Clinton-Induced Charter Freakout Continues

Man, just thirty little words can cause sooooo much fuss.

Most charter schools – I don’t want to say every one – but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them.

These have been quoted over and over and over again. Sometimes they are quoted by folks who are excited that Clinton said something supportive of public schools. But they've also been quoted by charter supporters who are absolutely freaking out.

Reformsters Robert Pondiscio and Richard Whitmire also made attempts to raise some dudgeon high over Clinton's thirty-word assault, and while I think they're wrong, they at least showed a little rhetorical and intellectual rigor. Not so some of the other defenders of the charter cause.

The Washington Post editorial board scolded her by citing bogus data from a report written by the Center for Education Reform, a group that exists strictly to push charter schools and crush teacher unions. That's high order journalistic sloppiness, like turning to the Tobacco Institute for your "facts" about smoking. The Wall Street Journal also rushed to the defense of the hedge fundies who profit from charter schools, citing more fact-free facts.

But nobody has leaned on the Panic Button with hands any heavier than Juan Williams today on The Hill. Williams is a Fox News "Analyst," a position he moved into after being fired by NPR for either A) some impolitic remarks about Muslims on planes or B) because he was buddying up to Fox. Take your pick of explanations.

All the features of the High State of Charter Dismay are here in this piece.

It starts with the headline (which, it should be noted, is probably not Williams' call)-- "Hillary betrays charter schools." Betrays?? As in double-crosses? Did they have some claim to her? Are they offended because they thought Clinton was their BFF, or because their ethical standards say that when a politician is bought, she should stay bought?

Next, Williams opens by invoking children:

My 5-year-old grandson goes to a big city charter school. But Eli and his classmates do not belong to a union. They do not give money to politicians. They can’t vote.

That is unquestionably true of Eli and his classmates. It is probably not true of the people who own and operate Eli's school. I bet those people have plenty of money to give to politicians.

Williams throws in the word "flip-flop." He calls her thirty word backstab an act of "political expediency." He accuses her of running over Eli. He says her words sound like a script written by the teachers union (to whom? and what exactly is that sound?) And then he starts in with some of the same old non-fact facts.

By law, almost all charter schools get their students from a lottery. They do not cherry-pick their students.

Yeah, no. The very act of a lottery is a creaming process, as it automatically selects out those parents who are able to navigate the lottery system and are willing to do so. When charters start taking randomly selected students from the public school system-- including students who didn't even express interest in attending a charter-- then you'll have a point. And the widespread evidence of push-outs, as exemplified by Success Academy's got-to-go list, is one more example of how charters make sure they are working with a select group of students-- unlike public schools.

Williams says he has talked to parents who see charters as "a great stride towards improving public education by providing competition and pioneering teaching techniques that offer a model for all schools." And yet, charters have done none of those things. Name one educational technique, one pedagogical breakthrough that has come from a charter.

Williams quotes the Washington Post quoting the Center for Education Reform in saying that charters take on a higher percentage of poor and minority students than public schools. No, that's not true, either, unless I suppose you are comparing charter schools to all the public schools in the country, including all the public schools that serve very white communities. But if we start looking city by city, we find things like the charter schools of Massachusetts that serve no non-English speaking students at all. Or you can check out some of the legitimate actual research done in New Jersey about exactly what populations charters serve. Or you can just keep reading copy from the ad fliers put out by the Center for Education Reform.

The Post also cited research that shows “charter schools produce greater student learning gains than traditional public schools, particularly for poor and minority students.”

It takes an extraordinary amount of laziness not to locate the research that shows that charters do no better than public schools, and often do worse. Heck, the writers at the Washington Post could have just looked through the reporting in the Washington Post to see that they were missing a point or two.

Williams moves on to a recounting of Clinton's flip-floppery, and then, of course, we have to spend some time indicting the Evil Unions.

The unions do not appreciate the Obama administration’s effort to have public school districts compete for grants given to districts with improved student achievement. They opposed holding teachers accountable for their students’ success or failure. 

That's because "improved student achievement" just means "higher test scores on a crappy standardized math and reading test." Do you, Mr. Williams, have any hopes for Ele beyond that he just learn to do well on a Big Standardized Test on math and reading? I'll bet you do. Welcome to the club.

And for the gazillionth time-- teachers do not oppose being held accountable for what we actually do. Let me put it this way-- would it have pissed you off if NPR had fired you over something to do with the actual quality of your reporting instead of some baloney about saying the wrong thing whiel talking to the wrong people? Do you think it was fair that your job security suffered for something unrelated to your job performance? Because-- again-- welcome to the club.

You want to evaluate me, come on ahead. I welcome it. But evaluate me on my actual teaching skills, and not some random trumped up fake-science VAM baloney that is neither valid nor reliable.

But Williams is not done unloading his big truck full of bovine fecal matter. This next sentence is sitting all by itself, just for impact.

In the name of protecting failing teachers and bad schools, they are the number one opponents of school reform.

Bullshit, sir. Bull. Shit. We have opposed "school reform" because it is and has been bad for education and bad for children, and because, after over a decade, it hasn't produced a single success.

The Wall Street Journal fears that  future Clinton ed department will be a wholly-owned union subsidiary, which brings me to what I find most hilariously ironic about all this Clintonian pearl clutching.

The charter folks take Clinton's words far more seriously than I do. Clinton has always been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street, and I fully expect her to behave as such should she be elected (which, if it happens, won't be because I voted for her). So Clinton said something vaguely mean (and painfully accurate) about charter schools, one time. Hell, Clinton says a lot of things. And since both unions threw support to her without making her so much as curtsy in their direction, I don't think there's much of a deal there. Nor do I think that union coffers will, this one time, outweigh the vast mountains of money that Wall Street has thrown at her over the years. And since it is Wall Street that ultimately backs the charter industry, I don't think charters have the slightest thing to worry about.

Heck-- almost immediately, a Clinton staffer walked back the terribly ouchy thirty words and re-assured charters that Clinton still thinks of them as Very Important Public Schools.

So the irony here is that while charter fans are freaking out because they think Clinton might start telling the truth about them and they might not be able to hoover up tax dollars with impunity any more, I'm thinking those thirty words are pretty meaningless. You guys really need to take a deep breath and get your blood pressure down; this is going to be a long haul.

Stopping Bad Charters

Over at Campbell Brown's Reformsters R Us PR site, charter fan Richard Whitmire addresses the question of how to handle terrible awful no good very bad charter schools. It's an important question, and his five answers are worth discussing. But it's also worth discussing how his answers direct attention to some fundamental charter issues.

Whitmire starts out by acknowledging that the charter movement keeps getting shot in the foot by its own friends. He drops the ball by characterizing charter opponents as either unions or competition-hating superintendents, skipping right past other opposition from groups like "people who care about public education" or "people who don't want schools to be used primarily as money-making tools for investors" or even "people who think the whole charter-choice approach is grossly inefficient and over-expensive." But he does nail his central point-- when charter foes ask why anyone should approve more charters when "so many crappy charters remain in business," they have a point.

Whitmire offers five ways that charter fans can sweep away the junk that is making Charterville look kind of shady and run-down.

Advocates Need To Change Their Mindset

Whitmire argues for quality over popularity. Filled seats and a waiting list don't prove that a school is good. He notes that CREDO research indicates that struggling charter schools can rarely be turned around. Which I would expect-- a public school has external pressures to answer to, while the board of a charter often answers to nobody. And he says this:

"And never justify keeping lousy charters open just because equally bad district schools never get closed. This is not the same thing. “Charter schools are meant to be an improvement over (traditional) public schools,” said [Scott] Pearson. “If not, why are we bothering? If we’re not delivering quality, I don’t think we have a business being in this game.”

It's a good point. Too many charters base their marketing on "the pubic schools here suck" and not "we can do things well."

Charter Advocates Need To Name Names

Yup. It's understandable to want to avoid calling out your own people when you're already under attack. But Whitmire says only California's charter association has the nerve to put charters on a "should close" list. But California's charter association chief says not calling them out is a threat to growth and autonomy.

But this is a great idea. I look forward to when the 74, which promised to follow the stories wherever they lead, starts naming names of bad charter actors.

Identify the Low Bar and Enforce It

Whitmire says states should set a minimum and close charters that fall below it. Good and great can take many forms, Whitmire says, but the bare minimum should be an enforceable universal standard.

Start Advocating-- Loudly-- For Changes In Mushy Laws That Allow Bad Charters To Stay In Business

Whitmire cites two Philly groups for doing so, and really, it's a surprise that more don't do so, because the next phase of the charter market will inevitably be the big players getting rules passed that make it harder to survive the market as a small fish. Charters used political connections and leverage to get the market pried open in the first place, but the next step for any evolving market is for the winners to enlist government help in maintaining their dominance.

The trick is in how the laws are written. If states set a true low standard below which charters can't fall, that's one challenge (particularly if it's test-based-- congratulations Test Prep Academy). But if legislators turn to industry insiders for a little help, we could see standards such as "Good charter schools have a combination of the letter K and a number in their title."

But there's certainly room for better laws in places like Ohio, Charter Junkyard of the East, or North Carolina, where charters are now assumed to be worthy unless someone proves they deserve to be shut down.

Improve Charter Authorizing 

Whitmire correctly notes that in some places (e.g. Kansas City) the incentives are in place to encourage authorizers to open as many charters as possible (Hmmm... wonder how the law ended up being written that way). Whitmire cites Arizona as a state where the charter board was "an embarrassment," but eventually figured things out (he comes just short of calling Ohio an embarrassment today).

There’s a dangerous notion out there that little can be done about weak authorizers. But that’s just wrong. What’s needed is for state politicians to insist that the job gets done.

So there are Whitmire's five thoughts. And if we assume for the moment that I'm not going to get my druthers regarding charters or their mission, then these are not bad thoughts. But for me, it raises  issues.

Embracing Churn

Whitmire's model is at least honest in its assumption that a charter system will involve schools regularly being shut down. And if I'm an economist looking down on a free market sector from high up on a cloud somewhere, that is normal and natural and not at all troubling. But if I'm a family on the ground, where schools are opening and closing and churning and burning-- well, that's not so great. Uprooting children on a regular basis? Not so great.

This is one of the many ways in which a market approach is incompatible with public education-- the free market does not provide a great deal of stability on the individual level (well, at least not until some market leader emerges to turn it into a not-so-free market). Children and their families deserve a stable system, and they benefit from not having to shift and change and retool and re-adjust every fall (and especially not during the year).

When it comes to schools, having a bunch of schools closing every year is not a desirable feature. But with a free charter market, it's not only a feature, but as Whitmire righly suggests, it's a necessity.

Meet the New Boss

Whitmire's article is shot through with calls, some direct and some not-so, for state regulation of charters.


Now, I don't have a problem with that. I would absolutely love to see states regulate the hell out of charters. But it doesn't really make sense for charteristas to like the idea, because it underlines a flaw in their whole premise.

After all-- the whole point of charters is to operate outside the heavy hand of government regulation and interference. Except that outside the hand of government regulation, we find lots of crappy charters. So we bring in the hand of government regulation to keep tings in line. Which means now we have two alternatives-- public schools that are locally run but regulated by the state, or charter schools that are locally run but regulated by the state. And if the charter regulations are going to be different in ways that are supposedly good for education, then why not use those better regulations for public schools.

It's possible that the long game is, as with many industries, to capture the controls of the regulatory agencies so that the regulations are just what charter operators would like them to be. But for that to happen the charter biz would have to be far more unified than it is now.

If ultimately we've got to call in the state to make sure that charters are accountable and run right and aren't corrupt crappy cons-- well, what's the point of having charters in the first place?

So I don't disagree with what Whitmire has to say, but it leads me back to the same old conclusion that charter schools as currently practiced don't do anything new or different except channel public tax dollars to private corporate pockets while increasing the total cost of education to a community (and suck the blood out of public schools in the process). More carefully regulating charters will just make charters less different from public schools.

Should We Embrace Charter Districts

First in USA Today, and a few days later, a bit more expansively in the Hechinger Report, Richard Whitmire argues for the embrace of charter growth, particularly since charters are starting to look like school districts.

We'll look at the Hechinger Report version, because it allows Whitmire to lay out his complete argument. It's an impressive compendium of almost every pro-charter argument ever made, and it manages to get very little correct.

More than twenty years ago when charter schools first got launched in Minnesota no one envisioned that one day we would see charter management networks growing to resemble medium-size school districts.

Probably not true. I think plenty of people called this one. More importantly, I think plenty of people interested in the charter business were absolutely banking on it.


Whitmire goes on to applaud the greenlighting of fourteen more Success Academy branches in NY. He cheers that the rapid expansion of the chain doesn't seem to have hurt the quality, and that even students in freshly opened branches have gotten swell test results.

"Regardless of your personal opinion of charter schools versus traditional schools," says Whitmire, "that’s remarkable."

Well, no. It isn't remarkable at all. If Success Academies, say, retained all of a starting class to the point of graduation instead of losing more than half, that would be remarkable. And if that wholly retained batch of eighth graders qualified for one of NYC's top high schools, instead of having to just move into another Success Academy berth, that would be remarkable. But it's not what happened. Raising standardized test scores is not the same thing as providing a quality education-- particularly if you drop the educating to focus on weeks and weeks of preparatory drilling. There is nothing remarkable about creaming a select student population and training them to get better test scores to the detriment of everything else.

Of course, there are larger chains than Success. Others reach greater states of hugification, but Whitmire is thankful that "only the best charter networks were allowed to grow to this size." It begs the question who, exactly, is "allowing" the growth, but okay. All of these large chains are, he claims, able to catch these students up with a year-and-a-half of learning for every year in the classroom. Measuring student learning in years? Not an ounce of support that that is actually a real thing.

Whitmire knows the secrets that allow charter chains to scale up. For instance, there's this:

...their ability to attract some of the nation’s brightest college graduates as teachers. Many of those teachers move on to other careers, but they stay long enough to make a difference.

So, TFA temps make charters better (I am curious-- how long exactly is "long enough to make a difference"?)  Sure, they may have little or training, and contribute nothing to the stability of the school. But at least they're cheap, easily replaced, and don't draw a pension. Whitmire has that stability thing covered-- charters are also great because they establish a common classroom culture. In other words, if you have a strong policies and procedures manual, you can plug any warm body into a classroom without making a difference.

Whitmire will trot out the old canard that charter schools are public schools. I've explained what four requirements must be met to earn the name "public" and I don't think the charter chains are meeting any of them (including Success Academy, which went to court to keep their finances secret).

He notes that charters have waiting lists out the whazoo, and cites Success as an example. Interesting choice, given Success's well-documented high-priced recruitment/marketing campaigns.

Whitmire does admit that charter networks don't take as many special education students. He also allows as how charters drain resources from public districts, forcing them to downsize "to meet diminished demand," which is incorrect. Public schools downsize to meet diminished funding, which would be easy if there were, in fact, a diminished demand. But when one kid leaves a classroom a charter, the students left behind still demand a fully resourced classroom.

When a charter kids leaves public school, she takes 100% of her funding with her, but she does not take 100% of the costs that she incurred for the district.

Whitmire proceeds to sign a song of many charter successes. Except they aren't successes. Tennessee's ASD is a mess. He claims that charter vs. public competition in DC benefits students on both sides. And he spends a whole paragraph touting the miracle of New Orleans, which appears to be only a miracle of PR. Like many hotbeds of charterfication, New Orleans' success has been in getting tax dollars directed to corporate pockets. Educating children? Not so much.

And why is it that no charter advocates want to talk about one place that is really working on implementing the New Orleans model? Where are the songs of praise dedicated to One Newark? Could it be that in New Jersey, charteristas have been freed to Do As They Please, and what they've created is a horrible, horrible mess. (If you want a link, read the collected works of Jersey Jazzman-- this is a mess so large that one blog post can't hold it.)

On the home stretch, Whitmire admits that some charters aren't pulling their weight, and he thinks that the authorizers should be all over their chartery butts.

But the growth of high performing single charters, as well as these larger CMOs such as IDEA, KIPP and Uncommon Schools, should be welcomed, not stonewalled or smeared with conspiracy theories about “privatizing” education.

"Conspiracy theory" is a polite and classy way to dismiss somebody as being crazy wrong. But when the state legislature of New York passes special laws requiring New York City schools to hand over real estate to the private company that runs Success Academy so that they can rake in the money (but not account for it, even as they pay their boss a cool half million) -- well, I'm not sure what that is, if not "privatization." I mean, it might come up short of "privatization" because it is being paid for with "public tax dollars," but other than that "splitting of hairs" I'm not sure what Whitmire is "talking about."

And as a last shot "These charters are successfully educating thousands of students destined to fail in traditional neighborhood schools." I'm impressed that we can tell the destinies of these students in alternate universes. I would like to peek over there and see how many of the students left behind in thanks-to-charters underfunded schools would have been destined to succeed more easily. Nor do I understand why charters, with their special destiny-o-vision, send so many students back to public schools.

But that's the whole compendium. Whitmire has sandwiched in just about every piece of marketing copy ever used for charters, while simultaneously answering none of the legitimate criticisms of the modern charter movement. He also manages to avoid the very question he raises-- why exactly is a larger charter chain better than a single charter? More layers of bureaucracy? A central office far away from your child's actual school? He never did tell us why size matters here.

It's a herculean effort, and a good piece to bookmark if you want access to All the Pro-charter Arguments. But for me, I'm going to hold off on the whole embracing thing, thanks.
It's an impressive compendium