The Los Angelos teachers added a few other requests [1]. The introduction starts with:
[...] LAUSD educators clearly want to get back into schools with their students, but the underlying question at every step must be: Given broader societal conditions, how do we open physical schools in a way that ensures that the benefit outweigh the risks [...]
And then proceeds to the following recommendations, among many others:
- Defund Police
- Shelter the homeless
- Paid sick leave for all
- Medicare for all
- "Charter Moratorium"
- "Financial Support for Undocumented Students and Families"
I don't understand the logic around the left's hatred of charters. Parents choose to send their kids there - if the existing public school was so good, why would they send them somewhere else? It's simply about choice, and sending your own kids to the best possible option. No one would ever deny their own children the best possible education available. It's so clearly about administrators and professionals over the needs of children, it's simply immoral and bordering on evil.
> I don't understand the logic around the left's hatred of charters
The left doesn't hate charters, it hates publicly subsidized private schools that are not effectively accountable. That's a subset of charters plus all vouchers.
Actual public charters, by which public schools are granted some variance of generally applicable rules to trial new methods are not a problem to the left; the hijacking of that process to create super-voucher schools when the voucher model failed to gain sufficient political support is what the left hates.
> Parents choose to send their kids there
Often, after the local regular public school has been replaced by a privately-operated charter in the same facility, and often the parents who most choose to send their children their are the ones whose most-local school was replaced, because it's the most convenient public school and going to a more distant one has added cost.
Charters are explicitly reductions in institutional legal accountability, and unlike public (charter or not) schools, the chief decision makers so released from accountability with private schools are not accountable by election, either.
Yes, and it's difficult to get information from charter schools because they are not subject to the same reporting that public schools are. This makes it easy for people take advantage of their opaqueness.
Harper’s recently ran a pretty good piece on the matter, if anyone is interested in a longer-form skeptical perspective on charter schools and their lack of accountability:
Charter schools are accountable to the parents. If the parents do not like the performance of a charter school, they can pull their kids out of it, and put them in their neighborhood public school.
I have had 3 kids in charter schools in San Diego for a total of 5 charter schools. The charter schools were all really good. Bad ones should close but the passion and excitement shown by charter school teachers are above and beyond the State run school teachers that my kids have also attended.
Charter schools compete for the same low funding pool, while only accepting well performing non-SPED students, leaving public schools with less money and a harder (& more expensive) student body.
This artificially increases Charter School's performance, and artificially lowers Public School's performance.
But this isn't an accident, Charter Schools are designed to de-fund public education for political reasons, and while discriminating against SPED kids is illegal, the % of SPED kids at charters is disproportionately low[0].
> Charter schools are significantly less likely to reply to students to the IEP message than to the baseline message, while traditional public schools are not. There is also some evidence that schools are less likely to respond to families with Hispanic-sounding names.
Blind lotteries exist because it has been true, and most states still don't mandate blind lotteries. That's like using anti-discrimination laws as an argument for discrimination not existing.
Blind lotteries were started to combat this prevalent issue (and still fail to address poorly performing/SPED kids dropping out of charters and back into public education at a disproportionate rate, which undermines their goal).
At best, charter schools are there to defund public education. At worst, they are outright embezzling of school funding. They are being pushed by Betsy Devos, whose record speaks against her. Her handling of the charter school system in Detroit led to it having the nationwide poorest reading and mathematics scores. In a lawsuit, charter school defenders argued that literacy is not a right.
Far too sweeping of a statement. "At their best" charter schools provide a laboratory for experimentation and alternative models of education which are impossible to implement within a rigid bureaucracy. In NYC we have many excellent progressive charter schools with massive waiting lists to get in. In many cases test scores are lower because these schools have chosen to emphasize real education over test preparation which unfortunately dominates bandwidth in many classrooms.
> At best, charter schools are there to defund public education.
At best, charter schools are public schools granted flexibility to trial new educational approaches on a limited basis to provide concrete evidence to drive decisions on changes in general practices.
But most charter schools, especially private-operated and especially private-for-profit ones, are not “at best”.
For me, it's because private, religiously focused schools can receive federal aid to indoctrinate children into said religion, dictate what is taught to increase indoctrination rates, and skate oversight. They are welcome to do this on their own dime, but as soon as taxpayer funding is involved all religious specific focus and values must be dropped. The school must no longer refuse employment or punish students based on protected classes, benefits and other school affiliated programs must not have any religious based rules or policies, and the school must be transparent to audit and review to confirm students meet standards for their education including basic science and and history like the big bang and fact based origins of dinosaurs.
In this instance, it's a separation of church and state. You should not get a public dime if they do things like fire an LGBT teacher who had otherwise glowing reviews and successful students or refuse to teach basic science and history.
But the arguments against charter schools as a suck for public dollars as well as the way voucher programs can be abused (with support by the present Secretary of education, someone who has investments and connections to charter programs) is another huge issue.
It's not that the left opposes education, it's that they want actual education in schools. It's not that we shouldn't spend the money to improve education, it's that we need to invest in programs and schools that meet federal guidelines and respect federal law and constitutional rights.
And for me it's because the first amendment should guarantee freedom of and FROM religion. If the best school in town is the religious charter school my property taxes are supporting, we have conflicts.
> If the best school in town is the religious charter school my property taxes are supporting, we have conflicts.
What is stopping other schools from improving their standards? After all, they also have access to the same public dollars and I am not aware of any funding imbalance between charter vs public schools (though please correct me if I am wrong here).
I went to a high school in Cali that was converted to a charter school. As far as I could tell, the main change was that they kicked out all the kids with poor grades or other problems. That is the polar opposite of "choice", it was about increasing inequality and it was completely disgusting.
Wow, so charter schools allow for stack-ranking their pupils all the out of the school if desired? Is there a list of reasons that a school cannot use to suspend or expel a student up somewhere? In addition, a list of active conditions with associated constraints for when they can?
Schools can do many things either directly or implicitly, with some variations based on local laws. Here are some that I’m aware of:
1. Have an exam to pass up to the next grade. This isn’t necessarily intended to be malicious but it means that kids who are struggling, have less than fully supported disabilities, unstable home environments, etc. aren’t in their stats for the higher grades but will be in the comparison schools.
2. Have a graduation requirement that, say, you pass a ton of AP exams. Struggling students are probably going to bail when the odds aren’t looking good.
3. Not offering support services: charters have a financial incentive not to hire specialists for special needs, psychologists, librarians, cafeteria workers, etc. Parents will often pull kids over to the public schools where they’ll get more support, which also makes the cost differential and difficulties accurately comparing performance more pronounced.
4. Favor high levels of family support: academic performance tracks closely with family wealth so anything which favors affluence will have the effect of removing more lower-performing kids. That can be homework requiring laptops which aren’t provided, having a schedule or location which doesn’t work well for transit users, after school / weekend clubs or courses with supply fees, etc.
5. Tailor the curriculum to attract certain types of student: require things like taking Latin/Greek or a STEM load, don’t offer much in the way of arts/music/sports, or simply requiring more classes total, etc.
Again, this doesn’t need to be malicious - it just means that you’re encouraging kids who aren’t hyper-focused on academics and well supported to go elsewhere. That makes the numbers harder to accurately compare with public schools who have to serve everyone and also confounds the question of how many of those kids would have been high performers at any school. People like to say this pushes them to be better, and that’s true in some cases but not as many as lore would have it and tends to ignore the kids who burn out but would have done well with a bit less pressure.
In many states, almost anyone can establish a charter school and there is very little oversight. Money is diverted from already small budgets to these charter schools.
Additionally, the US system punishes underperforming schools by deallocating funds. In what world does that make sense? Any rational society would send in an educational SWAT team to lift the school up, not handicap it further.
I don't understand the logic around the left's hatred of charters.
You'll probably understand better when you quit thinking that you can automatically identify the players involved. Perhaps simply ask why some folks oppose charter schools.
Others have responded with good answers, such as increased inequality and siphoning funds from public schools. If you take those to be left/right issues, well, there's your problem: does "the right" support increasing inequality and the draining money from public schools? That's kind of a rhetorical question (the assumed answer on my end is, "of course they don't"), but then again, maybe it's not.
These seem to be the "real" reasons: 1) re-segregation 2) skimming[B] 3) de-unionization 4) benchmarking[A] 5) statism preference.
The other declared reasons seemed unconvincing to me.
[A] Benchmarking - competing schools provide parents with a direct comparison point, so it's much harder for a struggling public school to disclaim responsibility for some of their own problems.
[B] Skimming - picking out the best-performing and the least-demanding students.
Charter schools in many jurisdictions can also expel underperforming or struggling kids, while public schools are obligated to enroll everyone regardless. I would be very skeptical of any charter school benchmarks.
I believe the case about giving money to religious schools was regarding publicly accessible facilities (playgrounds), so it doesn't change anything about funding for classrooms, teachers, etc.
That's how they like to pitch in sales, anyway. There are two problems which it hopes you won't know to ask about:
1. Most of the big claims about charter school performance is due to small sample size or short measurement time. There's a notorious cycle in the field where someone announces that they have a brilliant way to make kids succeed and publishes results which get a lot of attention, but regression to the mean sets in once they try to scale it up or have more than a few years worth of data. Once you get enough data they perform very similarly to the public schools serving the same community — worse as often as better.
2. Schools which show consistently better performance are the ones who can select students who were higher performing when they enrolled. If you can consistently attract richer, educated parents to your school — say with a pitch telling everyone how it's the best possible education for their children — you will post great numbers but those kids would have done well almost anywhere. This can be overt in the states which allow test-in or in the structure of the school (i.e. hit students with enough outside homework and you're going to lose a lot of kids who don't have family resources to support that extra time) or hidden in other areas: for example, a school in a state which doesn't require schools to offer free/reduced lunch will exclude poor kids without explicitly doing so, as will not offering bus service in a suburban area, having limited support for anyone with special needs, etc.
When evaluating schools, you have to do a value-added analysis comparing like cohorts of students. Public schools serve both a greater number of students and a much higher degree of diversity and very few are truly “bad” as — what you're usually seeing is that poor kids have more obstacles to success, and the United States runs a lot of special needs support through schools, and averages hide that information. I live in Washington DC which has tons of charters and there are a couple which have some great things for certain kids but not everyone (e.g. a language immersion) and a whole bunch which look pretty similar to the data from the local public schools when you match for equivalent parental SES.
Irrelevant. Plan a building for 2000 students. Figure out the best location, heating/cooling, building maintenance schedules, etc. Merge districts so that you can offer niche courses for advanced students. Then have the funding cut by 50%, because 1000 of the students go to charter schools. The fixed costs were planned out for the next 20 years, until the rug was pulled out from under schools. Instead, you get fewer teachers, larger class sizes, lower supply budgets, since those are the costs that can be reduced over a short time scale.
I'm fine with properly managed charter schools. However, opting out of public education does not entitle you to defund public education.
No, they aren't, because they expel problem students, into the public system. Even if admissions are lottery-based, expulsions are not.
Imagine two groceries. One that has to, by law, serve every kind of customer, and one that is allowed to throw out shoplifters, drunks, people high-out-of-their-minds-on-meth, etc.
Which one of these will provide better groceries for lower prices?
Experimentally: No. Betsy Devos's implementation was tested in Detroit, and failed miserably at teaching children. Expanding it without major, major changes is irresponsible and immoral. Step 1 is a system that doesn't defund public schools in the process.
Certainly. [1] gives a good overview, on how Devos pushed for more and more charter schools, without any requirement for credentials. [2] is some focus on the history of charter schools in Michigan, Devos's home state. [3] is a local news story (tracked down from some articles that reference it), going into a lawsuit about the poor performance of schools in the Detroit area, following the siphoning of funds to charter schools. The state didn't even attempt to argue that the schools were well-run, and instead argued that "there is no fundamental right to literacy".
Maybe I could see charter schools as a reasonable option in some cases. With Betsy Devos at the helm, they should be fought at every turn.
I wanted to circle back and say thanks for providing the links.
The wapo article was garbage (really, 3 sentences?) , but I found the michigan advance ariccle informative. I still don't agree with your conclusions, but now know there is a questionable track record in Detroit. I think the connection between Devos and charters and her influences is overstated, as they existed in numerous states long before she held any federal positions.
Thank you for the feedback. For the Washington Post article, it looks like they are silently paywalling the majority of the article. Opening it in incognito mode gave me the full article (several pages, not just a few sentences).
First, it is wrong. There's no requirement that charter schools get paid the same per student as public schools. Even when they do, charter schools also often lean heavily on public school resources (e.g. charter schools where I grew up used our public gymnasium, theater, and library regularly).
But second, even if the funding is exactly the same, the result is that all the "cheap" i.e. wealthy students (books and technology readily available at home, familial support for their studies, financially able to engage in more expensive educational opportunities outside the classroom) end up in one school while those without these privileges, or with disabilities, end up in the other. Even if you give both the same resources the second school is going to perform worse. And under current US policy, the school that performs worse then gets even less money while the school of rich kids gets more! It's wealth consolidation, pure and simple.
> the result is that all the "cheap" i.e. wealthy students (books and technology readily available at home, familial support for their studies, financially able to engage in more expensive educational opportunities outside the classroom) end up in one school while those without these privileges, or with disabilities, end up in the other
I don't understand - are charter schools allowed to refuse to admit disabled students?
Anti-charter sentiment is a union (teacher union) protecting itself. The left is along for the ride, because it's the same "tribe", but this is 100% driven by an organization protecting itself against competition.
Even if that is a cause, so? But the real issues revolve around a lack of oversight, small budgets, corruption, and exclusionary practices that hurt already marginalized groups.
Edit: "your mask is slipping" isn't a productive characterization. What I meant was, your statement comes off as bias - "tribes", "the left", "protecting itself against competition" all scream pro-capitalist propaganda on a topic that, frankly, should stay as far away from capitalism as possible.
That's my interpretation of your remarks and I am well aware that my own biases may distort your message.
But typically, when someone introduces "competition" to a discussion on education and laments teach unions, they have an agenda. Again, I could easily be wrong.
There's fundamentally no connection between the health of a union and the quality of the product. That's not the point of the union -- the point is protecting workers! Nobody argued that meatpackers should unionize so they could pack more meat!
So it's entirely reasonable to separate the reasons for the NEA to (1) exist, and (2) dislike charter schools -- that is, because their job is to protect teachers -- from the educational merits of charter schools. We shouldn't expect a teacher union to balance the merits of charter schools, because it's _not their job_.
We can talk about those points separately, but we need to expect that those talking points are completely independent of whether a teacher protection union (and I don't mean that negatively) objects to the schools which cut them out of the picture.
The current situation in US education strongly suggests that whatever other failings you want to ascribe to teachers unions, the interests of teachers and students are much more closely aligned than the interests of administrators who are planning to murder both other groups.
> I don't understand the logic around the left's hatred of charters
Charter schools are a threat to the public school system, so the public school system will naturally oppose charter schools.
If you are a public school without charter schools, a parent only has two choices: (1) public school, or (2) pay $20k+/yr/child to do private school. For the vast, vast majority of parents, public school is the only option.
Once you add charter schools to the mix, there is a new option that is viable for a much larger population. When parents choose charter schools, they lose public funding. Hence, this is a threat to public schools, and public school systems will strongly oppose it.
I think the reason you're having trouble understanding this is that you assume the public school union has the interests of children as it's top priority. With that assumption, opposition to charter schools doesn't make sense. But if you assume rational self interest, then you can easily explain the opposition.
I laughed when I first heard about this. Maybe they took the approach of asking for so many un-reasonable things to make sure the school does not open.
[...] LAUSD educators clearly want to get back into schools with their students, but the underlying question at every step must be: Given broader societal conditions, how do we open physical schools in a way that ensures that the benefit outweigh the risks [...]
And then proceeds to the following recommendations, among many others:
- Defund Police
- Shelter the homeless
- Paid sick leave for all
- Medicare for all
- "Charter Moratorium"
- "Financial Support for Undocumented Students and Families"
- Wealth tax
- Millionaire tax
- ...
[1] PDF https://www.utla.net/sites/default/files/samestormdiffboats_...