Why charters mean school closures
SFUSD faces a series of crises right now, including a looming strike, the upcoming departure of our superintendent — and the frighteningly likely closure of a number of schools.
One damaging factor helping to force school closures is the incursion of charter schools. Every charter drains students from existing schools, threatening their survival.
Yet charter schools’ record in our district is mixed. Overall, it’s mediocre. And that’s despite the fact that charters have gotten more district funding than other schools, by law, so that all children in non-charter schools sacrifice to subsidize charters.
Charter schools are a pet project of the Bush administration and the political right — a potent weapon in the arsenal aimed at weakening and ultimately destroying public education. Busting the teachers’ unions is one of their main goals.
Yes, there are some quality charter schools, and there are committed and competent educators involved in charter schools. But they are unwittingly adding momentum to a movement that aims to harm public education, not help it.
There’s a reason that those well-intentioned individuals and many readers may be unaware of these issues. The charter movement is sponsored, slickly marketed and skillfully promoted by well-funded and powerful anti-public-school forces, primarily think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution. Key charter supporters include such controversial names as Wal-Mart’s Walton family and Gap founder Don Fisher.
This wasn’t the way charters were supposed to be. Their original supporters envisioned small, community-run schools that would pioneer innovations, which could then be adopted by traditional public schools. But not even charter schools’ most fervent boosters can name any innovations that have been pioneered at charters. Asked at a recent Commonwealth Club forum, California charter schools’ top dog, Caprice Young, couldn’t name one such innovation. The best she could come up with were admirable but hardly earthshaking ideas such as foreign language classes.
Meanwhile, small communities have too often discovered that it’s a crushing, complex task to run a school on their own. So charter schools are generally operated by chains. They wind up constituting their own separate school systems, parallel to district systems and almost entirely unaccountable.
A school district’s only means of imposing oversight is the threat of revoking the charter. But the charter movement can marshal its ample resources to fight back, creating painful and damaging controversy within a school district.
SFUSD learned that the hard way when it revoked the charter of Urban Pioneer, where two students died in 2003 on a wilderness outing while their chaperones had gone off barhopping. Urban Pioneer was also in financial shambles, was openly committing academic fraud by graduating students with insufficient credits, and posted rock-bottom test scores. But the protests against SFUSD’s obviously necessary move to close the school split our district and ultimately harmed our kids.
Our district can’t undo the damage that has been done by approving previous charters, dating back to Edison Charter Academy in the Rojas era. But we can learn from our mistakes. In the future, I urge the school board to just say no to charter schools.
— Caroline
One damaging factor helping to force school closures is the incursion of charter schools. Every charter drains students from existing schools, threatening their survival.
Yet charter schools’ record in our district is mixed. Overall, it’s mediocre. And that’s despite the fact that charters have gotten more district funding than other schools, by law, so that all children in non-charter schools sacrifice to subsidize charters.
Charter schools are a pet project of the Bush administration and the political right — a potent weapon in the arsenal aimed at weakening and ultimately destroying public education. Busting the teachers’ unions is one of their main goals.
Yes, there are some quality charter schools, and there are committed and competent educators involved in charter schools. But they are unwittingly adding momentum to a movement that aims to harm public education, not help it.
There’s a reason that those well-intentioned individuals and many readers may be unaware of these issues. The charter movement is sponsored, slickly marketed and skillfully promoted by well-funded and powerful anti-public-school forces, primarily think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution. Key charter supporters include such controversial names as Wal-Mart’s Walton family and Gap founder Don Fisher.
This wasn’t the way charters were supposed to be. Their original supporters envisioned small, community-run schools that would pioneer innovations, which could then be adopted by traditional public schools. But not even charter schools’ most fervent boosters can name any innovations that have been pioneered at charters. Asked at a recent Commonwealth Club forum, California charter schools’ top dog, Caprice Young, couldn’t name one such innovation. The best she could come up with were admirable but hardly earthshaking ideas such as foreign language classes.
Meanwhile, small communities have too often discovered that it’s a crushing, complex task to run a school on their own. So charter schools are generally operated by chains. They wind up constituting their own separate school systems, parallel to district systems and almost entirely unaccountable.
A school district’s only means of imposing oversight is the threat of revoking the charter. But the charter movement can marshal its ample resources to fight back, creating painful and damaging controversy within a school district.
SFUSD learned that the hard way when it revoked the charter of Urban Pioneer, where two students died in 2003 on a wilderness outing while their chaperones had gone off barhopping. Urban Pioneer was also in financial shambles, was openly committing academic fraud by graduating students with insufficient credits, and posted rock-bottom test scores. But the protests against SFUSD’s obviously necessary move to close the school split our district and ultimately harmed our kids.
Our district can’t undo the damage that has been done by approving previous charters, dating back to Edison Charter Academy in the Rojas era. But we can learn from our mistakes. In the future, I urge the school board to just say no to charter schools.
— Caroline
Labels: Charters
4 Comments:
This article was published in the Examiner here. Nice work, Caroline.
Hi Caroline-
You are right on! As we watch "public school as we know it" being diced up I wonder constantly if anyone is listening or watching. The growing resegregation and two-tiered school-system that is being created is troubling. I thank you so this great comment.
Hi Caroline,
Old argument, but the horse, though dead, could take some more beating.
If charters are mediocre in general, they are no worse than ordinary public schools, and typically better if they are ordinary (non-distance learning) schools. We've been over this before.
If regular public schools are closed due to charter school taking the students, where's the harm ? Are the students worse off ? Hardly.
As for financing, as per RAND (that study we discussed months ago) charters don't get more money normally than public schools, typically they get less money from government sources, and the few that do get more get it from private sources. Your claims otherwise are undocumented.
The rest of your political arguments are based on pure political alignment. I could complain about public schools entirely out of dislike for public employee unions and socialistic academics and I would be no less correct than you are with respect to Republicans. I.e., that argument only works on people who already agree with you.
Hey Luis. You're correct that I targeted this piece at the left, which was my specific intent because that's a group that sometimes seems thoroughly addled about this issue.
I originally wrote it in a shorter version as a speech for a BOE meeting, aiming it at the BOE's charter supporters -- Mar, Sanchez and Lipson, whose motive for allying with the Hoover Institution on this issue absolutely flummoxes me.
However, re the additional district money charter schools have been getting, which apparently WILL end: I have not yet found a simple piece of information spelling that out, so you have to work backward divining it from what I can find online. But here's some info that seems definitive to me.
The Novato school district, saddled with an Envision charter as one of its three high schools, has been forced by law to give that charter $800 more per student per year than its other two high schools get. In SFUSD, that uneven funding gets lost in the fog a bit more, but in a district with only three high schools, it is very clear that students at two of them are sacrificing to give extra money to students at the third.
So the Novato district turned to State Sen. Carole Migden, who authored legislation to require that charter schools receive only the same funding as other district schools. The bill is SB 319, and the guv signed it in September. Here's documentation.
The item below is from "Charter Voice: The independent voice of California's charter schools and charter authorizers."
It complains about the Migden legislation and how it will cuase charters to lose that extra money. To me that constitutes fairly clear evidence that the extra money has been part of the funding structure.
This is extra money from a school district -- the charters forever complain that they get less overall, and I don't know about that, but they have been getting more from DISTRICTS.
From "Charter Voice," the key sentence: This bill would cap charter high school general purpose funding at the rate received by unified school districts, which will result in an approximate $800 cut per student.
http://www.chartervoice.org/pdf_files/fridayreports/Friday_Report_4-15-05.pdf
The full text:
Migden Bill to Cut Charter High School Funding Moves Forward, Despite Strong Opposition
After a lengthy discussion about the merits (or lack thereof) of Senator Carole Migden’s bill to cap charter high school funding, the Senate Education Committee ultimately voted to move the bill forward on a "courtesy" vote by Senator Denham. This bill would cap charter high school general purpose funding at the rate received by unified school
districts, which will result in an approximate $800 cut per student. CharterVoice testimony against the bill spurred sharp questions toward Senator Migden from both Democratic and Republican committee members. The committee ultimately passed the bill, though it was clear that several members did so only as a courtesy to Migden who chairs the powerful Appropriations Committee. We are hopeful that this absurd measure will die later in the legislative process.
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