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Ms. Brown,

Thank you for the perspective; truly unique and a welcome contribution. I wish nothing but the best for you and your kids, and I sincerely hope you get your fifth grader into a charter as that is your totally understandable preference.

But I stopped short of reading your essay as reflective of all traditional public schools or all charters. I’d like to say why, and I do so without meaning one iota of offense, but I know I’m a bit blunt. Apologies in advance:

My kids are in a TPS, get homework folders, and are in a school with a zero-tolerance policy toward misbehavior. I would guess that of the 1.1 million public schools kids that would be true for more than fewer. If not, I don’t see those as issues that can be fixed only by charters, or cannot be fixed within the current TPS system.

Most striking was the tutoring, which is fantastic, and which all kids in need deserve. But again I ask, is that by governance type a feature we should accept as exclusive to charters? Or is that a factor of, say, pay scales? i.e. Does the charter (even with less money per kid) have the ability to spread it around over more — but lower paid — staff members? Or is it something else? e.g. How many other draws on the staffing budget does the TPS have relative to the Charter? ELL? Spec Ed? etc.

At the risk of making hay out of this next “straw man” argument, I can imagine the push-back: “But Michael, your kids are in a GOOD public school.” True, but given THAT, it’s hard to maintain the case that the solution to our educational system is exclusively charters, and further deconstruction of the non-charter system, whether via space wars, attacks on the UFT, the weekly articles in the NYPost about rubber rooms, etc. The question is: What can we clone about the good TPS schools? (And why doesn’t the Chancellor focus on THAT as much as on “Texting with Eva,” Tweed’s new favorite soap opera and abuse of access?)

Solutions, regardless of charter or TPS, include: effective principals, effective teachers, parent involvement (for which I again commend Ms. Brown wholeheartedly), motivated kids (which frequently correlates with motivated parents), etc., etc. In short, effective principles.

Chris,

Actually, charters often get roughly the same amount of federal money per student, but that’s < 10% of the total expenditure.

You’re right that charters get less state money per student. Is that made up for with private donors? With some NYC charters. But not with most.

Glancing at their board of trustees, for example, I’d be surprised if Harlem Link was able to make up that gap. Maybe someone can post with the actual numbers.

I would agree with GGW that most charter schools are not run by private charter companies and thus do not fund raise to the extent that some widely known charters do. Some charters don’t get a building, get less funding, and have a board of not-so-superstar people that don’t have big connections and thus those schools have to fend for themselves.

And Chris, the last time I looked at the definition of “charter school”, it said a public school privately run. So saying that Ms. Brown is attacking public education would mean she was also attacking charter schools, which is definitely not the case. Ms. Brown is simply telling the differences between two public schools in her neighborhood and voicing her concern and wishes.

I think it’s a ridiculous comment to make that being on the side of charters is attacking public education simply because they receive donations and have a lottery. If I’m not mistaken, there are plenty of public schools out there that do their own fundraisers (I have worked at some) and have admissions tests. Doesn’t LaGuardia have auditions? I would have to say that those are a lot more subjective than a simple lottery. If charters were allowed to expand and add more seats for everyone who demanded entrance, there would be no need for a lottery. No school – charter, public, or private – can let just everyone attend. There are only so many seats and so many rooms.

It seems a bit hypocritical to accuse Ms. Brown of a public ed attacker when ALL of her children attend public schools in NYC.

The real difference is in the attitude of the school administration. Ms. Brown was able to choose a school whose administration’s attitude toward the children, and their parents’ concerns, was good for her and her children, except for the child who still attends a neighborhood school. Neighborhood public schools, like most monopolies, tend not to be not terribly concerned with their clients’ feelings and expressed needs and desires, although some are. But the latter are rare.

If more parents could pull more children out of schools – public, charter/public – which didn’t meet their children’s needs in ways the parents feel are appropriate, and put them into schools which they feel do, the ways that the remainder of the public schools operate would change – would be forced to change – or they’d wind up being closed.

If school exist to educate children, and educate them well, this is an appropriate resolution to the problem of a school with uncaring or incompetent administration. If schools exist primarily to maintain the paid adults who work in them, then this is unacceptable. I’m getting tired of people who are really primarily concerned with one pretend that their concerns lie with the other. There’s not really a middle ground here. Schools are not entitled to children. Children are entitled to schools – and good ones – whatever that takes.

Thank you. I was lucky … sort of. When my son was young, his needs, which were unusual, were very clear to me and his father. Our local community school district made it clear that it did not wish to meet his needs and, in fact, told us to go and put our son back in private school. We took offense at that since we were paying their salaries with our taxes, and so helped organize a parents’ group which rammed a new public school program through the community school district and central Board of Ed. But it took more than 100 organized parents, including attorneys, accountants, educators and various other kinds of professionals to do it, as well as lots of less-monied “regular” parents, including a number on welfare who contributed in other important ways. What made the CSD and central board folks the angriest was when we insisted on recruiting Citywide so that the program would be available to a diverse group of kids, including those whose parents weren’t as savvy and connected as our initial organizers were. And thus The Anderson Program for Exceptionally Gifted Children was born.

Actually, we went through hell birthing the program, including defending it in State Supreme Court against a really frivolous suit brought by a parent who was being manipulated by a UFT-connected school board member – and I would never suggest that parents try to do this again. But that’s the nice thing about charters. With so many, and so many different kinds out there, the odds of finding one that will meet a child’s needs is much, much greater than in years past. All you have to do is fill out an application and pray that your child lucks out in the lottery. It’s sad that there aren’t enough charters to meet the stated need, but hopefully that will change.

I’m constantly amazed at the legend of the little lovely community school that’s going to meet the needs of all the children in its cachement area. Then they say there’s something wrong with the kids whose needs they don’t meet. There’s rarely something wrong with these kids. Some kids do well in highly structured environments; others flourish in less structured ones. Some flourish with advanced, accelerated curricula; others enjoy spending a great deal of time on the same topic, exploring it in depth. Nobody really argues about the validity of this – many just insist that the same school will somehow provide both. T’aint so.

Us middle class parents always had some kind of choice in the Bd. of Ed. system … one way or another. Which is why, when the politics of The Anderson Program got too obnoxious and started effecting my child, I simply upped and registered him in the lovely local public school where my mom lived – in Forest Hills – one of the top 10 schools in NYC at that time. Charters merely give parents who don’t have these kinds of access other ways to get their kids’ needs met, and I say it’s fabulous, and about time, too!

What charters are really about is giving control over their children’s education back to all parents, including the ones who previously were captive of the public school monopoly system. I think providing this control, and opportunity, for those parents and their children is a very fundamental and basic civil rights issue. Far too many charter opponents don’t have kids in the incompetent public schools they claim to protect because they either have money or have figured out how to manipulate the system to their own children’s benefit. And then they have the nerve to complain because motivated, informed and involved parents send their kids to charter schools, when they can, leaving them with the children of the less-informed and/or less savvy. Can’t have it both ways, folks. Treat children and their parents well; educate them all competently, at a minimum, and charters will disappear in a New York minute. Until then … power to the parents! And that means charters, and more of them.

Protect the children and to hell with the salaried adults. They’re grown up and should be able to take care of themselves. It’s the children who deserve the focus.

Actually, if you look at many studies of the overall effectiveness of charter schools, what you see is that, overall, they do no better, nor worse, than public schools, but typically do so at less cost.

The NYCDOE currently claims, according to the latest Mayor’s Management Report, to spend over $60,000 per student for each severely disabled student in its District 75. District 75′s results are nothing short of appalling and stories re corruption and incompetence there are legend. The NYC DOE didn’t recently agree to repay the US Dept. of Health and Human Services $300 million for its fraudulent claims to Medicaid for related services allegedly provided to its Medicaid-eligible students with IEPs for no good reason, at least not according to the US Dept. of Justice, which secured the False Claims Act settlement. As it turns out, according to the relevant federal audits, at least 50% of the related services these disabled kids were supposed to receive from the NYC DOE never happened. I’m tired of having kids with disabilities used as a weapon against charters. At least when a kid with a disability attends a charter school, his/her parents can be reasonably sure that s/he won’t be abused or neglected, which is far from the case in District 75 and much of the rest of the NYC DOE as a whole.

Charters who accept kids with disabilities have to accept the IEPs written by the kids’ Community School District Committees on Special Education. And the IEPs they write dictate the structure of each disabled child’s school day and often make them extremely difficult, and often downright impossible, to implement while maintaining integrity of the charter’s structure and program. Charters are also not given special extra funds to make their buildings accessible to kids with disabilities.

We’d know a lot more about the NYC DOE’s special education operations and outcomes except that this is one of a number of areas in which the NYC DOE has essentially classified student-related information. If you want to know about the scores for the mildly and disabled kids in NYC DOE schools, those who usually just get a few periods of resource room, or maybe a bit of speech teacher attention, weekly, or who are in district-operated self-contained special ed. classes in regular district schools … I challenge you to find it, and then make it public … please. From what I can tell, the high school graduation rate for these kids in the NYC DOE hovers around the 5% mark, but that may be an over-estimation. In a data-rich organization such as the Bloomberg NYC DOE, when information is withheld, it’s a sure sign that if it was released, there would be a scandal.

Since the Regents have decided, in their infinite wit and wisdom, that charters cannot be set up exclusively to enroll kids with disabilities, which might allow the more severely disabled kids to get out of their NYC DOE Day Willowbrooks, failure of charters to take such students is pre-ordained. The funding formulae for charters in NYS do not provide the money necessary to staff a charter with experts needed for this population. (The exception being, of course, the one autism charter school, started by affluent sparklies with close contacts to Joel Klein and NYSED’s Regents, by report.)

Finally, if you are right – that if and when poor children who have informed, involved parents pull them out of the NYC DOE and enroll them in charter schools it impoverishes the remaining system and should thus be prohibited, well … lets follow that logic through to the end. The NYC DOE runs so many abysmal schools that those kids who do have informed, involved parents – even when they’re poor, or minority group members, or non-home English speakers – try to pull them out and get them into charter schools fast as they can. Removing this group of children, and their families, from the public schools’ monopoly makes it more difficult to educate the rest of the kids, i.e., those of the undeserving poor. And thus the children of the deserving poor are to be denied the benefits of having informed, involved parents and punished by being forced to remain in abysmal public schools. Is there something I’m missing. Perhaps you’d like to do an in-depth survey of the parents who have enrolled their kids in charters – a survey about how they feel they were treated when they tried to be good, informed, involved parents in terms of their kids’ educations when they were in the NYC public schools. “Deserving” isn’t the right word. “Desperate” is.

According to this line of reasoning, all private schools and parochial schools should be abolished … so as to keep feeding that great institution known as the NYC public school system. Fine! Try it! The last thing the NYC DOE wants is a heavy inrush of informed, involved, savvy and connected middle class parents and their children. The first thing those parents would do, as we did, is use the NYS Freedom of Information Law to look at purchase orders, after which all hell broke loose. Been there; done that.

If you want to put the well being of an institution above that of a child, that’s your choice. But don’t force parents who want good educations for their kids, but don’t have pricey options available, to live with your choice. Not unless you’re willing to pull your child out of a halfway decent public school and enroll him or her – immediately – in one of the NYC DOE failing schools in a poor minority neighborhood. Those parents work hard. They pay taxes. They vote. And what they want counts, too. Bigtime! And from what I’ve seen over the past 3 decades, what they want is a good education for their children – and to hell with protecting and maintaining an institution which has served their children poorly … at best.

I don’t see sacrificing the education of kids in charter schools so that a truly dysfunctional institution such as the NYC DOE can continue going on being dysfunctional is a legitimate choice to impose. Unless you’re willing to look a poor minority parent in Harlem straight in the fact and tell her, or him, that her or his child has to be sacrificed so that some unaccountable institution can survive unscathed by the results of its own conduct.

Oops! I hate to let reality intrude, but did you know that the majority of NYS persistently dangerous schools every year since the list has been published are in the NYC DOE’s District 75? And that’s with them claiming to be experts to the tune of over $60,000 per year per student. It takes something really special to tell the parents of these extremely vulnerable kids that they should not have a choice to flee to the few charters which can handle their kids. Give charters exactly the same amount of money for these kids as the NYC DOE claims to spend on them and you’ll see a rush of wheelchairs and canes beating a path to these charters as though there was a new California gold rush. I know, because I’ve spoken to a lot of these parents and … they can’t wait for the chance.

Protect children, not institutions.

… and when it comes to paying salaries with your taxes, remember that teachers also pay taxes and thus are paying a portion of their own salary.

Dee, it sounds like some of the comments really touched a nerve with you.

I’d make one important point: as an educator, I’ve never seen a parent who wasn’t motivated to get the best education possible for his or her child. Never. Uninformed, disempowered, downtrodden, maybe. Especially in the last couple of years and after 9/11 when folks on the bottom of the totem pole were losing jobs at the drop of a hat too. But this myth of the unmotivated parent filling the rolls of the district public schools that are left behind to clean up after charters have creamed the “informed” parents is a big fat lie, and an offensive one at that.

In my experience (and as at best a lukewarm believer in competition to make things better, not what I expected), the surrounding district public schools get better when a charter shows up, not worse. Indeed, the failure of the NYC public school system to provide a high quality education for all kids isn’t about the kids. It’s about the adults, and when adults behave differently and focus on what matters, things get remarkably better. And kids who could have been labeled with all kinds of bad and shameful educator-speak names because of their own behaviors remarkably rise to meet high academic expectations when they are given the supports they need and when the bad behaviors of school adults around them changes.

Hmm, some responses on these interesting comments.

This is not true:

Quote: “Actually, if you look at many studies of the overall effectiveness of charter schools, what you see is that, overall, they do no better, nor worse, than public schools…”

Actually, the studies are very clear – the majority of charter schools do worse than public schools, nationwide.

Quote: “…but typically do so at less cost.”

That’s too complicated, since as discussed otherwise here, charters underenroll the students who cost the most to educate. And the rock star charter schools certainly do not educate anyone at less cost. It’s funny, because I know a woman who’s a former KIPP executive and a non-charter public-school parent. When she talks about KIPP (which she still respects), she treats it as a given that KIPP has enormously more money to spend than her child’s public school – or any public school. I have friends who are charter school parents here in San Francisco who acknowledge the same thing — that’s WHY they chose the charter school. Yet the propagandists endlessly claim otherwise. The lies and distortions surrounding charter schools go on and on.

Quote: “According to this line of reasoning, all private schools and parochial schools should be abolished … so as to keep feeding that great institution known as the NYC public school system.”

Private schools and parochial schools aren’t being created and supported with tax dollars, however.

Quote: “The last thing the NYC DOE wants is a heavy inrush of informed, involved, savvy and connected middle class parents and their children. The first thing those parents would do, as we did, is use the NYS Freedom of Information Law to look at purchase orders, after which all hell broke loose.”

I am in San Francisco and follow this blog because there is so much buzz about mayoral control and how the Bloomberg school experiments could be leading the way for other school districts nationwide. It’s interesting to me that there’s so much hatred by charter parents aimed at the NYC DOE, when the NYC DOE appears so very pro-charter and hostile to its own schools — determined to neglect and abandon the schools it runs and turn as many schools over to charter operators as possible. I’m 3,000 miles away, so maybe that’s why I don’t get it, but I’m baffled.

Quote: “If you want to put the well being of an institution above that of a child, that’s your choice.” No, I want to put the well-being of the larger number of children above the well-being of a few. I might as well turn the comment around – if you want to put the well-being of your own child above everyone else’s, and harm the majority of children in the process – well, that shouldn’t be your choice, because it’s a selfish, coldblooded and immoral choice.

Quote: “I agree with you that a competitive spirit among schools is healthy. It pushes schools to be results-driven and be concerned with the real reason it is there – to educate and produce scholars. That’s why I think charter schools are wonderful.”

Diane Ravitch has a response to that. Here is her quote from a recent NPR interview: “There should not be an education marketplace, there should not be competition. Schools operate fundamentally — or should operate — like families. The fundamental principle by which education proceeds is collaboration. Teachers are supposed to share what works; schools are supposed to get together and talk about what’s [been successful] for them. They’re not supposed to hide their trade secrets and have a survival of the fittest competition with the school down the block.

Quote: “… as an educator, I’ve never seen a parent who wasn’t motivated to get the best education possible for his or her child. Never.”
Kitchen Sink, you do live in a bubble. In my own kids’ urban public-school classes I’ve seen parents who were too overwhelmed by their own problems to pay attention to their kids’ education, or even to understand that they should. Here in San Francisco, our mayor has been engaging in a project that has been an eye-opener to him; hearing about it might increase your awareness. After being challenged by Patricia Gray, the longtime principal of San Francisco’s Balboa High School, Mayor Gavin Newsom has been spending Saturdays calling the homes of students who are chronically truant from their San Francisco public schools. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier and Ross political insider column wrote about this in a Jan. 31 column (not available online.)
“It has been a real eye-opener,” Newsom told the Chronicle. “In just about every case,” Matier and Ross wrote, “the family is in crisis.” In other words, truancy isn’t all the fault of inept teachers and uncaring schools after all, Newsom is learning.
At last week’s overflowing Town Hall meeting called by San Francisco parents to address the current budget crisis, Newsom brought up his calls (and visits) to the homes of truants, and reiterated that point quite emphatically. The truants are almost always living in households battered by the worst life can dump on them. Those families are too overwhelmed to seek out the best education possible for their children, or to support their children’s education at all, even by getting them to school. It’s tragic, but it’s what’s happening in the real world.

Restating falsehoods with great forcefulness and at great length doesn’t make them true.

It’s bizarre and self-defeating for a special-education advocate to promote charter schools as the solution, because both data and anecdotal evidence overwhelmingly confirm that charters avoid and dump disabled students as much as possible. Those are just the facts, no matter how loudly firmly misguided (or deliberately deceptive) charter advocates try to insist otherwise.

Blustering at people about their school affiliations is counterproductive too, especially because so much of the pro-charter noise comes from people who haven’t set foot in a school in their adult lives, not counting a few shiny orchestrated tours, and know absolutely squat about what actually goes on in a classroom.

My own views about the “it’s a miracle!” magic-feather-silver-bullet charter propaganda started developing back in 1997, when I took on a major freelance writing job for the Hoover Institution, world capital of that mentality. At the same time, my older child was in second grade in a diverse urban public school (a midrange one, in answer to Ms. Alpert’s question, among our district schools). I was reading lots of Hoover materials by the magic-feather folks, mainly John Chubb (now discredited by the lies and sleaze he engaged in around his involvement with now-failed for-profit Edison Schools), Terry Moe and others like Thomas Sowell. At the same time, I was volunteering regularly in my son’s classroom, so I could see the total disconnect. These confident, high-profile and well-paid propagandists had not the tiniest ****ing clue what the inside of a K-12 classroom was like. Yet even they were probably more clued in that the primary drivers of our education policy, like Bill Gates and Eli Broad.

Oh, and I can see that the KIPP fans are leaping with desperation on the study of one (1) single KIPP school, which I haven’t had time to take a close look at. But here’s the history. Until a few years ago, none of the multiple studies and masses of gushing press coverage, of course including Jay Mathews’ (remember, he sells books based on the mass adoration of KIPP that he promotes), had ever thought to look at attrition. Gosh, I guess they all just “forgot” to check that. Since I’m familiar with the California Department of Education database, I researched the attrition at all the California KIPP schools and found the pattern that is now widely discussed — major attrition, with the majority of students who start KIPP not finishing. One thing I did was break down by demographics, so I found that the pattern consistently was that the subgroup that tended to be the most academically challenged tended to leave in much higher percentages (Latino or African-American boys, depending on the school’s overall makeup). At Oakland’s KIPP Bridge Academy during the period I researched, 79% of the African-American boys who started 5th grade left before the START of 8th grade — I didn’t have access to info on how many actually finished grade 8 — if any.

When I blogged those statistics, it got some attention. A while later, a report by SRI on San Francisco Bay Area KIPP schools resoundingly confirmed my findings, and also added info that I didn’t have access to — that the students who left were consistently the lowest achievers. The SRI study, to be clear, found that 60% of the students (overall) who started at those KIPP schools left before finishing 8th grade, consistently the lowest-achievers, and they were not replaced, leaving the class with the 40% highest achievers. The attrition of low achievers was so high that the SRI researchers were unable to study the impact of KIPP methods on students through their years there, because the attrition confounded the data.

Well, now we have info on one (1) KIPP school supposedly showing a different pattern; KIPP enthusiasts are leaping on it as the definitive proof, but I don’t see how you figure that. It’ll be interesting to see what the Mathematica study determines.

Oh, for disclosure, my kids have attended basically all three levels of urban public school: A midrange elementary school (Lakeshore Elementary, SFUSD), an arts high school that admits by audition and thus is relatively protected from some of the major challenges that urban schools face (San Francisco School of the Arts, SFUSD ), and a middle school that — especially when my older started there — was viewed as a “dirty,” “dangerous,” “disreputable” “ghetto” school (Aptos Middle School, SFUSD).

Yes, he has been calling the families of chronic truants at all levels, K-12 (he claims to have been doing this every Saturday for several month), though the project was inspired by a high school principal.

Well, I see you have been very involved, Kitchen Sink. All I can say is that your experience is an outlier and does not jibe with that of others involved in teaching and working with disadvantaged families.

It’s self-evident that charter schools enroll the families who have it together to seek them out, decide to take a chance on the lottery and perhaps the admission tests (KIPP does test applicants, and those applicants are given the impression that those tests are admission tests, though KIPP claims they’re not*), and work the rest of the process.

It’s also self-evident to almost everyone who lives in the real world, with the singular exception of Kitchen Sink, that not every family has it together to seek out a school, take a chance on the lottery, brave the admission test and work the rest of the process. And at KIPP schools and who knows what others, that’s before the “counseling session” with the administration at which adults and students sign contracts agreeing to this and that and may well be discouraged from enrolling after all if they’re not likely to get with the program.

This is reality. Kitchen Sink’s world is Kitchen Sink’s world.

*As some of you know, I went through part of the KIPP enrollment process with my own child as a research project — the gushing press and researchers who “forget” to do all the research haven’t tried that.

Caroline, it’s self-evident to me that KIPP set up an admissions test just for you, because in the Kitchen Sink world, charters don’t give admissions tests!

Interesting concept, that KIPP created an admissions test just for my daughter.

I don’t know about other charters, but at KIPP, yeah, they do give tests, which they don’t discourage families from believing to be admission tests. If you ask directly in a PR context, KIPP spokespeople say they’re tests to determine the applicant’s grade level. But as I say, to the applicant, it’s an admission test.

A parent/guardian who fears that his/her child would do poorly on an admission tests is going to be deterred. And obviously the test creams for students who are compliant enough o be willing to cooperate with taking the test.

I’m sure that in your parallel universe, all fifth-graders and middle-school-age students would eagerly take a test, KS, but that’s not the case on Planet Earth.

I did the little bit of research (applying to KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy for my daughter) after a happy KIPP parent here in San Francisco posted proudly on our SFschools Yahoo listserve that his daughter had “tested into” KIPP SF Bay.

It’s so ridiculous to have this surreal discussion again, Kitchen Sink. You and I have had it before, and I’ve had it with other charter advocates too. Here’s the discussion:

Me: Charter schools cream for compliant, higher-functioning, more-motivated students from compliant, higher-functioning, more-motivated families.
Charter advocate: They do not!
Me: (Explains yet again how charter schools cream for compliant, higher-functioning, more-motivated students from compliant, higher-functioning, more-motivated families.)
Charter advocate: What’s wrong with creaming for compliant, higher-functioning, more-motivated students from compliant, higher-functioning, more-motivated families?

Ms. Alpert, bluster and shouting will carry the day for a while, but eventually the truth does prevail.

OY! Lots of emotion in these comments.

My first response after reading the original poster’s piece was EXACTLY the first comment posted by Michael M.–that is, while Ms. Brown’s experience is real, it cannot be generalized out to ALL charter schools and ALL noncharter schools. My kids, like Michael M’s, go to a noncharter school where they must dutifully tote that Home folder back and forth each day. It bears announcements and, on Mondays, a checklist with the week’s worth of HW. At their school, I, too, can’t imagine that anyone could slam someone else’s head into anything and have it described as “just playing.” Kids who are struggling are pulled out for extra help during the school day. There’s nothing charter or noncharter about this; it’s just what ANY good school should do.

Why wouldn’t the DOE try to emulate the success of district schools, like the one that MM’s kids and my kids attend? Why should charters be embraced as the only route towards giving parents more choice and offering alternative modes of education? Dee you are clearly enraged at the DOE, and I can’t entirely fault you for that, but I still don’t get why you think that private entities are the solution. I have to admit, too, that you would have more chance of helping me understand your viewpoint if you didn’t write such vitriolic things as “They won; you lost. Get over it.” Is that how I should feel about my discontent or dissent within an allegedly democratic system? And isn’t it at odds with your professed desire that parents be advocates? By that logic, I would think parents, or any citizens, really, should just give up. After all, it’s all over.

During a discussion in a class at Lehman College recently, a classmate of mine recently said something that really struck me. “Privatization is a diversion.” A diversion to what, we all wondered. After a few inquistive looks, she replied that it was a diversion in creating a educational system that serves all children. It seemed like a simple enough statement, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized how true it was. Why our we dividing ourselves into separate camps, instead of rallying together to create equality in education?

I understand that advocates of charter schools believe that choice will create competition. They argue that competition will spur schools to offer better education, thus raising the bar on standards. To be entirely honest though, I can’t see any clear winner in this competition. In the past three months I have read and looked numerous studies, the results seem to be just as divided.

One recent New York Times columnist cited a study by Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist whose research found that students in attendance at the Harlem Children’s Zone schools reading and math scores improved tremendously. The “typical” student entered the school at the 39th percentile for both reading and math, and within two years, had jumped to the 53rd percentile in English and the 74th in math. After reading that, who wouldn’t believe that charter schools are the way to go.

On the other hand, a Standford economist by the name of Dr. Margaret Raymond, recently produced at the Center for Research on Education Outcomes that points toward the opposite conclusion. Raymond’s work (which was funded by pro-charter foundations) surveyed charter schools within 15 states and the District of Columbia and found that only 17 percent of the charter schools observed were performing better than the comparable public schools. The majority of the charters, at 46 percent, were showing no gains, and an alarming 37 percent were actually performing worse.

So, here we have two studies, both from scholars affiliated with Ivy League schools. Now it is a question of who is right- which type of school trumps the other?Wrong. The question is what makes that 17 percent better, and how do we incorporate that into public schooling. Similarly, what is preventing that 37 percent from scoring higher, and how do we help them improve. Charter schools have the freedom in terms of curriculum. They often do not have the standardized tests and accountability that public schools are subject to. They tend to be more active, focusing on the community as a whole. But at the same time, the organization is often lacking. Unlike public schools, there is no transparency, and sometimes corporations tied to the schools are allowed to run around without any restraint. There have been numerous cases in the past year where acts of nepotism have been revealed in charter schools.

So how can we offer better education without pitting students, parents, teachers, and administrators against one another? How do we create this unity between public and charter schools? We as a nation are so focused on numbers, but we often don’t look at what is behind those numbers. Let us focus not on which is better overall, but instead assess, piece by piece, what is working and what isn’t. I think if we were to take the best aspects of both types of schooling, we would see an educational system that would provide equal opportunities for all. I mean, what benefit are we getting out of this feud between public and private anyways?

Dee, could you provide a link to the DiNapoli audits? If I recall correctly, it was a seven-figure, multi-individual, multi-year heist that included public funds being spent on items such as Ferraris and vacations to Mexico in the Roslyn School District that led to the debate and lawsuit over whether the comptroller had authority to audit charters.

I agree that there is likely corruption in pockets all over the charter and district schools. As a mentor said to me when I mentioned some accusations that were leveled at me just because I run a charter school, “These things are or may well be happening in charter schools. Charter and district doesn’t matter when it comes to integrity.”

The question is whether there is sufficient public oversight and transparency in the charter law. My answer is yes, but I would appreciate some kind of factcheck.org independent report to answer the claims of people trying to get elected or re-elected, who may be stand-up individuals but have an agenda involving a seat (like anti-charter people like Perkins and DiNapoli, pro-charter people like Johnson, Smikle). Where are you, factcheck.org?