Arne Duncan's charter schools

Obama's Secretary of Education designate built his reputation in Chicago on the success of his so-called "turnaround schools." Turnaround schools are "low performing" schools (kids with lousy test scores) which are shut down and then replaced with "different" schools, many of them charters. 

Under Arne Duncan, many of the new charter schools were handed over to private management firms, not necessarily a bad move if they served ALL kids in Chicago Public Schools equally.  Problem is, they don't.

In a letter to the chair of the House Committee on Education and labor, Julie Woestehoff of the Chicago school activist group, Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE), cautioned Rep, George Miller that charter schools with high test scores, in this case the Dodge Renaissance Academy, have an unfair advantage:

"The new school is essentially serving a completely different student body. It simply does not operate on a level playing field with other schools, and its results should be considered in that context."

At a Chicago School Board meeting honoring Arne Duncan as Obama's pick for Education Secretary, unhappy parents and teachers registered their complaints:

"Jesse Sharkey, a Senn High union delegate, said that after a fight at a charter school in March, 19 kids showed up at Senn with letters saying they had been 'dis-enrolled' from the school. Charters 'are allowed to kick people off the island,' Sharkey said. 'We're supposed to take all children. How is that fair?' "

Fair or not, in Chicago, "charters are allowed to create and enforce their own disciplinary code", thereby justifying a process that rids the schools of hard to educate students.

In a post to the PURE website, Julie Woestehoff writes that, essentially charter schools in Chicago are manipulating their enrollments  to improve their test scores.  The smaller the enrollment and the fewer the number of low income students, the better the scores.

Same goes for New York's high flying public charters.  EduWonkette claims that successful choice schools like the

"...Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics isn't serving a population typical of the South Bronx: only 18% qualified for free lunch, 0% were in full-time special education, .9% were in part-time special education, .9% were English Language Learners... ."

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Closer to home, here's anecdotal evidence that Portland's charter schools are not above excluding students that they believe may be too difficult to educate.  It arrived as a comment to one of my earlier posts. 

Here are the salient remarks:

"My son [a child with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder] went to Trillium Charter School for 5th grade the first year it opened... .  It was a difficult year and by the end they simply said they couldn't serve him anymore at Trillium, so we enrolled him at Beaumont Middle School for 6th grade, which was also a disaster in many
ways... . ...

"[After a couple of years at local area private schools,we] applied again at Trillium for 9th grade." ...

"The week before school started we received a letter from the director of Trillium that stated that our son could not be admitted because he was on an IEP (he was not!) and because he had attended so many different schools since his time at Trillium.  Basically, the director of Trillium was saying that they didn't want him, didn't want to deal with his OCD, and they came up with an excuse."...

"I'm very offended.  The charter is just like a private school where the director gets to decide who is enrolled or not based on their whim, and they are accountable to no one."

Take that for what it's worth.  I have no way of verifying the accuracy of the account. 

But the fact remains that charter schools in Portland serve far fewer poor and special needs students than traditional public neighborhood schools. 

Hopefully Barack Obama will keep that in mind as he and Arne Duncan forge a new public schools policy for the 21st Century, one based on equitable and truly democratic principles. 

Comments

[marcia]

Unfortunately I think Obama is a big backer of the charter schools, also, judging from some of his campaign speeches. I brought this up when PAT decided to back him for president. The answer was, we need to keep educating him..

[Harry Kershner]

Obama, like other elites of the duopoly, do not need education. They already know the truth, and "speaking truth to power" is thus a poor strategy, as Marcia implies. Anyone who continues to believe that Obama represents progressive change needs the education.

[Zarwen]

Wasn't Connie van Brunt, formerly of the PSF, part of this "turnaround schools" movement in Chicago?