GRANDMA WORKS IN A UNION, THAT ADVOCATES FOR TEACHERS, CHILD IS SEVEN YEARS OLD, ASKS GRANDMA, DO YOU WORK FOR ________, OH NO GRANDMA I CAN’T SAY WHERE YOU WORK THEY WOULD THROW ME OUT OF SCHOOL….A CHILD THAT IS SEVEN YEARS OLD INVOLVED IN THE DIRTY WORLD OF POLITICS, THATS SO SAD. WHERE IS THE REAL GOAL OF PROTECTING AND NURTURING OUR CHILDREN ? THAT HAVE TO BE LOTTOED IN TO GET INTO WHAT SHOULD BE A SYSTEM FOR ALL. A GAMBLE ON EDUCATION, SOCIAL DARWINISM EXISTS.

As to the hold-back example, if that happened more at TPSs than charters, you’d have a point. My point was that to the degree it does NOT happen in both TPS and Charter, that skews the aggregate results. Simple.

I say ‘in this case,’ because I know the charter detractors out there have a myriad of such ‘creaming’ scenarios, some fictitious, some probably with a kernel of truth or more.

We need an honest and open public debate about this creaming to settle the question, and no better form than GS.

** It takes significantly MORE effort to sign up for a charter, and possible lottery. With a TPS (Traditional Public School), you can just walk in on Day One.

** There has been previous testimony here on GS that at least some lotteries are NOT open to the public. Glad to hear at your school they are.

** Parents withdrawing for academic reasons is a confession to creaming. Sorry. It takes the low scoring child out of the school’s average score. Even if such kid stays but repeats a grade, it takes that low scorer out of grade N+1 and leaves the kid in grade N, with a higher likelihood of a higher grade. It might indeed be the best move for the kid and for high standards, but it DOES tweak the aggregate scores. What if that happens a second or third year in a row?

** “…beneath us in both senses.” Yeeouch.

In NYS (I can’t comment on other states), there is quite a bit of oversight. I would be curious to hear your sense of the amount of oversight for NYC charter schools and what information that is based on. I am basing my opinion on numerous conversations with charter school authorizers, review of the broad and deep reports made available on their websites, and conversations with a large number of charter school operators. I am sure the oversight is far from perfect, but it seems to me to be generally strong. If anything, I sense that it is too intrusive, so I am surprised that you would find it “laughable”.

However, they differ significantly from charter schools in that they are not the recipients of massive amounts of taxpayer dollars redirected from public entities, nor are they the beneficiaries of media and philanthropic (Gates, Broad, Walton, Gap, etc.) propaganda campaigns.

However, I do agree that this thread has probably run its course.

Why frame it that charter-school skeptics are the ones slaughtering the language? “De-coding?” Sheesh.

The lack of respect for the mother tongue is NOT found in the charter debate, but in the double-speak emanating from Tweed / City Hall / The Reannointment Campaign. (It’s getting harder and harder to tell them apart, no? See my prior comments and quips re “Cerf’s Up.”)

What does it mean to be an “A” school this year?
Answer: There were no anomalies, like negative score contributions.

What does it mean to be an “A” school within a peer group, when there are “B” and even “C” schools whose kids have higher *performance* scores?
Answer: The ultimate “grading on a curve” to the point of non-comparativeness.

What does it mean to be an “A” school when benchmarked against a peer group… but a G&T school people are trying to get into only gets a “B”?
Answer: It means School Progress Report grades are meaningLESS.

What does it mean when those manipulating those grades then congratulate themselves, and their boss, on what a fine, fine, suit they’re wearing?
Answer: It means the same gang hyping charters (no fault of the charters here) have more interest in remaining in power than in educating kids. And at this point, I’m talking about the roughly ONE MILLION New York City school children NOT in charters.

It simply is not true, even when my friend Ken says it, that charter schools are publicly funded “but privately managed.” That’s only true if you don’t care what words mean.

Charter schools are nonprofit institutions, like the YMCA, Lincoln Center, etc. Charter schools are not private corporations.

Unlike most nonprofits and unlike most district schools, charter schools face a much more intense level of public accountability. Five-year performance contracts. Specific performance benchmarks. Risk of nonrenewal. Subject to open meetings law and freedom of information law, unlike typical nonprofits.

Now, a very small number of charter schools have hired private management firms to run their schools, subject to contracts with the nonprofit boards of those schools. Some public school districts have done this as well. In those more limited number of cases, I would agree to call them privately managed. But for the lion’s share of public charter schools that do not contract with management companies, the description is simply inaccurate.

For the record, if they were privately managed, it wouldn’t bother me a bit. But, it just doesn’t happen to be true.

So, my objection is not an ideological one but rather a linguistic one. Let’s not mangle the English language just because you have an issue with charter schools.

You can hate charter schools still, but please respect the mother tongue.

Agreed?

I agree that those points should be debated. I also agree that many of the issues are similar in many ways across various sectors of our economy.

I think “private” versus “publicly funded but privately managed” is an important distinction to separate organizations with relatively small degrees of public funding from those with relatively large degrees of public funding. I think that those that are concerned with “private management” should write that “charter schools are privately managed” and, then, carry on with their anti-private-management arguments. Calling charter schools “private schools” is, in many cases, a propaganda technique. I would say the same thing about calling them “public schools”. If charter schools were simply “public schools” or “private schools”, we wouldn’t have to use the annoying phrase “charter schools”.

Two points:

– In my mind, “private” versus “publicly funded but privately managed” is a distinction without a real difference.

– The political, economic and ideological underpinnings – in which business, political, philanthropic and academic interests are interwoven and engaged in a process that is rapidly transferring a public good into private hands – are exactly what should be debated here. What is happening to public education in the US, and indeed globally, is inseparable from other efforts privatize the public or common sphere.

Monsanto: publicly-funded, private, for-profit gene pools.
Correction Corporation of America: publicly- funded, private, for-profit prisons.
Blackwater: publicly funded, private, for-profit armies.
KIPP, Green Dot, etc.: publicly-funded, private …

I am a big fan of charter schools, but I agree with you that they are “publicly funded and privately managed”. I get somewhat annoyed both when anti-charter people call them private schools and when pro-charter people call them public schools. The slightly-longer phrase “publicly funded and privately managed” is accurate, important, and cuts through a lot of political nonsense. I have been meaning to write a post that makes this point and calls (begs?) for use of this more meaningful phrase.

The fact that charter schools are privately managed is, in my view, one of the main reasons that they will lead us to a better system. That’s not something I wish to debate in this thread, but I mention it to make clear why I can like your phrase, but disagree with some potential interpretations of that phrase.

As I stated before, and which has yet to be refuted, charter schools are publicly-funded schools that are privately managed. In other states, many of them are for-profit, and the non-profit status of many in NY, as pointed out by Michael M, is effectively a misnomer when you have “educators” who never taught a day in their lives earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Pull back the PR curtain of the large charter chains – which will ultimately be the only one’s left standing – and you’ll find private equity firms (Bain Capital, Leeds Equity, et al.) laying the foundation for their future transformation into private, for-profit firms. Leeds Equity, which is behind Green Dot NY already owns private for-profit schools and temporary labor agencies. How instructive. Combine the two and you’ve got the Brave New World of education in the US and elsewhere.

It’s time that the Orwellian language of corporate ed deform (War is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Peace, Teachers Are The Problem In Education) is exposed for what it is: a smokescreen to transfer the governance and content of education away from the public and the people who impart it, to a corporate agenda of segregation, overwork, tedium, stress and surveillance. That’s the business model in education at work.

Beg to differ, the lottery matters. It’s not that the charters are actively selecting per se, it’s that there is a non-random pool from which they then pull random numbers.

From your vantage, have you ever seen kids leaving the charter? If so, what were the circumstances? Where did they then go?

Also, are you in a co-located school, charter and non?

Cheers.