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Hypocrisy

Or more aptly, in the case of Corbett School District Superintendent Bob Dunton, a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Dunton, who has proposed a charter school for Corbett in order to boost enrollment, is "irked" that neighboring districts, namely Reynolds and Gresham, are offended by the proposal.  He calls the objections unethical:

"I wasn't going to let them take kids who want to be here, whose parents want them to be here," ... Dunton said. "Kids are not a means to an end, to financially support you as a district. That is unethical."

But that's precisely what Dunton's charter school proposal is, a "means to an end, to financially support" the Corbett School District.  He said so:

"...Dunton said he feared his 10-year quest to make the 700-student district a success would stall if schools in Gresham, Fairview, Troutdale and east Portland stopped allowing their students to transfer to Corbett."

Voila!  A K-12 Charter Academy that will merely mimic the programs up and running in the existing K-12 school.  Corbett already relies on transfers for a quarter of its enrollment.  The new charter will allow it to increase enrollment by an additional 300 students, each bringing in about $5K to district coffers.

The best part of the charter plan is that state law allows any student to enroll in a charter school --it doesn't matter where they live.

That's clearly a surefire financial "means to an end". 

Supposedly Corbett offers a superior learning environment to neighboring districts.  Maybe so.

But that's not so surprising given Corbett's small size and its lilly white demographics.  According to the Oregon Department of Education, 92% of its 700 students are white.

That will go a long way toward boosting a school's reputation.

Why charter schools can NEVER be models for school reform

Let me be more specific. 

When I say "models for school reform," I mean the reform of American universal public education.  Although charter schools are technically "public" schools, they operate outside the system.  That means, unlike traditional public schools, they are under no obligation to serve all students.

And they don't.  Despite lotteries and laws that prohibit selective enrollment by charter schools, "creaming," as the skimming off of better students is called, is built into the charter school application process.  Even to enter a lottery, parents must take the time and effort to "apply."  They must show an interest in enrolling their child in an alternative to the assigned neighborhood school.  That in itself narrows the range of students likely to enroll in a charter school.

How likely is it that children with parents who don't give a damn will become charter school students?

In a comment to the PPS Equity post "Charters and PPS", Rose cites other hindrances:

"The lottery system itself automatically excludes large populations: poor families without fixed addresses ... foster kids, homeless families, parents who are ELL or illiterate, and of course all those who are too busy, overwhelmed, or not sophisticated enough to stay aware of mandatory meetings, deadlines, and application processes."

As does Ken:

"Considering the lack of transportation to charter schools, parents must either live within walking distance, drive their own children, or find a carpool. This is simply impossible for many families: single mothers, some working families, families without access to individual transportation methods (cars), etc. Expanding charter schools would almost necessarily leave these children behind... ."

Nationally, the problem of charter school "creaming" is more apparent.  Two parent school activists from the San Francisco Bay area have written that charter schools "exclude the most challenging students" (and here):

"Enrollment at all charter schools is, by law, entirely by request. No student is assigned to a charter school by default. That means 'self-selection' occurs at all of them, inherently, by definition.

"That is, parents who care about their kids' education enough to make the effort to learn about and request a school are the ones whose kids attend charter schools. Parents who don't have it together ... do not choose charter schools. Thus their kids -- ...likely to be the most challenged and challenging -- are left in the traditional public schools."

In their second post they say that it's "...amply documented that charter schools all over the country... dramatically underserve special education students... ."

That's certainly true here in Portland. 

Initial enrollment is only part of the problem with limiting the range of students in charter schools.  There's also the issue of "attrition."

Caroline Grannan, one of the Bay Area activists, claims that the nationally renowned Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools, particularly the nine operating in California, lose a good chunk of their students each year, presumably their most problematic students:

"...any school that loses 77 percent of its most academically challenged subgroup, its true target students, is not solving the problems of public education. And any school that could keep 23 percent of a subgroup and disappear the rest could easily see that subgroup's achievement soar, no matter what pedagogical methods it used."

Grannan, citing an SRI International study, repeats the claim here:

"Sixty percent of the students who enter the Bay Area KIPP schools in fifth grade leave before the end of eighth grade ... . And the study also confirms what some might suspect -- it's consistently the lower performers who leave."

So there you have it --"creaming" and attrition should be reasons enough to discount charter schools as models for reform.

Someone please tell Barack Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, both big fans of charter schools. 

Charter schools, merit pay, and the "three stooges"

"Stooges" is how Jim Horn of School Matters described the three "unlikely comrades" featured in The Nation's excellent article, "The Selling of School Reform." 

Who are the three stooges?  Two Republicans --New York's Mike Bloomberg and Newt Gingrich --and Al Sharpton.  What the three have in common is that all are failed presidential candidates.  And this:

"The three are spokesmen for the Education Equality Project (EEP), an advocacy group that has attracted widespread media attention since its June 2008 launch, in large part because of its bipartisan call for policies like merit pay and the expansion of the charter school sector."

Other prominent members of EEP include up and coming young Democrats Corey Booker and Adrian Fenty (of Michelle Rhee infamy) who believe in applying free market principles to education and call themselves "reformers."  I call them what they really are --neoliberals, just like Bill Gates and Eli Broad, who, whatever political party they affiliate with, are nonetheless rich and not at all shy about using their wealth to force market-based reforms on the nation's public schools.

That means accountability, merit pay, and charter schools.

That brings us back to the EEP, the Education Equality Project, which is all about the "achievement gap."  Just what is the "achievement gap?"  It's the difference --or gap-- in scores on standardized achievement tests between the rich and the poor, the white and the non-white. 

That, too, is what accountability is all about --test scores.  Good schools get good test scores.  Lousy schools don't.  (That's where charters come in, but more on that later.)  Test scores also factor into merit pay.  How do you know who the good teachers are?  They're the ones with high scoring students.

Never mind ample evidence showing that an overemphasis on testing for accountability narrows school curricula.  What's taught is what can be tested.  Music?  Art?  Foreign languages?  PE?  They take back seat to the obsession with literacy and numeracy.

That's especially true in poor, high minority enrollment schools and school districts.

Real reformers --not the neoliberals-- take a decidedly different view.  From The Nation article:

"They [let's call them 'progressive reformers'] believe teachers and schools will not be able to eradicate the achievement gap between middle-class white children and everyone else until a wide array of social services are available to poor families. They envision schools as community centers, offering families healthcare, meals and counseling."

In other words, as I wrote sometime back, the schools alone cannot be held responsible for every social  ill.  If we want to close the achievement gap in this country, we better close the income gap. 

The free market "reformers" have adopted the mantra "no excuses," which in effect discounts poverty as a factor in the lower achievement of poor students.  Low expectations and lousy teaching, say the "reformers", are the culprits, not poverty.  Of course, they're wrong --dead wrong.  Research, and even 'hard science', provides abundant evidence that poverty plays a huge, and mostly negative, role in a child's education.

So what about charter schools?  Suffice it for now to say that although, as Scott Lehigh writes on Boston.com in praise of a recommendation to remove the "caps" on charter schools in Massachusetts, "some Boston charter schools" have improved the achievement of low income students, many --probably most-- have not.  In fact, most research indicates that charters do no better than traditional public schools in closing the  achievement gap.

There are other problems with the charter model as well.  More on that in subsequent posts.

Kafoury v. Kafoury

The Portland school board race in Zone 5 not only pits Scott Bailey (whom I endorsed yesterday) against Pam Knowles, it also further splits,  along political lines, the ex-husband and wife team of two locally prominent Kafoury's.

Gretchen Kafoury, you see, supports Bailey.  Her ex, world's worst person Stephen Kafoury, has endorsed Bailey's opponent, the business candidate Knowles.  I don't want to read too much into what these competing endorsements mean except to say this: 

Given Steve Kafoury's endorsement and the fact that he represents in Oregon a chain of virtual charter schools, one might speculate that Knowles may be more amenable to school charterization --even partial privatization-- than one would like to see in a public school board director. 

That makes me feel more confident in my support of Scott Bailey. 

There's another Kafoury involved in this intra-familial political dust-up --Steve and Gretchen's daughter, Deborah.  The newly-elected Multnomah County Commissioner sides with her father --and Knowles.  (What do you suppose her mother must think?)

Oh yeah.  Bailey also has the enthusiastic support of Steve Novick, the little man with the wicked left hook and possible Oregon gubernatorial candidate. 

Gretchen and Steve --Novick, that is-- are quite the powerful political team.  And that's good for Scott Bailey.

Billionaires, charter schools, and "venture philanthropy"

Oakland-based edu-blogger Perimeter Primate (Ms Primate is a school mom) brings word of a study about a new breed of charity called "venture philanthropy."

And yes, venture philanthropy all about pushy billionaires like Eli Broad who's doing his damnedest to charterize American public education.  In the process, Broad is elbowing educational professionals aside in favor of "alternative" leaders, mainly people like him from the world of business.  Bottom line is that venture philanthropists are less interested in charity than in advocacy:

"By funding charter school growth, venture philanthropies aim to radically reshape public education, especially for poor children of color, but also to change the ways that traditional foundations operate. Their vision involves philanthropy becoming aggressive in seeking out educational grantees and more engaged in advocacy; in this iteration, foundations lead educational policy change."

Read the study if you have the patience (it's a long one.)  Otherwise just read Ms Primate's post.  It contains a wealth of info.

For example, the post suggests that Washington D.C. is run not by a democratically elected Mayor and city council but an outfit of heavy hitters called the Federal City Council.  According to Ms Primate, Mayor Fenty took over the DC schools and installed Michelle Rhee as superintendent at the behest of the Federal City Council.

That sounds more than plausible to me.  Consider that one of the Council's recent "projects" was to '"spearhead"

"...the business community's support for public charter schools, as well as systemic reform of the D.C. Public Schools."

Enter Chancellor Michelle Rhee. 

Look at it this way.  Even if you support the idea of public charter schools, you have to think it odd, if not alarming, that backdoor deals hatched by the wealthy and the influential are running roughshod over democracy. 

That's venture philanthropy at work.  And that's why I wrote about the "Billionaire's Boys Club."

School reform and the "Billionaire's Boys Club"

And speaking of the "influentia", those movers and shakers who, because of their prominence, exert so much control over educational policy, let's not forget the malign influence on that policy of the mega-wealthy.

Bill Gates, for example.

San Francisco ed activist Caroline Grannan writes that former Republican insider, Diane Ravitch, has taken to calling Gates and his ilk the Billionaire's Boys Club.  The former Assistant Secretary of Education under Bush 41 has concluded:

"It appears that the Big Money has placed its bets on dismantling public education."

Ravitch writes from New York, so when Mayor Bloomberg

"...shows up at charter school rallies and tells the parents that their local public schools are no good and that they are lucky to be in a charter"

Ravitch assumes that such a pronouncement

"...has the enthusiastic endorsement of the Billionaire Boys Club, that is, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Walton Foundation. They know what needs to be done, and they don't see the point of listening to such unenlightened types as parents and teachers."

And how do they know "what needs to be done"?  Well, they have lots of money, don't they?  And if they're wrong (as they most assuredly are), what does it matter?  They'll lobby for their "reforms" heedless of any evidence to the contrary.

Gates, as Portlanders will recall, put up the money for the botched reconfiguration of Jefferson High School.  And the superintendent at the time --Vicki Phillips-- now works for the Gates Foundation.  So it goes.

*************************

While we're on the topic of charter schools and billionaires, over at change.org, teacher Clay Burell takes on Obama's embrace of charters.  His main objection is that, for traditional public schools, the charter model is simply not replicable:

"...if we're going to say charters should still be supported in order to serve as those 'laboratories,' the missing link in all of this talk centers on this question: 'What's the mechanism that will allow for that "duplication of success" in traditional public schools?' ...

"...One dangerous answer to this is: Traditional public schools will have that 'flexibility' when they are able to break union-negotiated teacher protections - to be union-free - and when they submit to the meddling of Gates, Broad, and the other billionaires at the Business Roundtable when they dangle their strings-attached money."

Today's worst person in the world: Stephen Kafoury

Back in 2003, Steve Kafoury was instrumental in recruiting the successful slate of Portland School Board candidates who went on to hire Vicki Phillips as district superintendent --big mistake-- and to shut down several more neighborhood schools.

Today Kafoury, a former school board member himself, is in the Oregonian flacking for a chain of "virtual" charter high schools.  In the process he bashes the trickery of the lobbying efforts of the state's big teachers union, the Oregon Education Association. 

The OEA opposes charter schools generally, and online schools particularly.  For good reason.

Insight Schools, Inc. is a subsidiary of the Apollo Group, Inc.  Apollo (which runs the Phoenix University chain) is a private for-profit organization, and aren't charter schools, virtual or otherwise, supposed to be "public" schools?  This slippery connection between the public and private sector in education both troubles and puzzles me.  As it probably does the OEA.

Apparently Kafoury, who sat on a public school board, has no problem with the partial privatization of public education. 

But wait!  The world's BEST person also showed up on the letters page of the O this morning.  Her name is Kris Alman, a parent, retired doctor, and candidate for the Beaverton School Board (she favors higher corporate taxes to increase school funding.)

Here's what she wrote regarding charters:

...

"Charter schools in Oregon have a higher closure rate than the national average (20 percent versus 11 percent). Conversely, popular charters, which resort to lotteries, can disenfranchise children who live nearby and they burden all families with transportation requirements. To remedy these inequities, school boards and administrators should foster innovation and flexible learning environments in each neighborhood school."

Sounds like something I would write.  In fact, it sounds a lot like what I have already written. 

Yay Kris!  (If you live in Beaverton, vote Kris Alman for School Board.)

More pros and cons for charters and choice

As an advocate of public education,  I see little difference between the charter school option and school choice generally.  So for the purpose of this argument, I'll treat the two as synonymous.

For some parents, charter schools offer an alternative to what they view as the stifling orthodoxy of traditional public schools.  In districts that bow to the testing dictates of No Child Left Behind (like PPS), charters are refuges from excessive testing and the obsession with literacy and numeracy at the expense of a much broader curriculum that includes music and art and all the other areas of student learning that can't easily be assessed by a multiple choice test.

Some charters, then, --not all (like the Arthur Academies)-- are perceived as student centered.  And progressive.  That's a good thing.

Some say that charters are laboratories for innovation that can steer other public schools in the right pedagogical direction.  If true, that's also a good thing.  I have my doubts about the legitimacy of that claim, however, on two grounds.

First, to say that charters can influence what happens in traditional public schools makes no more sense to me than the notion that competition between schools results in better schools all around.  That's market ideology.  It doesn't work in the realm of education.

Secondly, as I wrote in a comment to the post on charters on PPS Equity, we already know what works to truly improve and reform K-12 education.  (Steve Rawley later noted that I "...took the piss out of that argument [labs for innovation], and I think he has a point… we already know what works; we just have to implement it.")

Here are some of the reasons why charters and choice fail the test of good public policy:

• They don't serve the common good.  They benefit some students --usually the more advantaged-- at the expense of others.

• Charters and choice concentrate good students with supportive parents in some schools, and leave others --the disadvantaged-- behind in less affluent schools.

• Despite the ruse of the "lottery", charters are selective primarily because they require a parent application.  That works to the benefit of motivated and informed parents.

• Charters can dismiss students who are behaviorally difficult.  (That may be more true nationally than in Portland.)

• Charters may be publicly funded, but they are otherwise private.  Charter school organizations are statutorily tax exempt 501(c)(3) corporations run by special interest groups, even though the groups consist --usually-- of "concerned" parents.

They are other "cons" to the charter school issue.  Suffice it for me now to conclude with a couple of quotes from Ockley Green parent, Rose, (a nom de web, I'm pretty sure, of a fairly well-known Portland writer.)  Rose has contributed much to the (again) record-breaking PPS Equity post, "Charters and PPS":

• "...you asked how charter applications are barriers to poorer families.

  "You have to think of this in terms of a parent without your resources. You clearly have a car, don’t work nights, have childcare, and speak English, and other abilities which make going to 4 mandatory meetings almost an entire year before your child might attend a given school a viable option.

  "Think about this process for a parent without those resources. There are many parents without cars, without computers, and with limited English." ...       

• "...school choice has stripped many schools of their wealthier students. Now Ockley is a largely poor minority school floating in a gentrifying neighborhood where most white parents send their kids Somewhere Else.

  "We don’t need to discuss how much this hurts a school and hurts the students left behind."

• "...I don’t see any way around the barriers imposed by school choice and charters. Someone will always be left out, and that someone will probably be brown, black or poor.

  "So the short answer is, we need to bite the bullet. We need to get rid of school choice."

What Rose says makes eminently good sense.  Let's bite the bullet on school choice.  And charters.

Charter Schools: The pros, the cons, the school board

At the Portland School Board meeting Monday evening, David Wynde pronounced that the test for any charter school application is whether the proposed school meets an obvious need. 

In the case of LEP, the charter high school under consideration, Wynde said the school was clearly serving students whose needs weren't being met by existing schools.  The school clearly passed the "need" test.

With all due respect to Director Wynde, isn't that more a commentary on the state of Portland's traditional high schools. especially the poorer schools like Jefferson, Roosevelt, Marshall and Madison, which have been so badly treated, reconfigured, mismanaged and "downsized" by top-down district mandates?  And isn't that the cause of public discontent with traditional schools?  Isn't that the impetus for the creation of alternatives like charter schools?

The small size of the Leadership and Entrepreneurship Charter High School --enrollment 217, about a third the size of Jefferson -- accounts for both its appeal and its ability to innovate, to remain flexible, and to stay student friendly.  Its tiny size also counters the notion that it meets the needs of the far greater number of students who are ill-served by traditional PPS high schools.

The eagerness of school board members to get LEP to fix its financial problems --it hasn't paid its  monthly PERS obligation since last July, for example-- so that the board could eventually re-grant its charter was palpable at Monday's meeting.  Ruth Adkins gushed that she hoped LEP would quickly get its financial troubles behind them so that it could "grow" to serve an even a greater number of students.

But there's the rub, isn't it?  As I wrote in a comment to PPS Equity,

"...if charters were to become as large and diverse as the typical neighborhood school, they would instantly lose their appeal to those –most, anyway– who seek an alternative to traditional public schools."

Charters as they now exist meet the needs of a relatively small number of students (and parents) who want out of traditonal programs.  But they do very little, by their very nature, for the vast majority of public school students.  In other words, they do little to promote the common good.  And isn't that the mission of a public school district?

As Steve Rawley, the eminence grise* of PPS Equity, said in a comment to the same post,

"...some charters might get some students access to the kind of pedagogy you passionately seek.

"I just don’t see how they advance the cause for all students."

*(By which I mean head honcho and resident genius.  Steve isn't old enough to have gray hair.  Not much, anyway.)

Setting the record straight on education "reform"

Several days ago I wrote about the "myths" in Obama's education speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

It seems that the speech also included some exaggerations and falsehoods. 

According to factcheck.org, Obama's claim that the high school dropout rate has "tripled" in the past thirty years is simply wrong.  In fact, the dropout rate has "declined by a third." 

And Obama's stated goal "of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world" by the year 2020 has already been reached.  Or almost reached:

"...in terms of bachelor's degrees, we're nearly there. The U.S. is already second only to Norway in the percentage of adults age 25 to 64 with a four-year degree, and trails by just 1 percentage point."

Obama also promised to put more money into charter schools.  In my earlier post I wondered why, considering that charters typically perform no better than traditional neighborhood schools in terms of student achievement.  But there's also a dark side to charter schools that seldom reaches the public ear.

Consider this news from Atlanta involving the vaunted KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter school organization.  It seems that some parents of students at KIPP South Fulton Academy are angry about "excessive punishment" related to the the school's "high expectations for conduct."  The parents have threatened to pull their students from the school. 

Rumors have long circulated about KIPP's "shunning" of students with typical middle school behavioral problems.  A related issue is KIPP's high attrition rate, which critics say largely accounts for its high test scores. 

Here in Portland, a new audit  of charter schools raises questions about their value to improving public education. Not only does the district audit show a "mixed" result for the impact of charters on improving student achievement, it also reports that charters serve fewer low income or minority students than traditional public schools.

More significantly, the audit warns of an adverse impact of charters on neighborhood school enrollment.  It says specifically,

"If charter school students attended their neighborhood school at the same rate as other children living in their neighborhood, an estimated 31 additional teachers could be assigned to PPS schools."

As I've said before on many occasions, charter schools are not the reform we need to improve public education.