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- Charter schools are the prime example of the “free market myth of education.”
- Charter schools create economic and racial segregation.
- Supporting the continued existence of charter schools is inextricably capitalist
Mechanisms---Charter SchoolsCharter schools promote a corporate agenda that increases inequality by selecting for wealth and reducing educational outcomes for Black and Latino students.Berliner & Glass 14—David C. Berliner, former professor and dean of the Teachers College at Arizona State University, PhD in Educational Psych from Stanford, authored more than 200 articles, books and chapters on education policy, co-editor of the Handbook of Educational Psychology, former president of the American Educational Research Association, member of the National Academy of Education and the International Academy of Education, and Gene V. Glass, former professor in Educational and Policy Studies at Arizona State, senior researcher at the National Education Policy Center and a research professor in the School of Education at University of Colorado Boulder, 2014 (“Chapter 2: Myths and Lies About Who’s Best: Charters, Privates, Maybe Finland?”, 50 Myths and Lies that Threaten America’s Schools: The Real Crisis in Education, Teachers College Press, Kindle Edition) The promise of charters fervently heralded by many policymakers and education reformers was confronted by reality when the results of the first national assessment of charter school impact were released by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University in 2009. That report found that more than 80% of charter schools are either no better or worse than traditional public schools at securing math and reading gains for their students. It is interesting to note that the states most associated with extensive charter school laws, parental choice, and accountability systems (Arizona, Florida, Ohio, and Texas) rank highest among the states where traditional public school students outperform charter school students. The same report found that Black and Latino charter students at all levels and charter students in high school perform worse in both math and reading than do their peers in traditional public schools. This is significant considering that charter schools on average enroll almost twice as many Black students (29%) as do traditional public schools (15%) in the 27 states that enroll 95% of the nation’s charter school students. The CREDO report released in 2013 updates 2009 data and reveals that, overall, traditional public schools outperform charters in math and reading. This is especially true when comparing traditional public schools with new charter schools (those that opened after 2008 and were not included in the 2009 assessment). In some cases, new charter school performance is tantamount to 22 fewer days of learning than traditional public schools. But the 2013 CREDO report does reflect some positive results for charters: Charter schools do better at serving students in poverty and English language learners. Separating hype from reality in the world of charter schools is nearly a full-time job. The Chicago Tribune, in March 2013, hoaxed the public by passing on an apparent invention by charter school advocates who claimed that 19,000 children were on waiting lists to be admitted to charter schools in the city; hence, let’s have more charter schools. The reality was that this 19,000 number was not children but applications, with many children applying to 2, 3, 4, or even more charters. And many of these children had already entered a traditional public school or been turned down by a charter. Moreover, the phony waiting list number was at odds with the fact that the existing charter schools in Chicago were reporting numbers of vacant seats in the thousands. The subtle exclusion from charter schools of students with special needs is common. A Minnesota mother reported her experience with the same charter school in which one of her children was enrolled: “My daughter is a mainstream student and has been attending Minnesota School of Science since they opened. For 2 years in a row I have been trying to enroll my son, who is a special-needs student, but have been told by the school both years not to enroll him because the special education program is lacking and that my son’s needs will not get met and was told he is better off in a Minneapolis public school, not a charter school.” For the most part, charter schools that are touted in the media as making conspicuous academic progress achieve their reputation by discouraging enrollment of students who might not score well on tests. In the case of one charter school, the Tucson BASIS school, prospective students were asked to submit a long research paper, an original short story, or an essay on some historical figure they admire. There were interviews of applicants and entrance tests. Parents were asked to fill out a long survey and answer questions such as: “Will you volunteer time each week to help at the school?” Significantly, many of those parents were never asked to make good on their commitment. Strauss (2013) reports more abuses, including an Arizona charter that has applications available for parents only for a few hours per year, and only some people are informed when that will be. One chain of charter schools has captured national attention—even touted by U.S. News & World Report as one of the top 10 high schools in the nation—by the ruthless selection of incoming students and the subsequent “flunking” out of all but the most able. In a grade 6– 12 school with enrollment of more than 500 students, one year’s graduating class was fewer than 2 dozen students. The name of this chain of schools? BASIS Schools, founded by an economics professor from the University of Arizona. Although charter school expansion seems inevitable, there are glimmers of resistance. In April 2013, the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board rejected the application of BASIS to open a school in the District. Collecting big fees and constantly testing little children didn’t appeal to the Board, apparently. And some years previously, BASIS attempted to open a private school in Scottsdale, Arizona, an affluent city near Phoenix. Attracted, perhaps, by the hefty private school fees of the area, BASIS had pinpointed Scottsdale as a prime target for increased revenues. When only seven students had signed up by the fall opening of this BASIS private school, the executives of BASIS Schools quickly converted the enterprise into a charter school—free to students, but not to the general public, who must foot the bill. This failure of the free market had to be a bitter pill for the BASIS leadership to swallow. The bad taste was surely relieved by the handsome revenues resulting from requiring the state’s taxpayers to purchase the services they offered. It is fair to ask, given the mission of many charter schools, how a student who is at once minority, poor, and needing special services fares in a charter high school. These students have been less studied, and that may be because they are less likely to be admitted to a charter school. Due to the autonomy that charter schools are granted, they influence enrollment through a series of practices, such as placement testing, marketing, specialized curricular emphasis, and geographical site selection, that attract and retain students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. This practice, known as “creaming,” seeks to skim off the highest performing students from traditional public schools. These practices restrict ethnic, social class, and intellectual diversity, and contribute to the resegregation of public schools. There is a tendency to point to academic outliers as evidence that charter schools are working, much the same way someone might tell rags-to-riches stories to convince us that the American dream is alive and well. But for the millions of Americans who have seen their incomes stall or decline in recent decades, the “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” rhetoric does not hold the same promise it once did. Likewise, millions of American parents are not so easily convinced that charter schools are the answer to their concerns about their children’s education. Scholarly research, news reports, and blogs have captured the voices of parents whose experiences with charter schools have left them disappointed, and in some cases angry. When charter schools close, proponents say this is a healthy sign that the free market is working and that the surviving charters must be excellent. “Disruption,” the coming and going of corporations, is believed to help a free market attain efficiency. But disruption in education, meaning the closure of charter or ordinary public schools, is a disaster for children, families, and communities. The 2013 CREDO report notes that 193 charter schools included in the 2009 report had closed by the time data collection began for the new study. For young children, seeking stability is a far better goal than is the pursuit of disruption. Furthermore, genuinely free markets exist only in the fantasies of hide-bound conservative economists, and every consumer knows that just because a company is in business does not mean that it is either a good or an efficient company. In sum, Americans may not really want a free market in education, a market that is as unregulated as a local restaurant. Public utilities (like power and water supplies) and public schools are not restaurants or Silicon Valley start-ups. They should not be “disrupted.” Student success is the result of many influences, but the governing structure of the school is not likely to top the list. There is nothing that inherently makes charter schools better than traditional public schools. Alas, the strongest predictor of students’ success is related to their social circumstances. The social, intellectual, and fiscal resources, or “capital,” students bring with them into schools, whether charter or traditional, are much more important than the structure of the school or even the quality of the teachers (see Myth 9). But even with that noted, the data we have support the statement that traditional public schools do a better job in most instances of educating all students, regardless of their demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds. The myth that charter schools are better than traditional public schools is part of a bigger agenda, best articulated by Ronald Reagan decades ago: “… government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Charter schools may not be the solution to our public school problems either, and in many ways the increased funding for new and new types of (i.e., virtual) charter schools, especially those with unproven records of success, may exacerbate problems with our public schools. Charter schools are the prime example of the “free market myth of education.”Berliner & Glass 14—David C. Berliner, former professor and dean of the Teachers College at Arizona State University, PhD in Educational Psych from Stanford, authored more than 200 articles, books and chapters on education policy, co-editor of the Handbook of Educational Psychology, former president of the American Educational Research Association, member of the National Academy of Education and the International Academy of Education, and Gene V. Glass, former professor in Educational and Policy Studies at Arizona State, senior researcher at the National Education Policy Center and a research professor in the School of Education at University of Colorado Boulder, 2014 (“Chapter 2: Myths and Lies About Who’s Best: Charters, Privates, Maybe Finland?”, 50 Myths and Lies that Threaten America’s Schools: The Real Crisis in Education, Teachers College Press, Kindle Edition) Public charter schools are considered part of a growing national education reform movement based in part on myths and lies about poor school performance and the advantages of competition (see Myth 1). The charter movement took off in 1991, when Minnesota became the first state to pass legislation allowing charter schools to operate. Over the past 20 years, similar laws have been passed across the country; charter schools now operate in 40 states and the District of Columbia, representing approximately 5% of all public schools and enrolling over 1.6 million students nationally (U.S. Department of Education, 2012). More than half of America’s charter schools are elementary schools and more than half are located in cities. In 110 districts, over 10% of the school-age population is enrolled in charter schools, and in seven districts (New Orleans, Detroit, Washington, DC, Kansas City [Missouri], Flint, Gary, and St. Louis), more than 30% of all public school students are enrolled in charter schools (National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 2012). Applying market principles to education, these “schools of choice” claim to give parents more educational options for their children. The competition to enroll students is believed to spur all schools to improve academic outcomes—or so the story goes. Education reformers often tout charter schools as a solution to broken, failing, or incompetent public schools—myths we address elsewhere (see Myths 2 and 3). Free-market advocacy is seen, for example, when the San Antonio– based George W. Brackenridge Foundation advocates for increased charter school funding based on the argument that “billions of philanthropic dollars have disappeared into public school districts with no aggregate impact,” pointing out the “highly bureaucratic and politicized nature of districts run by elected boards” (Michels, 2012). Free markets, apparently, never waste money, or end up bureaucratized. Charter schools create economic and racial segregation.Berliner & Glass 14—David C. Berliner, former professor and dean of the Teachers College at Arizona State University, PhD in Educational Psych from Stanford, authored more than 200 articles, books and chapters on education policy, co-editor of the Handbook of Educational Psychology, former president of the American Educational Research Association, member of the National Academy of Education and the International Academy of Education, and Gene V. Glass, former professor in Educational and Policy Studies at Arizona State, senior researcher at the National Education Policy Center and a research professor in the School of Education at University of Colorado Boulder, 2014 (“Chapter 2: Myths and Lies About Who’s Best: Charters, Privates, Maybe Finland?”, 50 Myths and Lies that Threaten America’s Schools: The Real Crisis in Education, Teachers College Press, Kindle Edition) Overall, charter school students attend more racially and ethnically segregated schools than do students who attend traditional public schools (Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley, & Wang, 2010). Particularly in more affluent communities, charter schools are enrolling primarily White, non-Hispanic children. This has led some charter school critics to regard the charters in such areas as promoters of “White flight” from the traditional public school system. An important reason for this is that in order for a child to attend, a family must learn about the existence of the school, gather information, make a conscious decision to send the child there, and navigate the registration process. Many charter schools also require some type of parental involvement, such as 20 volunteer hours per school year. Researchers have determined that such requirements work to exclude lower income and single-parent families, and then, ironically, the requirement often is not enforced after the child is enrolled. In addition, busing is not provided for most charter schools. Consequently, a natural, but legal, “filtering” function is created that makes charter schools self-selecting and homogeneous in a number of ways (Simon, 2012; Welner, 2013). More-affluent families have the social, cultural, and financial “capital” to send their children to a charter school compared with lower income families, who may not know about the registration deadlines and requirements, the additional financial obligations (e.g., uniforms or textbook purchases), or time commitments (e.g., transportation, volunteering). Supporting the continued existence of charter schools is inextricably capitalistHill 17 (Dave, emeritus professor of research in education at Anglia Ruskin University, visiting professor at the national and Kapodistrian University of Athens, chief editor of Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, co-founder of the Hillcole Group of Radical Left Educators, author of 25 published books and over 100 chapters and academic articles. “The Role of Marxist Educators Against and Within Neoliberal Capitalism”, 1/5/17. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hNd2iWBtUpgJ:insurgentscripts.org/the-role-of-marxist-educators-against-and-within-neoliberal-capitalism/+&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us, 6/20/17)//JM Markets in Education 18. Markets have exacerbated existing inequalities. There is considerable data on how poor schools have, by and large, gotten poorer (in terms of relative education results and in terms of total income) and how rich schools (in the same terms) have got richer. Whitty, Power and Halpin (1998) examined the effects of the introduction of quasi-markets into education systems in USA, Sweden, England and Wales, Australia and New Zealand. Their book is a review of the research evidence. Their conclusion is that one of the results of marketizing education is that increasing 'parental choice' of schools, and/or setting up new types of schools, in effect increases school choice of parents and their children and thereby sets up or exacerbates racialized school hierarchies. 19. In the UK, for example, while in government 1979-1997, the Conservatives established a competitive market for consumers (children and their parents) by setting up new types of schools in addition to the local (state. i.e. public) primary school or the local secondary comprehensive school. Thus introduced new types of school such as City Technology Colleges and Grant Maintained schools, schools which removed themselves from the control of Local Authorities. And to confirm this creation of a 'quasi-' market in school choice, they extended the 'Parental Choice' of schools--letting parents, in effect, apply for any school anywhere in the country. 20. Not only that, but the Conservative governments also stopped redistributive, positive discrimination funding for schools. Decisions about funding were substantially taken out of the hands of the democratically elected local education authorities (LEAs) by the imposition of per capita funding for pupils/school students. So students in poor/disadvantaged areas in an LEA would receive the same per capita funding as 'rich kids'. Furthermore, this funding rose or fell according to intake numbers of pupils/students, itself affected by henceforth compulsorily publicised 'league table' performance according to pupil/student performance at various ages on SATS (Student Assessment Tasks) and 16+ examination results. (This 'equality of treatment' contrasts dramatically with the attempts, prior to the 1988 Education Reform Act, of many LEAs to secure more 'equality of opportunity' by spending more on those with greatest needs--a power partially restored in one of its social democratic polices by the New Labour government following its election in 1997). 21. The result of this 'school choice' is that inequalities between schools have increased because in many cases the 'parental choice' of schools has become the 'school's choice' of the most desirable parents and children--and rejection of others. 'Sink schools' have become more 'sink-like' as more favoured schools have picked the children they think are likely to be 'the cream of the crop'. Where selection exists, the sink schools just sink further and the privileged schools just become more privileged. Teachers in 'sink school' are publicly pilloried, and, under 'New Labour' the schools 'named and shamed' as 'Failing Schools', and, in some cases either re-opened with a new 'Superhead' as a 'Fresh Start School' (with dismissals of 'failing' teachers), or shut down.9 Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.3 Mb. Share with your friends:
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