Charter schools are
sold as an answer. With awful discipline and shocking scandals, many really
cause new problems.
By Jeff Bryant, Salon.com on Alternet
Imagine
your five-year old boy went to a school where he was occasionally thrown in a padded cell and
detained alone for stretches as long as 20 minutes.
Or
you sent your kid to an elementary school where the children are made to sit on a bare
floor in the classroom for days before they can “earn” their
desks.
Or
your kid went to a school where she spent hours parked in a
cubicle in front of a computer with a poorly trained teacher
who has to monitor more than 100 other students.
Maybe
you don’t have children or send them to private school? So how do you feel when
you find out the local school that you pay for with your taxes is operating a
scam that diverted
millions of dollars through fake Medicaid billing?
Or
the school used your tax dollars as “grants” to start up other
profit-making enterprises ... or pay lavish salaries — $300,000,
$400,000 or more — to its administrators ... or support a movement linked to a reclusive
Turkish cleric being investigated for bribery and corruption.
Welcome
to the world of charter schools.
But
neither of those questions matters because of what the charter school movement
has come to represent in the landscape of American education.
Charter
schools have been relentlessly marketed to the American populace as a silver
bullet for “failed” public schools, especially in poor urban communities of
African-American and Latino/a students.
Politicians
in both parties speak glowingly of these schools — which, by the way, their
children seem never to attend.
Huge
nationwide chains — called education management organizations (EMOs) — now run
many of these charters. A recent study by the National
Education Policy Center found, “Students across 35 states and
the District of Columbia now attend schools managed by these non-government
entities.”
These for-profit and nonprofit EMOs — such as K12 Inc., National
Heritage Academies, Charter Schools USA and KIPP — now account for nearly half
of the students educated by charter schools.
Substantial,
well-funded nationwide organizations have rapidly developed to lobby for these
schools.
One such organization, the Alliance for School Choice, recently received
a $6 million gift from the Walton
Foundation, of Wal-Mart fame.
Slick marketing campaigns have been rolled
out in communities across the country to tout the coming of new charters.
The
actual academic results of these schools seems to hardly anyone, despite report after report showing
that these schools tend to do poorly on state and national tests and fail at
providing equitable education to underserved students.
Yet lobbying for
more of these schools continues unabated with more money funneled into the campaigns of
politicians who support charters and more efforts to press
state lawmakers to lift any
provisions currently in place to regulate how these schools
operate and are held accountable to the public.
As
a result, charter schools now serve one in 20 students nationwide, despite “mixed results” at
best.
Yet
how much is really known about how most charter schools operate on a day-to-day
basis? Most of the people who witness what these schools actually do are
students, who have little voice outside the classroom; teachers, who need to
hold onto their jobs; and charter administrators, who can’t always be depended
on to blow the whistle on shenanigans.
But
as these institutions proliferate, so are troubling reports of what the charter
movement has unleashed.
Turning Our Backs on Abuse
Keeping
a running tally of charter school scandals could amount to so much
cherry-picking if it weren’t for the fact the tree is so loaded there’s
practically nothing but fruit.
Two
of the anecdotes cited above surfaced recently in schools operated by a
nationwide chain called KIPP, which has been acclaimed for doing “wonderful
things” to poor kids that most middle-class parents would not
want to see done to their kids.
The
incident where a 5-year-old student was confined in school to a padded cell
prompted Chicago (where the incident occurred) blogger Mike Klonsky to
write, “Brutal forms of discipline have become routine for KIPP.
“No
divergence is permitted and deviants are quickly labeled, punished or expelled.
KIPP has the highest student
attrition rate in the nation. I recall one KIPP school where
African-American children were made to sit on a bench with a sign around their
neck that said, ‘CRETIN.’”
Klonsky
noted the nationwide chain’s practice of using a behavioral technique, called
“Slant,” that “instructs students to sit up, listen, ask questions, nod and
track the speaker with their eyes.” It’s “military style behavior,” renowned
educator Debra Meier remarked
on her blog at Education Week.
Meier
explained how these schools rely on “public shaming” as a form of behavior
control, which often includes “children being ‘exiled’ to a special table at
lunch, required to wear their KIPP shirts backwards, and other forms of public
embarrassment.”
James
Horn, who came across the incident where students had to “earn” their desks by
siting on the floor, wrote, “KIPP requires the poorest urban children, those
who have received the least in life, to earn everything at KIPP.”
Horn
interviewed a former teacher from that KIPP school who recounted, “[The
children] would sit there and do homework on the floor. They would fill in
forms and pass them. And they had to all do it correctly, otherwise, they’d do
it again and again and again ... It was 100 [students]. It was all the
fifth-graders in a classroom.”
Horn
noted, “This is not the first time such educational atrocities at KIPP have
been documented,” and he linked to a “series of incidents” in Fresno, Calif., where
the school principal was accused of ”slamming students against the wall,
placing trash cans over their heads, forcing kids to crawl on their hands and
knees while barking, and enforcing unreasonably strict bathroom rules,
resulting in students having accidents and vomiting on themselves inside the
classroom.”
“How
long will we turn our backs on this kind of abuse?” Horn asked.
Rocketship to Nowhere
The
questionable practices of many charter schools go beyond classroom management.
The
charter cited above where students spent hours stuck in cubicles, in front of
computers, is part of a nationwide charter chain called Rocketship.
According
to ed-tech media outlet EdSurge, “Rocketship Education is a charter school
network in hot demand, courted by urban school districts across the nation.
Both Kaya Henderson, Superintendent of D.C. Public Schools and New York City’s outgoing mayor
Michael Bloomberg have publicly said they’d welcome Rocketship schools in their
districts.” (emphasis added)
Tech
market enthusiasts at EdSurge claim, “Rocketship has broken down the
traditional factory school model, rethinking things like the bell-schedule, the
role of teachers, the way kids are grouped, and even the physical space
itself.”
What
does all this “innovation” look like in practice?
As
Samantha Winslow explained in the article cited above, Rocketship’s allure
comes mostly from cost savings because so much of the “instruction” is
delivered via computers. “The company says it saves half a million dollars a
year by using fewer teachers, replacing them with non-certified instructors at
$15 per hour ... Half its teachers have less than two years’ experience; 75
percent come from Teach for America.”
The
chain “targets low-income students” with the claim it can raise their test
scores by drilling them with computer-based instruction. “Instructors monitor up
to 130 kids at a time in cubicles in the schools’ computer labs. Rocketeers, as
students are called, sit looking at computer screens up to two hours per day.
“Skeptics
say the Rocketship test scores just demonstrate the schools are focusing on
test preparation at the expense of arts, languages, and real learning,” Winslow
noted.
The Last Thing These Children Need
In
these types of high-tech-driven charters, where efficiency and driving down the
costs of teachers are priorities, “there is never much time to actually teach,”
explained one teacher who had been employed at a virtual charter school run by
the company K12.
Writing
recently at the the blog site of Education Week edu-blogger Anthony Cody,
the teacher, Darcy Bedortha, recounted, “Each class met for 30 minutes in an
interactive-blackboard setting one day each week. Fewer than 10 percent of
students actually attended these ‘classes.’ Other than that time and any
one-on-one sessions a teacher and student might set up (which, in my
experience, almost never happened), there is no room for direct instruction.
“I
was an English teacher,” Bedortha explained, “so my students would write. They
wrote of pain and fear and of not fitting in. They were the kinds of young
people who desperately needed to have the protective circle of a community
watching over them. They needed one healthy person to smile at them and
recognize them by name every day, to say ‘I’m glad you’re here!’ ... The last
thing these young people needed ... was to be isolated in front of a computer
screen.”
The
educational malpractices committed by charter schools aren’t confined to the
tech-driven ones.
A
tutor who had worked at a “no excuse” charter school in Boston recently
wrote a letter to her former students on the edu-blog site Edushyster. She
confessed, “What I saw at your ‘No Excuses’ charter startled me and still
troubles me deeply. I was trained on how to discipline you, but not on the best
way to help you understand material. I was lectured on how to turn your
learning into data points, but was never told who you are and where you came
from. Your school forced me to do things that I don’t believe are in your
best interest.”
A
recent report coming out of Ohio told
of a charter management operation in Columbus where teachers failed to show for
work because they hadn’t been paid. There were bedbugs in the school, the food
vendor stopped providing lunches, and an assistant principal was making less
than minimum wage. The charter operator had two other charters it operated
closed down by the state Department of Education in the previous month because
“inadequate staffing led to fights among students and to lunch not being served
on a set schedule.”
A “Perfect Storm” of Corruption
In
addition to questionable classroom practices, charter schools are dogged by
corruption.
The
scandal cited above in which a charter chain defrauded taxpayers of millions of
dollars in a Medicaid scheme presents a “perfect storm,” according
to one analysis, “of everything that might go wrong with private, for-profit
‘educators’ trying to make more than a buck from public education under the
guise of charter school management.”
The
D.C.-based firm Options Public Charter School managed to orchestrate a train
wreck of corruption, including not only the Medicaid fraud scheme, but also
payoffs of public officials and a local television news personality, diversion
of funds meant for schools to personal accounts, business arrangements that
siphoned funds to contractor partners, and bloated executive salaries.
The
charter scandal involving the Turkish cleric is especially bizarre. As the
Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss explained
at her Answer Sheet blog, “The reclusive cleric is Fethullah Gulen, who has
been linked to charter schools in some 25 states and to other schools in
dozens of countries around the world.”
But
Gluen is no mere charter operator. In fact, as Al Jazeera reported,
he is the head of a powerful movement in Turkey involved in “the most extensive
and sensational corruption investigations” of that country’s recent history.
“The
public charter schools in what is unofficially known as the Gulen network,”
Strauss explained, “are believed to be operated by people — usually Turks — in
or associated with the Gulen movement.”
Many
of the schools have strong academic records, but have been the subject of
frequent investigations of “whether some employees at some of these schools are
‘kicking back part of their salaries’ to the Gulen Movement.”
Strauss
noted, “The New York Times and CBS News as well as PBS have reported on the
Gulen charter network, citing problems such as whether these schools give
special preference to Turkish companies when handing out contracts.”
No Scrutiny Please
One
doesn’t have to dig deeply to find examples of charter school malfeasance.
Indeed, all the above examples appeared in news stories and blog sites since
the current school year began.
In
the meantime, charter promoters do all they can to avoid any external audits or
legal consequences related to what they do.
As
education historian Diane Ravitch recently
reported from her blog, when charter school operators in California were convicted of
misappropriating over $200,000 in public monies, the California Charter Schools
Association entered an amicus brief stating the defendants were “not guilty of
any criminal offense because charter schools are not subject to the laws
governing public schools. CCSA says that charter schools are exempt from
criminal laws governing public schools because they are
operated by a private corporation.”
In
the same blog post, Ravitch told of a case in Arizona where
another charter successfully argued that it was a private corporation, not a
public school. And in Chicago, when the teachers at a charter school wanted to
form a union, “the charter founder
argued before the National Labor Relations Board that the
charter was operated by a private corporation and not subject to state labor
laws.”
Wait
... and you thought charter schools were public schools?
Movement Interrupted
If
it weren’t for the great marketing job the charter movement has employed, this
education “innovation” would be a P.R. disaster.
So
far, only the most well-informed fans of charter schools, who aren’t wrapped up
in the movement ideology it has become, have changed their minds about what’s
befalling schoolchildren and communities across the country.
An
impartial observer of charter schools, Rutgers professor Bruce Baker, once
hoped charters would be a possible source of “some creative, energetic
leadership ... that might be associated with a mission-driven start-up school,
coupled with an ounce or two of deregulation.”
Recently,
however, his perception has changed. “This whole movement has gotten way out of
control — it has morphed dramatically — especially the punditry and resultant
public policy surrounding charter schooling. Sadly, I’m reaching a point where
I now believe that the end result is causing more harm than good.”
Recently, Stan Karp of
Rethinking Schools wrote, “Nearly every teacher dreams of starting a school. I
know I did.
“But
I also know the charter school movement has changed dramatically in recent
years in ways that have undermined its original intentions ... The counterfeit
claim that charter privatization is part of a new ‘civil rights movement,’
addressing the deep and historic inequality that surrounds our schools, is
belied by the real impact of rapid charter growth in cities across the
country.”
His
conclusion? “It’s time to put the brakes on charter expansion and refocus
public policy on providing excellent public schools for all.”
Amen.
Jeff Bryant is an Associate Fellow at Campaign for America's
Future and owner of a marketing and communications consultancy, serving
numerous nonprofits and progressive organizations and causes including Human
Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, PBS, and International Planned
Parenthood Foundation. He writes extensively about public education policy at
ourfuture.org and previously at OpenLeft.com. Follow Jeff on Twitter: jeffbcdm
