GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Hey! Mayor Mike barely got re-elected for this third (illegal) term — hardly a mandate. Just like Bush, he’s nevertheless been pushing through his anti-democratic, unpopular and anti-low-income people policies, and treating parents as invisible non-entities. All We The People have is a Vigilant Press. Kudos to Gotham Schools for covering the REAL news, unlike the elitist NYT and the billionaire-ego-assuaging News and Post.

bklynlifer – I’m seeing a whole lot more low income people getting their kids into schools that will be successul for their kids than under previous mayors. I don’t see how that’s anti-low-income people or treating parents like non-entities. He’s pushing for parent choice here.

……not to mention the fact that charter schools receive busing, books, electricity, janitorial services and on and on. how will charters sustain themselves when the investors walk away from the movement? What will remain? Or, will parents be asked to pay….tuition? hmmmmm. Remember when cable was cheap? Remember when the Yankees and Mets games were all on free TV? Remember when no one knew who the Dolans were and everyone thought MSG was a food additive? what are YOU paying for cable now?

KS,

Finally, we agree: the discussion is going around and around.

Still, I must respond to your points:

– You have a very different view of the role of the press regarding charter schools and so-
called education reform. With pitifully few exceptions, the press functions as stenographers
and an echo chamber for the press releases by the DOE, the mayor and the malanthropists
funding privatization. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the primary job of mainstream
journalists is to manufacture consent.

– The statistics regarding the percentages of special needs students and ELLs in charters
compared to district schools speak for themselves. As for your smoke and fire metaphor, it
ignores the fact that fires are easier to ignore when very wealthy and powerful people –
some of whom are simultaneously elected officials and owners of media empires – are
among the arsonists.

Tell The Truth,

Your statements and statistics are either irrelevant, or prove my point.

First of all, I never said anything about the lotteries being “unfair.” That’s you imputing something to me I never said. The point about lotteries that charter opponents make is not that they are unfair or rigged – although I personally believe that many are, but that’s neither here nor there for the purposes of this discussion – but that they are a de facto filter that prevents a large swath of families with high-needs – and the income/free lunch stats are a red herring that confuses the issue – children from applying. It’s a form of stealth creaming. Your comment does not address that.

You state that, “Those who attend are generally the same rate as those who get accepted (no widespread counseling out).” This is a non sequitur, as one point has nothing to do with the other. By definition, a student who has been counseled out has attended the school. And what is your definition of “widespread?” 5%? 15%? 50%?

Additionally, the Gotham schools post you refer too says, “Hoxby acknowledged that her sample cannot be truly representative of the charter school population.” So what is it representative of, aside from her bought-and paid-for ideology (widely known, as she is affiliated with the pro-privatization Hoover Institute and has made frequent comments in favor of privatizing the schools) and the financial interests, ideology or gullibility of those who promoted it?

Lastly, even if we accept your/Hoxby’s numbers, they still prove my point: they clearly show that (real) public schools enroll 18% more special ed students, and over 300% more ELLs than charter schools.

Charters are predominantly a union-busting idea and institution.  I want better conditions for ALL the schoolchildren of New York City, and, I want decent and fair conditions, pay, and benefits for those children who grow up and want to become teachers.  Bloomberg, Klein, Duncan, Rhee, Broad, and their ilk are not in this for the future of our children.  They have no idea on how to truly help education other than what their rich “friends” tell them.

Well, Micheal, since you’ve “demolished” my argument, I’m sure you’ll have no problem demolishing Unity in the upcoming elections. See you at the DA!

Charter schools are public schools. Please read the New York State Education Department’s guidelines and website (click on my name). In terms of minimal oversight from SED and the Board of Regents, you obviously have never, I repeat, never been involved in a charter school audit, annual visit, seen your administrators fill out dozens of requests, forms and accountability requests. Your perspective is not based in any real world experience and if you deigned to visit a single charter school during an inspection, attend a Board Meeting completing legal documents or do something more than what appears to be internet research, you would see that charter schools are more heavily regulated on the accountability side (you know, results and stuff) than traditional public schools.

I am familiar with your school and respect its work. You missed my point: just because a school doesn’t meet the exact demographic patterns of its surrounding district doesn’t mean that they are exclusive or creaming. Newcomers is needed because it fills a niche for recent immigrants, just like Wildcat fills a niche of overaged, undercredited students.

As for the supposed rainbow paradise of the UFT, you clearly know that the since the UFT’s self serving and immoral demolition (word of the thread!) of community control in the late 1960s, it ain’t been roses on the racial front. Sure, there are some people of color on the UFT leadership, but they’re still UNITY hacks and they do not serve the interests of communities of color which are served by the DOE system.

In terms of hegemony, if you take a moment to dust off your Gramsci and then examine our public schools system in New York, you’d see that a tiny elite comprised of the DOE’s power structure (a proxy for Bloomberg) and the Unity Leadership (a proxy for entrenched interests of mostly retired teachers and the active ones awaiting their shot at the patronage) control the fates of 1M+ students. Since the 1960s, the UFT has effectively been a co-manager of the public school system. They are simply the loyal opposition who will never upend the underlying assumptions of the current system because the current system is the source of their power, influence and wealth. $40M buys a lot of influence in Albany, no?

Democratic citizen engagement is the opportunity for a group of educators, community members and parents to open a public school that actually has the potential to transform the lives the children in their community. But don’t worry, those 35,000 students on charter school waiting lists are just shills, or stupid, or hegemons. As for the myth of the white savior, how about the myth of the black and brown parent who just ain’t smart enough to know when they’ve been manipulated. Maybe they want their children in charters because the majority of schools in their district are absolute educational black holes and drop out factories, which have led to the systemic disenfranchisement of minorities in this city?

Yes! Three cheers for a system that has criminally failed the poor, criminally failed children of color, criminally failed students with disabilities. Continue to defend the undefendable, and leave the demolishing to the experts at 52 Broadway and 52 Chambers. Nice symmetry there, eh?

Tell The Truth,

I used your own numbers to refute your argument, for which you had no substantive response whatsoever, and all you can do is make a snide comment about the upcoming UFT elections. Please try again, but in a more thoughtful or witty fashion, please.

You can point to all the SED Guidelines you like, just as old CP members would refer to the protections for civil liberties in the constitution of the Soviet Union, but that doesn’t make charters bona fide public schools. As yesterday’s NYT reported, the federal government allocated 1/10th of 1% of its money spent on charter schools for oversight. How much does NY State spend? Twice that? Three times that? Very impressive.

As for Newcomers, don’t try to weasel out after I refuted your claim that it excludes (your term) special ed students. And your claim that “just because a school doesn’t meet the exact demographic patterns of its surrounding district doesn’t mean that they are exclusive or creaming,” flies in the face of reality, because providing “choice” to residents of minority communities is precisely what charter schools claim to do. In fact, your last comment essentially makes the same claim in its final paragraph. However, as Leonie Haimson has shown in these pages, charters schools are in fact less reflective of the communities in which they are located. So which is it, since it can’t be both at once?

It was you, not me, who initially brought up the term hegemony, so don’t try to make it appear that I’m the one resorting to vintage left-wing rhetoric. And you speak of the “DOE’s power structure,” while this is the very structure without which charter schools could not exist. After all, what is it but the “DOE power structure” that is forcing charters into public school buildings in a brazen real estate grab?

You speak in dark terms of the UFT’s power in Albany, and while they may misuse their power at times – personally, I think they misuse it by not being more forceful – no apologies need to be made for working people collectively using political power in their interests, which in the case of the UFT usually coincides with the interests of students. Why is it that in a society that glorifies self interest and greed, that teachers are somehow expected to renounce their interests? Do Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Carl Icahn, the Walton family, Whitney Tilson and other charter venture capitalists? Bill Gates has been publicly quoted speaking disparagingly of competitors with “finite greed,” and in addition to funding the privatization of the schools is busy working with Monsanto to privatize the agricultural gene pool: where’s the criticism of that?

You say that “citizen engagement is the opportunity for a group of educators, community members and parents to open a public school.” How many “educators, parents and community members” are on the Boards of KIPP, Edison, Imagine and Victory Schools? While there are charter schools that have started organically within communities, the deeper structural reality is that the movement has long-since been hijacked by corporate interests. Those community-based charters are in an ever-decreasing minority, and will eventually merge with the chains or disappear as the industry consolidates and scales up. That’s the logic of the business model that gives your backers wet dreams.

I never claimed the UFT was a “rainbow paradise.” I simply said that its membership and leadership is more diverse than that of the charter movement, a claim your are unable to refute. As for the Ocean-Hill Brownsville debacle of 1968, two points: first, that was over 40 years ago: can’t you possibly come up with a more recent example of the evil doings of the UFT? Second, while both parties in that dispute at times behaved disgracefully, and while in all honesty I can’t say what I would have done if I’d been teaching at that time, the fact is that community control and the public schools were far more damaged by the fiscal crisis (really a banker’s coup) of the 1970′s than by anything the UFT did.

The previous point leads me to the next one, which is the decades-long crises in minority communities and schools. Notice how I also mentioned communities, which ed deformers studiously avoid doing. Where were these so-called philanthropists when the public schools were being systematically underfunded, as the CFE lawsuit proved? First, they starve the schools for decades, then they attempt to privatize them by using their “failures” as a rationale.

And, finally, it’s fascinating how you and other ed deformers limit your diatribes about “a system that has criminally failed the poor, criminally failed children of color” to the public schools and their unionized teachers? Your faux pwogwessive rhetoric is a sham and a diversion. Why don’t you privatizers name the system for its failures in housing and health care? Go to the OECD social indicators statistics (www.oecd.org/els/social/indicators/SAG) and see how miserably this country does in terms of poverty levels, life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality, etc. Why aren’t you going after the developers and obstetricians? Oh, that’s right, housing and health care are already privatized, and to go after them might upset your plutocratic funders.

Yes: it’s always the teacher’s and the union’s fault.

It was interesting to read the peices about unions protecting jobs. i have been at a number of these charter school public hearing. At each and everyone of them, there were teachers urging parents and children to speak out in support of growing a charter school or expanding the charter school movement to create more charters. Isn’t that odd. I thougth charter school teachers were in it for the dedication and devotion to the students, not job protection.
I wonder: do they see the irony in this?

Michael has done the heavy lifting here. I can’t wait to see him, Arthur Goldstein and John Lawhead represent ICE on the UFT Executive Board as HS reps if the Unity/New Action tandem doesn’t win those positions. (And good point “d” about the inability of the Unity/New Action crowd to articulate these points – maybe a high level of intellectual dishonesty is a factor.)

Let’s reiterate one point. Charter school boards have no public input and are chosen by ouija board. Even in our mayoral control system we know that Bloomberg will one day disappear after 4 or 5 terms and in a few years the state legislature will actually revisit mayoral control and mercifully put a stake through its heart – especially as we see the charter school movement begin to fall apart as all the territory gets filled up. (Notice how the competition has led to Evil Moskowitz moving to new territory in the Bronx. Charters never want to run all the schools because there is a limit to creaming and those kids that are the most difficult to work with cost a hell of a lot to deal with – not in the charter school/hedge fund monetary equation.)

Notice how the charter school crew buries the issue of basic democracy for people of color in urban schools while white parents in most of the nation actually vote on school boards and budgets. I don’t see any charter schools running into those places. And they have tough times in urban places with a democratic process. Thus see the battle of Rochester going on now.

As to fixing the lotteries. It all depends on where you advertise. Where I taught we knew which blocks had the poorest kids. Even in our school with 100% free lunch there were differences. The top classes were on grade level. Open school night we had double the parents – often both mom and dad – as we did when we has the bottom classes. These are the people entering the lotteries. Smart operators can target certain areas to milk this crowd which under any circumstances will be a bigger component of the lottery. I wonder if slick brochures flood local homeless shelters?

This creaming business is not a new thing. We always had a top middle school that all the active parents managed to get their kids into. Again – this is the charter population right now. We succeeded with these kids as well as any charter. That is not the population where the tough educational battles need to take place. And just like Evil leaving Harlem once the creaming is over, we will see each area of the city undergo this charterised creaming, leaving some public schools standing, which will naturally be accused of failing. The end game is to then call for Edison like entities to come in and finish off what’s left. After a few years of skimming millions but still failing, they will be replaced by the next gravy train riders. And so it will pass.

Ding. Ding. Ding. TKO. Looks like “Tell the Truth” picked the wrong fight. TtT was “demolished” and “out-classed.”