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Fantastic post in all respects. You make an important point about the soul-crushing impact of test-driven schools and about the charters’ general lack of cooperation and collaboration with neighborhood schools. The latter causes great rifts in our NYC communities.

Hey Mark,

Let’s use Harlem Success Academy as an example, since you mention it specifically.  What has been your most direct experience(s) with this CMO?  Why do you suspect that the CEO doesn’t sufficiently understand the communities the CMO serves?  

Davis, it would be helpful if there was some data to address this issue.  Certainly it’s a serious concern, but calls to an advocacy organization are not strong evidence.  It’s a particularly difficult issue to unpack because like district schools, charter schools have no control over the placement of students with disabilities.  The Committees on Special Education make those decisions.  Since charter schools tend to be small and rarely operate self-contained classrooms, the CSEs naturally place students in other schools to meet their needs.  This is not the same as students being “sent away” by the charter school.  Moreover, charter schools often operate unique programs that do not fit into the CSE’s traditional views of how to meet IEP requirements, despite their success with many students with disabilities.  It takes a lot of work on the part of the charter school and parents to convince some CSEs that the charter is a good fit.

Gideon,
I appreciate what you say about the social justice mission of CMOs that I derided. I agree that they are doing some social justice work by the fact that they exist as a resource in under resourced communities. But I also think that they believe a false binary: rigorous education vs. social justice education. I believe we can have both and we really have to try to achieve both. The kind of teacher I dream about becoming does both. I dream that my students can critique capitalism and also get top score on the Critical Lens essay. I want them to advocate for causes, using SAT vocabulary as they converse. I have seen it happen in my class and the classes of other teachers enough times that I believe it can happen.  

Good idea

Ken, not to sound arrogant; please define what you meant by ‘affects the curriculum’. Did you mean all of the different curriculA across the school? Did you mean the curriculUM of one course? or discipline?
And what type of examples were you thinking of??

Also, I enjoyed what seemed to be an underlying point of a living breathing environment where teachers create the happenings (the four-step process) contrasted against the paternal (DO THIS; ALL 49 things, please) that ‘Teach Like a Champ’ may represent to some people who would rather find their own way. I’m curious to know whether or not you caught this contrast the same way I did? I always like to know how non educators view certain components of the education debate. This repeating contrast, which exists between the two worlds (charter, more top-down, paternal advice, traditional, more find your own way advice) seemed to me to come up in the piece (even though Mark’s school is a charter) and it comes up a lot.

Mark, 
I agree with social justice being important and all but I don’t take your view on testing being over emphasized. Standardized testing is not perfect, but at the end of the day if your kids can’t read, they can’t read whether they’re taking a test or not. At least this way we know they can’t and we can hold teachers accountable to their students’ growth. 

-Noor
3rd grade, Blow Pierce Friendship Charter, DC

Can’t I give a lecture on Milton Friedman instead?

I remember when I was in my mid-20s and referred to false binaries.

Mark,

You seem like a committed educator, and you claim that you and the school you work at are going against the grain of “the prevalent trends of charter schools in New York City and nationally.”

But there’s a disconnect here, and it goes beyond the blatant anti-union (and thus, anti-social justice) animus of charter schools and their backers. 

Beyond the education the students may be getting at your school, you seem unwilling or unable to face the broader policy issues regarding charter schools and their ill effects on public education, even while ostensibly criticizing them. Has it occurred to you that the charter school movement as currently constituted is in fact an engine of social injustice, with the neediest students largely excluded and kept in public schools that endure intentional and continuing budgetary and organizational crisis? That charter schools divert funding from public schools, are active in taking over public school facilities, and are a vehicle for privatizing and monetizing a public resource  - and please don’t tell me that charters are public schools; even the law that brought them into being doesn’t call them that – and are an inseparable component of neoliberal doctrine and practice? Or is that an inconvenient truth at Harvard?

Your school’s web site brags about a 25:1 student-teacher ratio, while when speaking out of the other side of their mouths, charter supporters claim that class size is unimportant. How can you argue with a straight face that you are working for social justice when a few students receive these benefits at the expense of the overwhelming majority of poor and working class children in the city? If you think that is just an unfortunate coincidence, I have some mortgage-backed securities I’d like to sell you.

My recommendation is that you and like-minded charter school educators join those of us who teach in real public schools, and fight to get rid of the metal detectors, the budget cuts, the attacks on teacher working conditions and student learning conditions, the mercenary administrators, and the privatization and looting of a precious public good. Until then, columns like this read like an exercise in moral vanity (also not helped by the fact that the first person singular subject, object and possessive pronouns appear thirty-two times in a five-paragraph piece).

Mark,

I did not mean to attack you personally, but to point out what I see as the blind spots in your outlook, the outlook of an idealistic person who is trying to do good as they see it. And I certainly recognize the difficult employment situation facing new teachers. 

My purpose was to address the basic incompatibility of charter schools, as a matter of public policy, with notions of social justice. Perhaps I misread your column, but your criticisms of charter school shortcomings and abuses seemed to attribute them to some misguided people or unfortunate incidents, rather than fundamental characteristics. The teachers may be coming in with humane, progressive world views, but the deeper structures and actors are at root exclusionary and self-interested. I think that you fool yourself if you try to believe otherwise. A decent public education is a right for every child, not something to be competed for in a lottery.

I recognize that charter schools are diverse (though superficially and temporarily, since their backers recognize the ultimate need for economies of scale; the little guys will have to get big or get out), and the overwhelming majority of their teachers have social consciousness and a concern for the well-being of their students. The cruel irony is how that does a lot to mask the fundamental destructiveness of what charters have become as an institutional force and instrument of policy. And don’t think the Big Money that is capitalizing charters doesn’t know this. Individual schools do good things, fortunate students are helped, and there are some heartwarming photos taken and publicized, but all to the systemic detriment of the public schools, and resulting in the intentional destruction of the neighborhood school.

Charters are, legally and by their nature, private entities funded with public dollars, with minimal public oversight, and that do not enroll the full spectrum of students in their communities. They are often being pushed most aggressively in districts where local democratic control has been removed. This is a cruel contradiction, as policies falsely claiming to constitute “the civil rights issue of our time” are in fact based on eliminating the democratic rights of minority communities. And, of course, charters degrade wages and working conditions for teachers. 

Those are not unfortunate errors, but structural characteristics, based upon well-thought out policies and strategies. 

You say you want to influence the “new well-resourced schools,” but aren’t you overlooking something? When the money spent on these “well-resourced” schools is diverted from the public schools, where is the equity or justice?  How is that anything other than separate and unequal? When private money is able to set policy, and pick winners and losers, what has become of the democratic process?

A note about what you mistakenly call my “blind anger.” First of all, public school teachers have a right to be angry. We are demonized and scapegoated, blamed for the poverty our students face, expected to meet their infinite needs with diminishing resources, and targeted with punitive policies and conflicting mandates. And the same people who are demonizing us are the ones providing the venture capital and marketing hype for charter schools. Why shouldn’t we be angry? We’re witnessing widespread social vandalism and the siphoning of public resources to private interests, while continually being blamed for the system’s failures.

And, on a personal level, I take it personally when people threaten my livelihood and the contractual benefits teachers before me fought for. It’s especially distasteful when these same people use children as props to do it.

Lastly, you accuse me of wanting to “shut down institutions.” This is putting words in my mouth. I don’t think any charter opponent is calling for the closing of schools; that would cause the same disruption and instability that corporate ed deform is itself (intentionally) creating. 

I can’t speak for any organizations, but only for myself. If it was up to me, I’d want an immediate and indefinite moratorium on granting of new charters, regulations that would compel charters to enroll and continue to educate children from a representative cross section of the local community, an end to charter real estate grabs, laws that would insure that schools receiving public dollars pay the prevailing (union) wage and adhere to prevailing (union) working conditions, and their eventual integration into a democratically-run system that would, when appropriate, preserve their pedagogical autonomy. As for the chains, let them get their funding from The Microsoft Foundation, the Walton’s, Broad,  and all those hedge fund altruists. Let them prosper, and let the students for whom those schools work succeed, but not while taking public money and pretending to be public schools.

John, 

As someone who “found my own way” in teaching, it turns out that Teach Like a Champion describes better than anything else I’ve read what that way – that I found through experience, over many years – actually involves. There are other ways, but I’m happy to share with new teachers the techniques from that book, which I have found to be helpful and have seen many others “discover” as well. 

It seems to me that the process of becoming a teacher involves learning as many different things that work (always or sometimes, in every situation or in specific situations) as you possibly can, and then forging from them your own specific approach, effective and appropriate to your setting. Gosh, as a new teacher, how much I would have appreciated a copy of that book… it could have saved me a year or two of “finding my own way” in my classroom. 

Ms. V.

Michael, it is completely antithetical to the idea of social justice both to attack and dismiss the work of allies and to assert that public school teachers are the only “true” teachers.

The best any of us can ever do is to fight against oppression as much as we can, in the circles of influence that exist for us. The world is not fair, but to imply it’s somehow less important–or hypocritical–to educate the students in a charter school in the South Bronx about social justice than to educate those in a public school is shortsighted and unhelpful.

Even if charter schools (and, heck, let’s throw in private schools) were all abolished and every school was turned “public,” do you really believe all the schools would then have equal funding/resources? Somehow centuries of instituionalized racism, class structure, and capitalism itself would evaporate? Of course not. There would–and probably always will–still be haves and have nots.

The only chance at diminishing that gap is through concerted efforts to illuminate oppression, gather allies, and demonstrate how it can be attacked. I kind of get what you’re trying to do, but what you’re achieving is muddying the actual source of oppression by focusing your anger at its results, losing allies by creating unnecessary divisions within the already embattled ranks of educators, and providing no clear or realistic plan of attack for someone like me–who fundamentally agrees with all of your basic sentiments about education– to follow.

Mr. Fusco says nothing in his rather short introductory column indicating that his outlook towards charter schools in general is anything other than problematized and critical. He is hopeful, as anyone should be, that his school will succeed in educating and enriching the lives of its students. He is clearly personally committed to and proud of his students’ success. These are the characteristics of a great teacher, and by no means undercut his ability to analyze both his and his school’s position in an oppressive structure.

Would it not be more productive to engage such an intelligent and effective young teacher in some meaningful partnership or dialogue than to assume a useless moral high ground? Especially since you both espouse social justice!

It just reads, Michael, like you’re more interested in letting everyone know how (rightfully) pissed off you are about inequality than trying to build towards something better.

Fusco deserves congrats for what he’s accomplished and at bare minimum the benefit of the doubt for what he has yet to achieve, which I think will be remarkable.

Good column, Mark!

I would think a non union school would be one of the most important–not ironic–places to teach social justice. Your logic would say it’s “ironic” to teach about starving countries unless you’re in a starving country.

also-

unions are just as likely to be corrupt and damaging to education as corporations.

You sound just a bit unnecessarily haughty here, too, don’t you think?