enlarge the market.

I found Diane Ravitch’s recent review essay in the New York Review of Books on charter schools and privatization helpful and persuasive. I’m wondering what others think. Here is part of the piece:

[….] For the past fifteen years, the nation’s public schools have been a prime target for privatization. Unbeknownst to the public, those who would privatize the public schools call themselves “reformers” to disguise their goal. Who could be opposed to “reform”? These days, those who call themselves “education reformers” are likely to be hedge fund managers, entrepreneurs, and billionaires, not educators. The “reform” movement loudly proclaims the failure of American public education and seeks to turn public dollars over to entrepreneurs, corporate chains, mom-and-pop operations, religious organizations, and almost anyone else who wants to open a school.

In early September, Donald Trump declared his commitment to privatization of the nation’s public schools. He held a press conference at a low-performing charter school in Cleveland run by a for-profit entrepreneur. He announced that if elected president, he would turn $20 billion in existing federal education expenditures into a block grant to states, which they could use for vouchers for religious schools, charter schools, private schools, or public schools. These are funds that currently subsidize public schools that enroll large numbers of poor students. Like most Republicans, Trump believes that “school choice” and competition produce better education, even though there is no evidence for this belief. As president, Trump will encourage competition among public and private providers of education, which will reduce funding for public schools. No high-performing nation in the world has privatized its schools.

The motives for the privatization movement are various. Some privatizers have an ideological commitment to free-market capitalism; they decry public schools as “government schools,” hobbled by unions and bureaucracy. Some are certain that schools need to be run like businesses, and that people with business experience can manage schools far better than educators. Others have a profit motive, and they hope to make money in the burgeoning “education industry.” The adherents of the business approach oppose unions and tenure, preferring employees without any adequate job protection and merit pay tied to test scores. They never say, “We want to privatize public schools.” They say, “We want to save poor children from failing schools.” Therefore, “We must open privately managed charter schools to give children a choice,” and “We must provide vouchers so that poor families can escape the public schools.”

The privatization movement has a powerful lobby to advance its cause. Most of those who support privatization are political conservatives. Right-wing think tanks regularly produce glowing accounts of charter schools and vouchers along with glowing reports about their success. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing organization funded by major corporations and composed of two thousand or so state legislators, drafts model charter school legislation, which its members introduce in their state legislatures. Every Republican governor and legislature has passed legislation for charters and vouchers. About half the states have enacted voucher legislation or tax credits for nonpublic schools, even though in some of those states, like Indiana and Nevada, the state constitution explicitly forbids spending state funds on religious schools or anything other than public schools.

If the privatization movement were confined to Republicans, there might be a vigorous political debate about the wisdom of privatizing the nation’s public schools. But the Obama administration has been just as enthusiastic about privately managed charter schools as the Republicans. In 2009, its own education reform program, Race to the Top, offered a prize of $4.35 billion that states could compete for. In order to be eligible, states had to change their laws to allow or increase the number of charter schools, and they had to agree to close public schools that had persistently low test scores.

In response to the prodding of the Obama administration, forty-two states and the District of Columbia currently permit charter schools. As thousands of neighborhood public schools were closed, charter schools opened to take their place. Today, there are about seven thousand publicly funded, privately managed charter schools, enrolling nearly three million students. Some are run for profit. Some are online schools, where students sit at home and get their lessons on a computer. Some operate in shopping malls. Some are run by fly-by-night characters hoping to make money. Charters open and close with disturbing frequency; from 2010 to 2015, more than 1,200 charters closed due to academic or financial difficulties, while others opened.

Charters have several advantages over regular public schools: they can admit the students they want, exclude those they do not want, and push out the ones who do not meet their academic or behavioral standards. Even though some public schools have selective admissions, the public school system must enroll every student, at every point in the school year. Typically, charter schools have smaller numbers of students whose native language is not English and smaller numbers of students with serious disabilities as compared to neighborhood public schools. Both charters and vouchers drain away resources from the public schools, even as they leave the neediest, most expensive students to the public schools to educate. Competition from charters and vouchers does not improve public schools, which still enroll 94 percent of all students; it weakens them.

Charter schools often call themselves “public charter schools,” but when they have been challenged in federal or state court or before the National Labor Relations Board, charter corporations insist that they are private contractors, not “state actors” like public schools, and therefore are not bound to follow state laws. As private corporations, they are exempt from state labor laws and from state laws that govern disciplinary policies. About 93 percent of charter schools are nonunion, as are virtually all voucher schools. In most charter schools, young teachers work fifty, sixty, or seventy hours a week. Teacher turnover is high, given the hours and intensity of the work.

Over the past twenty years, under Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, the federal government thas spent billions of dollars to increase the number of privately managed charter schools. Charter schools have been embraced by hedge fund managers; very wealthy financiers have created numerous organizations—such as Democrats for Education Reform, Education Reform Now, and Families for Excellent Schools—to supply many millions of dollars to support the expansion of charter schools. The elites who support charters also finance political campaigns for sympathetic candidates and for state referenda increasing charters. In the recent election, out-of-state donors, including the Waltons of Arkansas, spent $26 million in Massachusetts in hopes of expanding the number of charter schools; the ballot question was defeated by a resounding margin of 62–38 percent. In Georgia, the Republican governor sought a change in the state constitution to allow him to take over low-scoring public schools and convert them to charters; it too was defeated, by a vote of 60–40 percent.
In addition to spending on political campaigns, some of the same billionaires have used their philanthropies to increase the number of charter schools. Three of the nation’s biggest foundations subsidize their growth: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Edythe and Eli Broad Foundation. In addition to these three, charters have also received donations from the Bloomberg Family Foundation, the Susan and Michael Dell Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (ex-Enron), the Fisher Family Foundation (The Gap stores), Reed Hastings (Netflix), Jonathan Sackler (Purdue Pharmaceutical, manufacturer of Oxycontin), the DeVos family of Michigan (Amway), and many more of the nation’s wealthiest citizens. Eli Broad is financing a program to put half the students in Los Angeles (the nation’s second-biggest school district) into privately managed charters.

The Walton Family Foundation alone spends $200 million annually for charters, and claims credit for launching one of every four charter schools in the nation. The Walton family of Arkansas is worth about $130 billion, thanks to the Walmart stores, and they are vehemently antiunion. For them, charters are a convenient way to undermine teachers’ unions, one of the last and largest remaining pillars of the organized labor movement. Bill Gates has personally spent money to pass charter legislation in his home state of Washington. Three state referenda on charters failed in Washington, and the fourth passed by less than 1.5 percent of the vote in 2012. Gates’s goal was stymied, however, when the state’s highest court ruled that charter schools are not public schools because their boards are not elected. In the recent election, Gates and his allies supported opponents who ran against justices of the state Supreme Court who ruled against public funding of privately managed charter schools, but the voters reelected them. [….]

The whole essay is here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/08/when-public-goes-private-as-trump-wants-what-happens/

LFC @ 111, I’d respond to your argument if you had actually made any. The simple existence of individual economic mobility isn’t in dispute by me, as much as I might question its relevance to the vast majority of impoverished people’s lives in practice, and conversely the necessity for a large section of the population in capitalist society to be raised into an economic stratum of low-skilled employment (and/or unstable part-time employment and/or chronic unemployment and/or incarceration etc.) doesn’t seem to be in dispute by you. Or at least you seem too caught up in a weird non sequitur of “marxists r dum, did u no marxisms liek a religun, ha ha zing, betcha never hurd dat 1 b4” to present anything that might actually dispute it.

Harry @ 114, saying that people are prone to see what their ideology lets them see is absolutely a tautology, and without accusing you of anything direct or specific, no amount of media/publishing/research background into any subject can make anybody somehow exempt from this. I probably haven’t spent as much time on the subject as you have but I know many people who have, and they’d generally roll their eyes at the idea of any empirical research we have on programs like KIPP being rigorous or controlled enough to dignify with a term like “quasi-experimental”. Of course any genuine planned experiment along these lines would end up in Nuremberg/Helsinki territory pretty quick (the great curse of social science research) but in order to state with any deserved impact that we have experimental evidence of a particular approach’s efficacy, we’d need a few things to be true. First we’d need to strictly define our population of interest — is this approach meant to work for all impoverished US children? impoverished US children in inner cities? impoverished nonwhite US children in inner cities? impoverished nonwhite US children in inner cities who don’t move around a lot? impoverished nonwhite US children in inner cities who don’t move around a lot and have a stable household with parent(s)/guardian(s) able to support their education? etc. — and we’d need to ensure that any effort to isolate the variable “KIPP or non-KIPP” was being measured within genuinely randomized samples of that population of interest. We’d also need to decide what exactly about this approach we’re trying to measure — is it just the effects of the institutional structure and pedagogy with all else equal, or are we assuming that a school’s ability to attract private philanthropy (Elected school boards aren’t exactly rolling in Gates or Walton bucks) can be part of how we determine its effect on students, and can we expect this to continue at the same rate if or when the use of such schools is expanded? (Do we want to consider the possibility that haut-bourgeois philanthropy toward charter schools for poor students is a ploy to make these schools seem more attractive in order to influence public policy before yanking the money once their agenda is established, which actually would closely resemble the retail pricing practices of a certain Walton-affiliated company you may have heard of?)

Maybe most importantly, though, we’d need to explicitly define our goals, especially whether we’re interested primarily in individual economic mobility or broad economic uplift. If the goal is to cherry-pick only a select number of impoverished (plus other variables etc. etc.) children who might be able to individually make it into the middle or upper classes and put them in a better position to do so by segregating them from their non-upwardly-mobile peers, a project for which approaches like KIPP might actually be successful, then advocates should be explicit about this and not pretend that the goal is actually some high-minded pursuit of a solution to poverty in general. But this strikes me as something many ed reform folks don’t seem to want to realize about themselves: limited pipelines of upward mobility could make quite a lot of sense as a strategy to prevent broader uplift by channeling individual discontent and ultimately stunting the development of class solidarity, but since nobody likes to think of themselves as oppressors, the people implementing this strategy have an interest in mystifying this strategy as seeking the end of poverty for all children, not just the pre-selected stable and motivated ones who’ve successfully jumped through the hoops for some high-profile new Gates-funded charter school. A little bit of clarity here could go a long way.

Same thing for early intervention and Head Start only way more so and yet.

Nobody gives a rat’s behind about the evidence.

(Obviously I meant to post that in the other thread… the curse of clicking a link, scrolling to the bottom, and focusing on the input field w/o looking above it first.)

Of course there are things that would change their minds, there are things that would change literally anybody’s mind about literally anything. I’m trying to be polite in urging you down from your ideological high horse about your own skeptical empirical science-y prudence amidst the ideological barbarians at the gates — to quote Clifford Geertz, “I have a social philosophy, you have political opinions, he has an ideology” — but at the point where you’re comparing ed reform skeptics to climate change denialists, the cordiality starts to wear thin. Especially because many of the same vested neoliberal interests that back climate denialism are also deeply entrenched in the politics of ed reform, so if anybody in this debate seems more likely to be comparable to global warming denialists, it might as well be the researchers whose conclusions are in accord with the ideology of their billionaire patrons. Even within the liberal mainstream there are researchers like Ravitch whose conclusions dispute the general efficacy of charter schools and question the representativeness or scalability of high-profile orgs like KIPP, and unlike many of their opponents none of them are hooked up to an endless money spigot from Redmond or Bentonville; to me this would seem to make their conclusions more credible, but maybe setting one’s rubric as “ideological vs. non-ideological” is a maneuver to make it seem as if not being in it strictly for the money would actually detract from their credibility instead.

In any case, here’s what you said in the other thread: “We have pretty good evidence concerning KIPP, that they do well for the kids when it comes to traditional measures of success.” What you didn’t say was this: “We have pretty good evidence concerning KIPP, that they do well for the kids who have stable non-transient households and functional supportive families, and successfully complete an application process for the program, and don’t drop out or leave for any reason when it comes to traditional measures of success.” You packed a hell of a lot of ideology into that simple little phrase “the kids”, and now after being called out on it, you’re clarifying that when you said “the kids” you meant kids who almost by definition aren’t suffering from many of the worst and most destabilizing effects of systemic racialized poverty. The issue here goes way beyond the fog-inducing effects of the science news cycle, since the caveats and variables being handwaved away in short summaries and headlines like “KIPP does well for the kids” contain much of the very core of the problem in which we claim to be interested.

Unless, of course, the problem in which we’re actually interested isn’t the misery of impoverished communities in general, but a lack of opportunity for the most functional and non-destabilized individuals from impoverished communities to escape the miserable surroundings of their upbringing and join the affluent ruling and professional classes. If the second is our real objective, something like KIPP could be exactly what we’re looking for, and when we say “the kids” we might as well mean “the select group of kids we consider deserving of upward mobility” as opposed to the larger group of kids we’re content to see remain trapped in cycles of poverty. And it seems plausible that this is exactly what the neoliberal ed reformers mean underneath all the obfuscation, because giving certain children of racialized poverty individual chances to climb the socioeconomic ladder meshes quite well with the superficially progressive neoliberal politics of representationalism — the struggle for a ruling class that resembles in as many ways as possible the downtrodden masses it rules, even while dominating them with an ever more iron fist.

I think that the relationship of charter schools to privatization is more complicated than generally understood. I explain why here: http://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2015/01/17/the-charter-school-challenge/

Ah, yes. Those nasty unions. As if the people actually doing the job had any insights…

Privatisation is a push going for decades, across multiple areas – wherever looks most vulnerable or wherever some defect can be pointed to. The underlying logic has nothing much to do with the area in question and is, in fact, more likely to be found in Lenin’s observations on the dilemmas of finance capitalism.

Apologies in advance for not reading everything recommended here.

I’d like a little history of public (American sense) education here. Although that isn’t easy. Dorchester, MA in 1631: public meant church and state in sync, as one.

In line with their Puritan (and allied) brethren in GB and other places in Europe, the goal: educate everyone, which would require the community’s full support and efforts.

Interesting how that played out differently in different regions. In, say, MA, that meant church/state integrity. In NY, that meant churches, for a long time. In the South, it meant churches, for a few (sometimes even Blacks), but pretty much just churches (and private tutors for the rich — tutors educated usually in the North).

I am doing a terrible job here at this. Maybe the test case is NYC in the early-mid 1800’s. The city subsidized church-sponsored schools. There was a strong movement for direct city-run schools that gained traction as Catholics got more and more funds for their church-sponsored schools. (OMG, the state is sponsoring Catholics?) Finally NYC began to catch up with NE, as it expanded its public education without religious affiliation — even as, in NE, that church affiliation was built into the state.

Me, I am for the state as the proper religion, at least when it comes to schools. But then, I look at Trump and the state as religion and recoil. The beat goes on.

I might be the only person who has posted on CT whose kid actually goes to a charter school. In Newark, NJ, no less. This, I know, is a very limited qualification.

“Charter school” casts a very broad net. Many of them are out-and-out scams–either by local entrepreneurs, or by for-profit charter management organizations. Some states (including mine) are pretty good at weeding out the scams, but none are perfect. Many of the non-scamly ones aren’t very good. Many of the good ones (e.g., KIPP) aren’t as good as they pretend to be, or are too focused on test scores and “drill-and-kill” teaching techniques. Mine is none-of-the-above–just a good sound elementary school.

I’m not sure about the use of the word “privatization.” It conceals an important distinction. There are three ways of providing a service: government; nonprofit; and for-profit. They have different advantages in different contexts. The for-profit system (which “manages” nonprofit charters, using the nonprofit as a kind of legal condom) just doesn’t work. The verdict is still out on nonprofit charters. They shouldn’t be lumped with the for-profits, whose verdict is clear. And the word “privatization” does just that.

To go beyond my very limited expertise, I am constantly astounded by the weakness of the charter advocates’ arguments. They can’t say their better arguments in public, and their public arguments are weak. As I see it, their arguments are:
– Unionz evil! They can’t say this too clearly, but they obviously believe it.
– Urban school boardz corrupt! There is something to this, although the history of presumably-less-corrupt-state takeovers is not encouraging. And again, you can’t say this in public.
– Bad kids infect good kids. Again, there is something to this and maybe you can say this in public. I suppose in this vision of charterization, public schools act as penitentiary prep.
– Flexible dynamic throbbing pulsing charter management! For some reason, this argument is acceptable to newspaper editors, although it is obvious blather. Charter schools suffer from bad diseconomies of managerial scale.
– Various kinds of arguments that translate to cream-skimming, of teachers or students.

Harry, the implied criticism in the statement that “if there is a lot of high quality evidence that indicates you are wrong, you should be open to rethinking”, and the smarmy spelling out of “basic rules of thumb” for adequately skeptical inquiry as if we’re 14-year-olds who just discovered New Atheism, certainly sound like a thinly veiled comparison to me. The core objection to organizations like KIPP succeeding with de facto cherrypicked groups of students isn’t that it doesn’t or can’t happen at all (not to discount the way these kinds of “success” stories often are built on bullshit, a symptom of the systemic potential for fraud and corruption inherent in such a loosely regulated educational model) but that by definition “succeeding” in this way does nothing about the problems in which we’re actually interested. Any school can far exceed the alleged achievements of outfits like KIPP by doing more explicitly what these outfits do less explicitly, except we call schools like this “magnet schools” and don’t attribute their success to any new pedagogical silver bullet that offers deeper lessons for the socioeconomic uplift of students with less preexisting motivation and support. Without trying to imply any deeper comparison, it’s a “Hitler says the sky is blue” kind of maneuver: since we object to Hitler for reasons having nothing to do with his stance on sky color, bringing up this stance as a response is at best irrelevant and at worst a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters. I would have thought of all of this as something we wouldn’t have to say every time we write, but maybe spelling it out would be helpful.

As far as “privatization”, it’s certainly appropriate in a sense, but to many people it seems to imply an overly rigid opposition between public and private sectors, when the neoliberal agenda in practice absolutely doesn’t revolve around any inherent conflict between governments and markets — a zombie idea whose endless reanimation with cash infusions from patrons like the Kochs is arguably a form of obfuscation meant to keep erstwhile opponents of neoliberalism stuck on the wrong arguments. A more useful distinction both for neoliberalism and for those seeking to understand it is between productive and non-productive economic activity, in a strictly capitalist sense of whether or not it can accommodate the extraction of profit; accordingly, a more useful conceptual lens seems to be the commodification of public services, which can be a lucrative domain of capitalist accumulation even when the services in question remain nominally under public administration. (One of my favorite theorists Ursula Huws has a developed and accessible critique along these lines.) Public education is a ripe target for this accumulative process regardless of how the extraction of profit from educators’ labor ends up being structured administratively, and the idea that it might succeed in resisting commodification at all is more or less an existential affront to capital, which seems to be why the ruling class in the US has risked dropping its customary ideological shield of “two parties disagreeing with each other” in order to more effectively coordinate a combined political attack.

Of course we can’t dismiss the way so many of the neoliberal ideologues engaged in the fight to commodify public education affect some sort of selfless altruistic motivation, even trying to outflank public school teachers — a caste whose outward decency relative to Fortune 500 executives otherwise seems like it’d be on fairly solid ground — by obsessively hammering away at a narrative of corrupt and self-interested teachers’ unions. But this in no way precludes a long-term strategy ultimately aimed at commodification and profit once the old institutions are successfully destroyed, any more than Walmart selling below cost at a newly opened store precludes raising their prices once the local competition has been driven out of business. (As an aside, the generalization of this two-faced strategy to encompass literally all philanthropy was a criminally under-discussed “innovation” of the now all-but-forgotten Clinton Foundation; even Bill himself was very explicit about the Foundation’s work as a foot in the door to open new domains for the expansion of markets, both on the practical grounds that this would be more efficient than traditional philanthropy and on the moral grounds that “it’s wrong to ask anyone to lose money” on charity.) Don’t underestimate their duplicitousness, even if on some level they’re also fooling themselves.

Harry, I’ll get back to you, but please note I didn’t equate charter schools with private schools but ‘ed reform’ and ‘choice’ with privatisation, and it was a query not an assertion. (Commodification is a different but related issue. I strenuously disagree that neoliberalism makes the distinction between public and private ownership irrelevant.)

@16:
The actual poor tended to vote for Clinton, who beat the other fellow by a meaningless 2.6 million votes.

As for the Rust Belters who went for Trump, their message has been heard loud and clear, judging by Trump’s Cabinet appointments. Arsenic in the water? A mere bonne bouche, my friends. Trump and the GOP are going to clout his voters on the backs of their heads like baby seals.

I anticipate they’ll just come back for more, those that can still walk to the polls.

“It is possible for people to be in favour of radical change (for example, in education), but to be opposed to one particular proposal for radical change (for example, voucher funding for education).”

Sure, but so far as I can tell there hasn’t been a serious left leaning proposal for radical change (or even semi-serious on the margins change) in decades. So you’ve ceded the field to the voucher advocates, and that is the only option that poor people see. Which sounds like it could be a developing political problem.

@35 Abolishing local funding is a serious left leaning proposal, but the alleged advocates of bold reform won’t touch it.

(Any policy that has Gareth Wilson going for his musket is relevant enough for me…)

I had never heard of the BBA, and I follow the area with some interest. I’ll take a look.

Banning private schools would be almost a complete irrelevance in the US

Move along nothing to see here

Since 2000, The Heritage Foundation has con­ducted several surveys of Members of Congress to determine how many Senators and Representatives practice school choice by sending their children to private school.[2] In 2007, The Heritage Foundation updated this survey and found that 37 percent of Representatives and 45 percent of Senators in the 110th Congress sent their children to private schools-almost four times the rate of the general population.[3]