Since the NAACP created a resolution, to be ratified at a later date, calling for a moratorium on new charter schools, it has run into all kinds of resistance. The expected pro-charter groups opposed the resolution, as did the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post.
This weekend, the NAACP approved the resolution. I sent a personal email congratulating the group on its courage, and took out a membership for the first time.
Black children, who make up 15 percent of the overall school enrollment, make up 25 percent of the charter school population. Clearly the schools are a popular option in black communities. But the NAACP’s concern is that too many of the charters attended by black children “mirror predatory lending practices.” I’m not sure the analogy works exactly, but the concept is accurate. If you want to find poorly run charter schools where the people who “own” them are out for a quick buck at the expense of the children, look at schools serving children from low income families, whether black, brown or white. It’s tough to get away with offering shoddy education to the children of high income, well educated parents, but unfortunately, it’s all too easy to stick the words “college preparatory academy” into the name of a school serving low income students and sell it as a way for children to get a better education than they get at their local public schools. As poorly as district schools sometimes serve their children, some charters do even worse.
It’s important to remember the NAACP isn’t condemning all charters, and it isn’t calling for the closure of schools currently in operation, only a halt to their expansion until some conditions are met.
We are calling for a moratorium on the expansion of the charter schools at least until such time as:
(1) Charter schools are subject to the same transparency and accountability standards as public schools
(2) Public funds are not diverted to charter schools at the expense of the public school system
(3) Charter schools cease expelling students that public schools have a duty to educate and
(4) Cease to perpetuate de facto segregation of the highest performing children from those whose aspirations may be high but whose talents are not yet as obvious.
Charters have been around for 25 years, and during that time, they’ve been subject to few regulations and less transparency and accountability. In their two-and-a-half decades, we’ve had a chance to get a sense of how charter schools operate, for better and for worse. We’ve seen ample evidence of the ways some unscrupulous people use the schools as their personal piggy banks, often getting away with draining state funding from the schools and cheating their students out of educations for years before they’re found out. Too many people are still operating their educational scams undetected. It’s time to do what we can to get the bad actors out of the charter school business by exposing the ways they abuse the system, and maximize the number of charters that are dedicated to giving quality educations to their students.
A Yeah-Yeah-I-Know Note. Yeah, yeah, I know public schools don’t always spend their money wisely, and they don’t always do as good a job as we want them to do. But their finances and policies are far more transparent than charter schools, by law, so we can peer inside them more easily to see what’s going on. Transparency and accountability aren’t guarantees schools will be run effectively, but they are necessary prerequisites to allow the public to see problems and work toward improving the schools. That should be true of all publicly funded district and charter schools.
This article appears in Oct 13-19, 2016.
Thank you Safier for your support in keeping those black children in their failing inner city schools and not having choice to escape. It’s essential to the ‘progressive’ agenda to have a dependent, second class of citizens.
The rest of the country have the inner city blacks. Here in Tucson we can be proud of the illegals that provide millions of dollars of confiscated taxpayer dollars to ‘good’ and ‘caring’ liberals stuffing their pockets, like you did for your entire career.
Liberals, ‘Progressives’, have had a lock on the public school system for decades.
Now all we need is Bernie Sanders to go out and campaign for Hillary. The liberal takeover is complete:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/10/17/hillary-clinton-foundation-donors-lobbyists-state-department/92285652/
Take a good look at the socialist corporations and our money that they have used against us.
Sanders may have conspired to make Hillary look moderate. The law will catch up with her.
David:
I hate to interrupt your contemplation of what you regard as encouraging developments at the national level with mundane and somewhat depressing local concerns, but the fact is that here in Arizona, the transparency of public district schools is far from what you assume it is. You state: “I know public schools don’t always spend their money wisely, and they don’t always do as good a job as we want them to do. But their finances and policies are far more transparent than charter schools, by law, so we can peer inside them more easily to see what’s going on.”
Arizona public district schools may be REQUIRED BY LAW to be more transparent, but in a context where enforcement of these laws is by no means effective or uniform, we cannot, in practice, “peer inside them more easily to see what’s going on.”
Did you notice the link “Supporting Public Ed Means Supporting Local Reform” posted on one of your recent blogs, David? In case not, here it is again, and I suggest you do what I did: click on it and read the reports, especially those pertaining to Tucson Unified School District Governing Board, Amphitheater School District Governing Board, Holladay Magnet Site Council, University High School Site Council, and the informal survey at the end of the report relating to public district site council laws and their implementation in selected local districts:
http://www.lwvgt.org/files/ObserverCorps-TransparencyCheckSep2016.pdf
This report is not getting very much play in the local media. I wonder why. Perhaps because there are some people locally who believe, “Morale costs nothing in these tough fiscal times, and our schools need that morale to keep going in the face of adversity.” In other words: Keep lying about or concealing what the ACTUAL conditions are in our public district schools, because if people knew how bad conditions have actually become, the charters might win this war we’re fighting with them.
Sorry, but according to the very HIGH standards of people like you who champion TRANSPARENCY and ACCOUNTABILITY, that cannot be regarded as an appropriate attitude for an employee of a PUBLIC institution to adopt, can it David?
All I can say is thank God we who can’t afford private schools have an option besides our mediocre-to-awful public school system. More charter schools please.
Arizona is number one in charter school choice and from 2011 to 2015 we were number one in combined math and reading gains on the NAEP test from 2011 4th grade to 2015 8th grsde.
But charter schools were not pumping out little communistic activists. The public’s have a lock on that.
jhuppent: Correlation does not show causation. Get some sort of comparison group before you start boasting of proof. Better yet – how about a real study?
I’m interested in the portion of David’s blog where he writes, “If you want to find poorly run charter schools where the people who “own” them are out for a quick buck at the expense of the children, look at schools serving children from low income families, whether black, brown or white.”
That’s also true of public district schools, David: If you want to find poorly run public district schools where the people who govern and administer them are out for a quick buck at the expense of the children, look at public district systems serving primarily children from low income families.
What’s the solution to creating educational institutions that can deliver sound services to low SES constituencies? Having transparency laws on the books is not enough; any honest examination of how well having Arizona Open Meeting Law on the books actually yields practices in our public school districts that support easy access of information for constituents will tell you that. You might also want to look at how much good it does for the media to provide constituents in poor school districts with information on central administrative bloat, improper relationships between Board members and contractors, and outrageously inflated central administration compensation packages. When these facts about certain public districts are widely publicized, does the dissemination of this information result in change of leadership at the Board level, or is the electorate insufficiently engaged to understand what this information means and to act on it? What happens with the TUSD Board election this November will be an interesting local “test case” for this.
In any case, something more than putting transparency laws on the books is required to protect the best interests of our most vulnerable citizens. In a context where the enforcement model is complaint driven, as it is with Arizona Open Meeting Law, enforcement depends upon constituents, advocacy organizations, or journalists knowing the law, watching the institutions, reporting on what is going on , filing complaints and asking for improvement.
You have not been and you continue not to be part of that process because you make no effort to provide reporting that is accurate and reasonably complete on what is happening in the schools — both public district and charter — that serve low SES constituencies. The premise behind your posts is always that there is some magical superiority to public district schools and that defending the entrenched, vested interests in these institutions is to defend the interest of the poor. That is simply not the case, and continuing to send that message to the public and to the Pima County Democratic Party (your real target audience here) is making yourself part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
It is not David’s job to tell the truth here, or even bring accurate reporting. We know he won’t because he is not part of the media. But where is the media that used to do that as a service to the public for their very protected existence under freedom of the press?
They have also chosen to lie to us, and simply scoof at their responsibility.
That explains this:
“The further a society strays from the truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” – George Orwell
Response to: jjmarks
Correlation isn’t causation but proof of causation starts with correlation. In this case, Safire is making a anecdotal case that charter public schools are hurting Arizona education when clearly this is not the case. Measured academic gains were the highest in the nation for 2011 to 2015. And, the evidence exgtends outside of test scores. In 1992, juveniles in Arizona committed 70 murders. By 2012, that had dropped to a stunning 7 murders.
You can’t prove causation, Huppenthal. Didn’t you ever read David Hume?
Some kids need to be expelled because the parents don’t want to deal with their own discipline problem and make all the other students and teachers SUFFER! Some children simply don’t have the mental capacity to attend college:
IQ 80-89 — Below average
This is the I.Q. range most associated with violence. Most violent crime is committed by males from this range. When the modal I.Q. of a group is in this range, one may expect trouble with with many male members of that group. When the modal I.Q. of a society or population is raised upward of this range, violence decreases as fewer males fall in this range then, given the shape of an even remotely normal distribution. When the modal I.Q. of a society is below this range to begin with though, raising it may increase violence. The causal mechanism behind the (statistical) relation between crime and below-average I.Q. is likely that lower I.Q. levels inherently tend to go with having less impulse control, being less able to delay gratification, being less able to comprehend moral principles like the Golden Rule, and being overstrained by the cognitive demands of society.
13 years ago the US IQ was 103
Now It’s 98
IQ of Mexico (average) 89
IQ of Mexican/Americans (average) 89 SO! Don’t blame the Teachers or the schools.
In response to “Try getting a graduate degree in education”
You misinterpret Hume. Hume doesn’t deny cause and effect. Let me assure you that Hume acknowledges that if you light a torch and put it under your finger your flesh will burn.
What Hume is referring to is false associations and education is loaded with them. For example high performing students are so closely associated with Advanced Placement that surely Advance Placement causes at least some of that high performance. But, in the NELS study where they followed thousands of students from 8th grade on into adult life and they could carefully compare high SES students, they found no impact from Advanced Placement with the exception of one Advanced Placement class: Calculus.
In the late 90’s, the National Reading Panel spent $10 million analyzing 10,000 studies, the top 10,000 studies selected from prestigious journals, and found that 96% of them weren’t worth the paper they were written on. Even the other 4% had significant flaws.
Education culture is a mess precisely for the issues that Hume raises in his famous discourses on cause and effect. This is why the huge longitudinal studies are so important. NELS and the ECLS are guiding lights for education policy because they meet Hume’s standards for cause and effect.