Charter Schools Week, Part 1: Ravitch Rewrites Shanker

In some recent email snuggling between hedge fund kingpin and KIPP supporter, Whitney Tilson, and Diane Ravitch, Dr. Ravitch attempted to educate Whitney on some of the early rationale for charter schools. Instead, she muddied the historical waters with a bizarre and inaccurate recollection of some of the early developments.   

Here's a clip from Ravitch's conversation with Tilson, in which Ravitch wistfully considers returning to a time that never was:

I would like to see charter schools return to the original idea proposed in 1988 by Albert Shanker and a professor in Massachusetts named Ray Budde. Charter schools were supposed to be collaborators with public schools, not competitors. Their teachers would belong to the same union as public school teachers. They were supposed to have freedom to innovate and expected to share their innovations with the public schools. At the end of their charter–say, five years or ten years–they would cease to exist and return to the public school district. Shanker thought that charter schools should exist find innovative ways to help the kids who were not making it in public schools, those who had dropped out, those who were unmotivated, those who were turned off by traditional schools. I support that idea. We have strayed very far from the original idea and are moving towards a dual school system, one free to choose its students, the other required to accept all who show up at their doors.

Even though Tilson might certainly appreciate this gloss (since it offers some justification for the chain gang approach), Ravitch ignores the principal reasons that Shanker was initially interested in charters.  

When the idea of independent charter schools arrived on the scene in the late 80s, education policy folks and teachers were excited by the prospect of public school experiments that embrace new organizational structures and educational ideas and strategies that the larger systems might learn from and emulate.  AFT president, Albert Shanker, was particularly interested in the potential of charters to attract economically diverse and ethnically diverse students, much the same way that alternative schools of the 60s had, but with major differences.  

Shanker wanted charters to serve the needs of individual students, yes, but he wanted charters, too, to help to improve the public school systems in ways that that would make schools more humane, integrated, progressive, and effective for students and teachers, alike.  He was not interested in remedial charters for students on the verge of dropping out, as Ravitch claims.

By the early 1990s, however, Shanker had seen the corporate writing on the wall, and he saw charters as the privatization threat that has become full blown over the past two decades--with 7,000 charters today.  Of course, Ravitch and her misleading allies who run the teachers' unions leave out this part of the Shanker history, just as they ignore the historical fact that Shanker was interested in charters as a tool for increasing integration, improving new instructional strategies, and experimenting with organizational structures.

Today "high quality" charters have failed on all three counts, as they are now frozen in place by a rigid segregation model grounded in a behavioral management rigor mortis that has more in common with the 19th Century than the 21st.  

In the kinds of charters that the federal government and Wall Street love to fund, there is penal kind of segregation that operates inside an organizational structure that turns professional teachers into temporary corporate servants to the brutal whims of clueless school CEOs.  

What results are paternalistic indoctrination programs that exploit teachers and the unpaid drudgery of students to raise test scores, thus expanding the "no excuses" apartheid charter schools as the school model of choice for the poor by white philanthropists and Washington's elite.

We clearly see the preference for the "no excuses" KIPP Model in the statements and actions taken by the corporate progressives who run the U. S. Dept. of Education. This will be taken up in Pt. 2, which examines the first charter school program grant program under ESSA, which will be worth $160,000,000. It's not pretty.

Six Decades After Brown

Charts follow the clip:

Decades after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling declared segregated schooling of black students unconstitutional, many American schools with high minority populations continue to receive fewer resources and provide an education that's inferior to schools with large white populations.

For Sunday's 61st anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which proclaimed "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," The Huffington Post takes a look at the state of education for black students in 2015.

In many states, there continues to be stark disparities in resources provided to black students and white students. In Nevada, for example, high-minority school districts receive significantly less state and local funding per pupil than low-minority districts.

These six graphs show the disparities.

Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for Memphis Apartheid Corporate Charter Schools

Today's story in the Commercial Appeal makes it clear that Shelby County Schools (SCS)  are in a big hurry to close the deal to keep large numbers of County students from going to the municipal boutique districts that sprang into existence when the threat of consolidation made it clear that they, otherwise, would have been in the same school system as all the poor black kids in Memphis.  

Hanging on to large numbers of the poorer County students that, otherwise, would end up in the municipal districts serves SCS in two ways: 1) it helps to cover the $212 million loss ofthe thousands of students to apartheid corporate charter reform schools in Memphis, without acknowledging the loss, and 2) it provides future targets for corporate segregation schools beyond the urban core. With the State's bottom five percent of schools targeted for turnover each year, you only have to be in the lower half of test performers to get charterized within the next ten years. 

Wake County's Teabagger Five Working to Revive Socioeconomic Apartheid

The enemies of diversity have come up with their initial implementation plan to return Wake County schools to the era of Jim Crow. 

Instead of following the advice of the consultant they hired to present a plan for "controlled choice," the Tea Partiers on the panel have chosen the most divisive and unfair of the four options on the table.  Is anyone surprised? 

After all, the ideological playbook that these teabagger mouthpieces are working from demands the debasement and destruction of public education.  Re-creating a whole bunch of poor, failing schools feeds that effort, while satisfying the racists within Wake County who "want their country back."  It's a real opportunity for the John Birchers and the Koch Brothers to advance their anti-democratic agenda.  A clip from the News & Observer:

. . . .Last month, the student assignment committee told staff to work on four different maps, based on high school attendance lines; transportation zones; regions run by each area superintendent; and, planning regions used for developing school construction bond issues.

Committee members agreed Tuesday to go with a plan with the largest number of zones of those considered by the committee and schools staff.

"From the things that people have said, the high school model seems to have the most positives," said board majority member Chris Malone. "What I would like us to do is begin with that shell."

But the choice of more neighborhood zones goes against the recommendations of Michael Alves, a Massachusetts educational consultant who was invited to explain his "controlled choice" concept to Wake officials this summer. Alves said that such plans, used by dozens of systems nationwide, work best with a smaller number of large zones that each reflect the entire community.

Demographic data shows that the 16 neighborhood school zones have wide disparities in race and in the percentage of children receiving federally subsidized lunches. Committee members stressed that the boundary lines for the 16 zones are still being worked on and could be redrawn in an attempt to minimize these disparities. . . .

Disaster Capitalism Collects from FEMA: Why NOLA Charterites Have 1,800 Million Reasons to Celebrate, Part I

In light of the 1,800 million FEMA dollars that will likely go to Paul Vallas and the charterites to build the perfect segregated charter school system in New Orleans, it is high time to revisit the educational apartheid infrastructure that corporate charterites began and that Obama has chosen to complete. 

The following is from an explanation of the unfair, unethical, and anti-public school reality on the ground in NOLA schools.  It is from the Executive Summary of THE STATE OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN POST-KATRINA NEW ORLEANS: THE CHALLENGE OF CREATING EQUAL OPPORTUNITY by the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota, a report released in February 2010:

Rebuilding of the public school system in post-Katrina New Orleans has produced a five “tiered” system of public schools in which not every student in the city receives the same quality education.

In the new system, public schools operate under five distinct governance structures that serve different student populations: Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) traditional public schools (which educate 7 percent of the city’s students); OPSB charter schools (20 percent); Recovery School District (RSD) traditional public schools (36 percent); RSD charter schools (34 percent); and Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) charter schools (2 percent).

Public schools in this tiered system do not compete on a level playing field because schools in each sector operate under different rules and regulations.

The “tiered” system of public schools in the city of New Orleans sorts white students and a relatively small share of students of color into selective schools in the OPSB and BESE sectors, while steering the majority of low-income students of color to high-poverty schools in the RSD sector.

 In 2009, 87 percent of all white students in the city attended an OPSB or BESE charter school, while only 18 percent of black students did so.

 In contrast, 75 percent of black students attended an RSD school (charter or traditional public) in 2009, compared to only 11 percent of white students.

 Although nearly all schools in the city were high poverty, OPSB and BESE charters showed the lowest shares of high-poverty schools—67 and 50 percent—in the city. In contrast, nearly all RSD schools were high-poverty schools.

Racial and economic segregation hurt even the limited number of students of color who are in the OPSB and BESE sectors.

 Students of color were much more likely to attend a high-poverty school than white students in these two sectors. For instance, in 2009, students of color in OPSB charter schools were nearly 12 times more likely to attend a high-poverty OPSB school than white students. 

PERFORMANCE OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN THE NEW ORLEANS METROPOLITAN AREA:

The “tiered” system of public schools in the metro creates a tiered performance hierarchy and sorts white students and a minority of students of color into higher performing schools while restricting the majority of low income students of color into lower performing schools.

 School performance varies significantly across OPSB, RSD, BESE and suburban schools but not so much between charter and traditional schools.

 OPSB schools rank highest for the most part followed by BESE and suburban schools, with RSD schools lagging behind.

School performance varies significantly across sectors because schools in each sector do not compete on a level playing field.

 OPSB and BESE schools in the city provide some of the most advantageous educational settings in the region. However, they do so mostly by skimming the easiest-to-educate students through selective admission requirements that allow them to set explicit academic standards for incoming students. They also shape their student enrollments by using their enrollment practices, discipline and expulsion practices, transportation policies, location decisions, and marketing and recruitment efforts. These practices certainly contribute to the selective student bodies and superior performance of these schools.

 Suburban public schools—charters and non-charters—also provide good educational settings and outcomes. Suburban traditional schools are less likely to be segregated by race or income and test scores reflect this.

 RSD charter schools still skim the most motivated public students in the RSD sector despite lacking the selective admission requirements OPSB and BESE charters have.They do so by using their enrollment practices, discipline and expulsion practices, transportation policies, location decisions, and marketing and recruitment efforts. These practices almost certainly work to increase pass rates in RSD charters compared to their traditional counterparts.

As a result of rules that put RSD traditional schools at a competitive disadvantage, schools in this sector are reduced to ‘schools of last resort.’ This sector continues to educate the hardest-to-educate students in racially segregated, high-poverty schools. 

School performance varies much less between charter and traditional schools in each sector.

 OPSB and suburban charter schools do not outperform their traditional counterparts.  RSD charter schools do outperform RSD traditional public schools but the margins are modest and are narrowing for fourth graders.

Keep in mind this last point.  Despite the actively-racist fixing, finagling, recruiting in and pushing out, the charters are having a tough time holding on to their test score advantage over the public school dumping ground they have created for purposes of unfair comparison.

Georgia's Private White Academies Now to Be Financed with Tax Dollars

Last updated: 2/10/10

My first year of teaching was 1971 in Sandersville, Georgia, during the second year of school integration in that part of the apartheid South. Those white children whose parents could afford it had been placed in the private academies that had sprung up around the region like mushrooms in a cow pasture after a spring rain. Now almost 40 years later, we can now see the return of segregation and apartheid, this time taking hold at public expense in the charter schools like Pataula Charter Academy that hoped to be the solution to race mixing. From the Journal-Constitution:

By Maureen Downey

9:12 a.m. Monday, February 8, 2010

In fighting approval of a regional charter school, southwest Georgia superintendents allege that the Pataula Charter Academy would signal a return to the era in Georgia when blacks and whites attended different schools.

The debate is reopening old wounds of race and disparate education in districts still under court desegregation orders.

One of seven charter schools — public schools that operate with greater autonomy in exchange for greater accountability — approved by a new state commission, Pataula plans to open in the fall as a regional public k-8 school. It will enroll 440 students from Randolph, Calhoun, Early, Clay and Baker counties. Some districts now want the state Board of Education to stop Pataula.

Along with drawing from the majority black schools in the region, Pataula is attracting students from two private academies, which are virtually all-white. “Initially, you will see more urgency on the side of private-school parents who are tired of paying tuition,” said Ben Dismukes, a Pataula founder and himself the parent of two private-school students.

The interest of private-school parents has sparked worries that Pataula is a seg academy posing as a public charter school. To counter the innuendo that it is a “white school,” Pataula has held lotteries for slots, and encouraged all families to apply.

“For whatever reason — and it probably goes back to long before charter schools and long before even my time growing up in this area — trust has to be re-established between the African-American and white communities when it comes to education,” said Dismukes.

Although the school systems contend that Pataula will increase segregation, many nearby schools are far from integrated. Out of 756 students in k-8, Randolph County has 694 blacks and 62 whites. . . . .

American Apartheid: From Cradle to School to Prison

From Marian Wright Edelman at HuffPo:

Incarceration is becoming the new American apartheid and poor children of color are the fodder. It is time to sound a loud alarm about this threat to American unity and community, act to stop the growing criminalization of children at younger and younger ages, and tackle the unjust treatment of minority youths and adults in the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems with urgency and persistence. The failure to act now will reverse the hard-earned racial and social progress for which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others died and sacrificed. We must all call for investment in all children from birth through their successful transition to adulthood, remembering Frederick Douglass's correct observation that "it is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."

So many poor babies in rich America enter the world with multiple strikes against them: born without prenatal care, at low birthweight, and to a teen, poor, and poorly educated single mother and absent father. At crucial points in their development after birth until adulthood, more risks pile on, making a successful transition to productive adulthood significantly less likely and involvement in the criminal justice system significantly more likely. As Black children are more than three times as likely as White children to be poor, and are four times as likely to live in extreme poverty, a poor Black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime and is almost six times as likely as a White boy to be incarcerated for a drug offense.

The past continues to strangle the present and the future. Children with an incarcerated parent are more likely to become incarcerated. Black children are nearly nine times and Latino children are three times as likely as White children to have an incarcerated parent. Blacks constitute one-third and Latinos one-fifth of the prisoners in America, and 1 in 3 Black men, 20 to 29 years old, is under correctional supervision or control. Of the 2.3 million in jail or prison, 64 percent are minority. Of the 4.2 million persons on probation, 45 percent are minority; of the 800,000 on parole, 59 percent are minority. Inequitable drug sentencing policies including mandatory minimums have greatly escalated the incarceration of minority adults and youths.

Child poverty and neglect, racial disparities in systems that serve children, and the pipeline to prison are not acts of God. They are America's immoral political and economic choices that can and must be changed with strong political, corporate and community leadership.

No single sector or group can solve these child- and nation-threatening crises alone but all of us can together. Leaders must call us to the table and use their bully pulpits to replace our current paradigm of punishment as a first resort with a paradigm of prevention and early intervention. That will save lives, save families, save taxpayer money, and save our nation's aspiration to be a fair society. Health and mental health care and quality education cost far less than prisons.

If called to account today, America would not pass the test of the prophets, the Gospels, and all great faiths. Christians who profess to believe that God entered human history as a poor vulnerable baby, and that each man, woman and child is created in God's own image, need to act on that faith. The Jewish Midrash says God agreed to give the people of Israel the Torah only after they offered their children as guarantors, deeming neither their prophets nor elders sufficient. It is time to heed the prophets' call for justice for the orphans and the weak. America's Declaration of Independence says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...." After more than two centuries, it is time to make those truths evident in the lives of poor children of color and to close our intolerable national hypocrisy gap. America's sixth child is waiting for all of us to welcome him or her to the table in our rich land and show the world whether democratic capitalism is an oxymoron or whether it can work. Our national creed demands it. All great faiths demand it. Common sense and self-interest require it. And our moral redemption and credibility in the world we seek to lead compels it.

Ending child poverty is not only an urgent moral necessity, it is economically beneficial. Dr. Robert M. Solow, M.I.T. Nobel Laureate in Economics, wrote in Wasting America's Future that "ending child poverty is, at the very least, highly affordable" and would be a boost to the economy. A healthy Social Security and Medicare system for our increasing elderly population need as many productive workers as possible to support them. We can ill afford to let millions of our children grow up poor, in poor health, uneducated, and as dependent rather than productive citizens.

What then can leaders do to help build the spiritual and political will needed to help our nation pass the test of the God of history and better prepare for America's future? What steps can you take to heed Dr. King's warning not to let our wealth become our destruction but our salvation by helping the poor Lazaruses languishing at our closed gates? How can our nation use its blessings to bless all the children entrusted to our care and rekindle America's dimming dream?

As President Obama and Congress contemplate ways to stimulate our economy, let them begin by investing in a healthy, fair, head, and safe start for every American child and measures to ensure their successful transition to college and productive adulthood.

Learn more about CDF's Cradle to Prison Pipeline® Campaign.

Marian Wright Edelman, whose latest book is The Sea Is So Wide And My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation, is president of the Children's Defense Fund. For more information about the Children's Defense Fund, go to www.childrensdefense.org.