In a prime example of allowing a fox to guard the hen house, Charlie Baker has hired James Peyser of the Pioneer Institute as the state Secretary of Education. Peyser was the architect in past Republican administrations of both charter schools and the introduction of MCAS testing.
Peyser noted that he was excited to take on the challenge of “producing more great schools throughout the commonwealth, expanding and strengthening career-technical education programs, developing new partnerships with local school districts and communities, and making higher education more affordable and responsive to the needs of our diverse regions”.
I suspect that the “production” of more great schools is going to involve closing public schools and opening more charter schools.
Of course Baker would retaliate.
Had the MTA sat this out, Baker would hire this guy. Insofar as Baker has a discernible policy prescription on education, it’s privatization.
It was nice of Charlie to bury this announcement while everyone is focused on the holidays too. No one is paying attention to it. That is telling.
…though even then I’m generally inclined to let executives have their people. Personally I think departments should be headed by those who believe in the mission of the department.
in the Governor’s Council. LOL
I’m sure you disagree since you seem to have a personal beef with that body, but we should restore that IMO.
🙂
I’ll just resort to a Westminster debate tactic and say that on the matter of the Governor’s Council I refer my honourable friend to the comments I have made previously:)
And didn’t Deval appoint charter people for all of his ed reform goals?
I dislike that this guy is in the revolving door between Pioneer and government that Weld-Cellucci-Romney-Baker has followed, but we certainly should respond by cleaning house on our own side. Deval loved charters, so does the President, and we have to change that narrative.
My own kid went to a charter 20 years ago, and they provide excellent education.
The problem that I have with charter schools is that they help a few people at the expense of the many. And not only do they do this, but they pretend that they do it with the same constraints as public schools. They also tout their successes while ignoring their failed brethren.
Look at the numbers of the top charter school in Springfield. They have a 50% poverty rate, a 2.3% limited English rate, and a 97% “stable student” rate (meaning they don’t have kids coming and going all year). Compare to a typical Springfield school with a 90% poverty rate, a 25% ELL rate, and a 75% stable student rate.
Charters have an application process which screens out the most unresponsive of parents, and they have more ability to eject kids that don’t follow their rules.
And they do this while funneling public money back to their operators, either directly by being for-profit (in other states), or indirectly via “intellectual property” agreements.
Charter schools then say “See! We’re doing better! Public schools suck, create more of us instead!”
The end result is that the schools they pull students from become worse and worse, and problems in them grow exponentially.
Yes, for some parents who are able to surf that wave, charters work well. For most people in a district, they do not, nor can they.
They should be evaluated on a case by case basis. Yours worked, many are doing worse than public schools and are not getting the same regulations and oversight to meet he same standards. Many are operating like Medicare Part D or privatized prisons where costs are going up while quality is going down (since it’s for profit now and that’s how you maximize profits).
I think they are useful as stop gaps and to fill in the margins with specialized focal points like Harlem Children’s Zone, Urban Prep, or the boarding approach in DC. Christo Rey could easily be secularized as a charter model as well. These would be niche schools serving particularly classes of students.
But more broadly we need to fully find our existing public schools and get the resources there that are needed and have the teachers really dictate what reforms work and what reforms muck up their lesson planning. We gotta strop teaching to the test and start eliminating the middle men that muck up the process.
But advocates overrate their efficacy, underrate unionized teachers and their abilities, and purpose it as a panacea solution for all of education when it’s really a niche tool to be used to fill in certain gaps that should have to meet the same standards and rigor applied to traditional public schools.
I went to public schools through senior year and turned out just fine too. CRLS frankly gave me a better global and multicultural education than U Chicago.
The other thing that I see with charter schools is that they are a convenient way to make things appear better when they really are not. Picture that you are in charge of a school with 20 classrooms. Kids are evenly distributed, and the average grade in each classroom is a 59 – an F. That means you have 20 failing classrooms.
You come up with a brilliant idea. By looking at the numbers, you realize that by shuffling kids around a bit, you can manufacture 1 classroom with an A average; 3 classrooms with a B average, 4 classrooms with a C average, 5 with a D average, and 7 classrooms which score in the 40% range – still an F. You magically transformed your classrooms from 20 failures into 7 failures and 13 successes. You give yourself a bonus for your efforts.
Of course, the classrooms that are in the 40% range drop even further because instead of having a mix of manageable students in them, they are now so abysmal that they are beyond help. The students now get a 10%. Doesn’t matter to you though; they still count as an F whether they get a 59% or a 10%.
That is what we are doing with charter schools, and with our schools in general in this state. We have sliced and diced our students into tranches the way that the Wall Street financial whizzes manipulated subprime mortgages. We then take the students that need the most help and label them as “beyond help”.
Charter schools are a really insidious vehicle; they appear to be a tool of good because they do help some kids, but they indirectly hurt a lot more – the kids that are left behind. If you take them to their logical conclusion, they completely dismantle public education and turn it into a vehicle which is funded by tax dollars, but has no local oversight or control. The path is insidious too – you keep skimming off the good kids from the district, the remainder of the district gets worse and worse, and that gives you impetus to keep creating more and more charters. The charters ultimately get worse and worse, but much more slowly, and when compared to the “left behinds” they look like a raging success.
Since these schools are private schools, they have a great deal of latitude to shape their student bodies. The schools then become just like a marketplace of insurance companies, focusing on shifting costs rather than on addressing real problems.
This is a really bad result for an institution that is such a linchpin in our society.
After that magical reshuffling, you then expel the students in the 12 classrooms with a D and F, “right-size” the school by laying off those 12 teachers, increase ROI by selling the existing 20 room building (as luxury condos) and building a lovely new 8 room “Innovation School”.
At the end of the process, you’ve increased profitability, “raised” student performance, eliminated “deadwood” teachers, and reduced operating costs. Thus, the executives and shareholders collect huge performance bonuses.
A genuine GOP success story.
The new outsourced ‘testing industry’ is another.
The ideology element is just the cover story for the ‘base’. The real game is identifying ways to grift.
That is probably the formula for the Nice Polite Republicans that gull the yuppies into voting for them in these parts.
Screeching Tea Bags are probably unelectable here but a bit of smiling stealth and the right nudges and winks for the DeLeo wing makes the whole thing work out fine.
As has been observed elsewhere, the charter school movement has long ago been hijacked by racist elements of the GOP to advance their racist “Voucher” programs. The goal is to subvert the decades-long effort to eliminate segregated schools.
The “charter school” idiom has the same relationship to racism that “Creationism” has to religious extremists who reject evolution. Each is a euphemistic disguise for the real agenda.
It’s like the corporate weasels con the bigots into agitating to make these things so the trough feeding can get underway with smug smiles all around.
It is done with dog whistles, of course.
What I find strange is the lack of effort to orient the young to watershed changes in modes of learning that are washing away many schoolhouse functions while suggesting potential for new ones.
I could envision a renewed need to help people attain critical reasoning skills, cognitive abilities that currently get side tracked in the screen staring modality we have and to ensure a capacity for analysis.
It’s as if the core fundamentals of learning how to learn become what is taught and the past assumptions as to what curriculum should be could be adjusted to reflect these needs and potentials.
I haven’t noticed if the charter shills address any of that stuff as it might give them a competitive advantage in that market thing they so love.
If they show no evidence of this sort of forward thinking philosophical bent, it’s a good bet they’re just fishing for the corporate welfare angle and inventing new classes of service sector work they can undercut.
In fact, they often try to sell it as a way for non-white urban families to escape failing public systems and I have seen polls suggesting that these programs enjoy quite a bit of support among such families.
Any thoughts on why?
Data? Is there data?
I’m mainly working with a general trend of outsourcing I’ve seen.
And I have a suspicion that it may not be monolithic. I wonder what kind of variations of type and design are out there.
What are the differences among various kinds of schools and the premises that inform them?
What were the alternatives available to these people?
And what do they do to address the bald fact that a knowledge motivated person at nearly any level can learn about anything anywhere?
What if the task is becoming a kind of guided social forum about learning how to learn and instilling a general value for lifelong learning?
The real power in this state is the Commissioner of Education, who is elected by the Board of Education (made up of gubernatorial appointees with fixed-year terms). It is true that Deval kept on Mitt Romney’s Commissioner of Education, Mitchell Chester. If there is one person I could replace in state government, in any office, it would be him. Chester long ago decided he knew everything, and has lost his ability to learn or listen. Massachusetts achieves greatness in education despite, not because of, this guy.
That’s my policy. We let soldiers tell policy makers what they need, diplomats determine how the DoS operates, and cops for better or for worse determine what equipment and oversight they need. The only public sector profession where we place the onus on change on the individual employee is teaching. The only one where outside experts without direct experience must be brought in to show the employees how rondo the job they have experience and training for. The only cabinet department at the municipal, state, and federal levels routinely filled with ideologues, cronies, socialites, or investment bankers. The only government service we entrust to MBAs.
It’s really time to change that culture and treat teachers the way we treat soldiers and cops regarding what resources and protections they need. They are on the front line of the battle that most determines our future.
… because the charter school movement in the US started for just this very reason. The idea was to give teachers, whom you correctly identify as having the temperament, training and experience to do the job better than any others, more autonomy.
Somewhere along the way the charter movement split from the teachers union and the rift has left both public school teachers unions and charter schools retreating into separate antagonisms and antipathies… where they are, separately, much less impactful than they could be together.
professor and embraced by Albert Shanker, but they never split from teachers unions because they were never implemented by teachers. They were picked up by conservatives in part as a way to replace school vouchers. Many of these conservatives were directly opposed to teacher unions and publicly funded education. Since then, they have become the pet project of dilletantes and the business elite, which have advanced non-charter policies that directly undermine the autonomy of teachers.
As a whole, charters offer very little other than a non-public school education. They are less accountable to parents, democratically speaking. Their innovations seem to be no excuses discipline, high attrition rates, fewer ESL students, fewer SPED kids, and falsely inflated waiting lists.
There are charter schools that offer educations not available in public schools, Chinese language immersion, performing arts. And some schools that have operated for a very long time. If we were really interested in what charter schools had to offer, we’d stop or slow their proliferation and allow those that exist the opportunity to do what public schools have been doing for over 100 years. After another decade or two, we might actually learn some lessons from charters. As they are now, few have been around more than 15 years.
… would the teachers have leave to ‘implement’ anything?
Pardon me if the meaning was unclear, but I was pointing out that the charter school movement was implemented ‘for’ the teachers and not ‘by’ the teachers: meaning that it was directly, distinctly and unequivocally intended to do one thing; free up the teachers. As such, it was supported, in as much as our adversarial labor relations allows ‘support’, by the teachers but not, again insofar as our system of labor relations allows, not ‘implemented’ by the teachers. I was at pains to point out that this is clearly different from the present situation wherein the relations can, clearly, be called, at best, unsupportive and, at worst, ‘spiteful’ and ‘vituperative’ (on both sides).
I don’t know from “accountable to parents.” I”m already trusting my kids to the teachers. I’d rather not, also, have some hard-hitting dumb-ass who thinks his princess deserves an A in chemistry so she can stay on the cheerleading squad and/or that his lunkhead son should have 15 electives so that he can concentrate (sic) on football put his two cents in… And because I don’t want that, I don’t butt in myself. ‘Accountable to parents” seems to be the most double edged of swords. And because of that double edge, I have much the same outlook on teachers and parents as I do on representative democracy and popular will: there is a time and a place and that time and that place is strictly proscribed.
As for ‘high attrition rates, fewer ESL students” and “fewer SPED kids’, I dropped out of a public high school in 1982 precisely because of a dearth of SPED expertise. The school had no ESL program to speak of at that time either…. You can bet it does both SPED and ESL now. If traditional public schools can bridge that gap than charter public schools can do so also… but most public school systems still don’t track dropout (read: attrition) rates. Nobody, circa 1982, made the claim that because schools at that time couldn’t do SPED and ESL we should give up entirely on public education. You, however, now infer that because charters do poorly with regard to SPED and ESL we should chuck the whole business of charters.
I’m not antagonistic to the notion that the charter movement has been in part co-opted by conservatives seeking to defund public education — and I deplore for-profit schools — but you are to consider why they bothered to attempt to co-opt it in the first place: did they think it was an avenue to conservative victory (doubtful); or did they seek to stymie the power and the victory of the teachers unions themselves?
So… co-opt it back… I repeat: charters won’t reach their full potential until they can draw freely and openly from the pool of experts available — that is to say, from the teachers unions; and the teachers unions, likewise, won’t move forward until they can be free’d of the constraints imposed by law — as originally envisioned for charters.
How to do that? I don’t know. Tweak the law to give the teachers unions a veto on charter schools… I would totally support that. Or require some significant percentage of teachers to be union teachers and certified… Or some combination of incentives and punishment for excluding union teachers… . But get the experts in the teachers union and the charter schools together and the results, I’m certain, will be unavoidably awesome.
both wanted to see teachers running charter schools. Not having schools run for them.
The charter school idea was indeed co-opted by conservatives, but no one is interested in “co-opting them back” as you say. Aside from Albert Shanker, who would have liked to run a lot of things, running charter schools is not on the agenda of teacher unions. Some school systems have, in fact, made some school districts have designated some public schools as charter schools. Referred to as Horace Mann schools, they’ve met with mixed success at best.
I think you’re confusing teacher unions and teachers. Almost all public school teachers belong to unions, but aside from paying dues, their association is very loose. Teacher unions apply political pressure when it comes to opening new charters, but that’s it. They have nothing against charter school teachers, neither do public school teachers. Charters don’t typically attract unionized teachers because they don’t pay well and their working conditions tend to suck. Charters can unionize, but they typically don’t do so because teachers aren’t around long enough to organize. Teachers at a charter school would have to want to organize a union. That takes time and interest from those teachers. Teacher turnover in charter schools is extreme. They’d have to form a local to join the MTA or AFT. I’ve never heard of charters discouraging unionization. It’s possible, but really unnecessary.
Teacher unions may not support charters, but aside from lobbying, which hasn’t been extremely successful, they have no legal or democratic standing to approve anything or way to accomplish that approval. They wouldn’t ask for it nor should they receive it. It would be like giving the Boy Scouts approval over any youth activities starting in a town.
Communities, on the the other hand, would very much like the authority to approve charter schools. They are directly affected by charter schools. Our more liberal legislators would like to see charters funded in a way that doesn’t detract from public school financing, but that’s unlikely to happen.
Charter schools are not operated by democratically elected people. When I say “accountable to parents,” I mean democratically. You can elect your school committee. They can and do set policy and respond to the community. They can choose not rehire superintendents. Charters may have some sort of committee, but they’re more like vendors. If you don’t like what they’re selling, you have to take your business elsewhere.
I’m unclear as to what charter schools have to offer that could lead to something “unavoidably awesome” for education in general. I don’t mean this as a criticism, but what are they offering that hundreds of Massachusetts public schools can’t think of given the resources? And what would be the mechanism for they getting together?
My kid’s charter school is unionized, and the now-principal was a teacher 20 years ago.
Doesn’t pay well? Working conditions suck? I say bunk again. You are repeating things you’ve heard in the echo chamber. Have you had any direct connection with a charter school? I have.
Porcupine, did you read my whole post or just the parts you wanted to argue with. Read what I said, not what you wanted me to say. I said I wasn’t aware of any unionized charters, not that there weren’t any. Charter schools in Massachusetts had just gotten started 20 years ago. Have salaries kept up? Have things changed? What percentage of charter schools are unionized? Direct connections? Working conditions and pay, yeah, I’ve hired people from charter schools and had and have friends working for them. Their salaries were and are a joke. No, they weren’t unionized. Could they have unionized? Yep. Was it up to them to do so yep?
Have individual teachers started charter schools? Surely. Do teachers as a group–which I think was what Petr was referring to–start charter schools? Not typically.
So your kid went to Sturgis 20 years ago and that somehow makes you an expert? Motivated reasoning and dated anecdotal evidence don’t make it so. Bunk indeed.
Yes, I did read your whole post. You thought to make sweeping statements. Many were inaccurate repetition of preconceived ideas. For example:
‘Charters may have some sort of committee…” I’ve sat on one, and if anything, it has MORE authority than an elected school committee.
The same school committees and local unions will ALWAYS seek to keep charter schools from opening. Charters were CREATED in response to moribund and unresponsive school systems. They sure ARE directly affected by charters – and it makes them have to be better for kids who now have a non-parochial/private education alternative.
I already mentioned your unsupported assertion about working conditions and pay, and tried to speak to your assertion about extreme turnover by pointing out that a teacher was now a principal after 20 years – but I also call out your assertion that charter teachers don’t ‘care enough’ about students to bother to organize.
I ask again if you have ever had any direct contact with a charter. If you did, you might know that Sturgis is less than 10 years old, so nobody could attend it 20 years ago – just another assumption on your part.
Porcupine, you take me to task for things I didn’t say and for not claiming knowledge of things I don’t claim to have knowledge of, i.e. ‘Charters may have some sort of committee…” Yep, I don’t have direct knowledge of that. I only have a passing knowledge of that. Note the use of the subjunctive. Also note the main idea of my paragraph: the committee isn’t accountable to voters. I didn’t say anything about authority. Those are your words. Don’t put them in my mouth, thanks.
Charter teachers not unionizing because they don’t care about kids? Where did that come from? Not me. I said they’d have to want a union and organize it. The MTA doesn’t come in and try to get them to unionize.
Direct contact with a charter? Nope. I haven’t worked with one. My kids don’t go to one. You were involved in one 20 years ago, so you’re an expert. I, therefore, must defer to you?
Salaries? You can do the research if you like. I won’t bother what my cursory investigation showed, since I never worked for a charter and thus have no standing in this discussion. In closing, your comments are so lacking in intellectual honesty I have no interest in carrying on this conversation.
… As much as I rail against the adversarial labor relations in this country, it’s not so bad that teachers can’t become administrators and, indeed, many — if not most– have done exactly that…
… I don’t think you understand the term ‘charter’. It is a legal term for pre-defining privileges and responsibilities for a specified term. If any given school committee doesn’t feel comfortable with any pre-defined rights and expectations, then they should absolutely not implement the charter. Re-negotiate it or ask the organization to take their business elsewhere. That’s the democracy you want. School committees may have chosen to do this on an ongoing basis for traditional public schools but that’s not a de facto exclusion of any other modus operandi..
As well, at least for Boston, the “democratically elected school committee” you wish to see in place doesn’t exist. The 7 member school committee is appointed by the mayor from a list presented by a 13 member ‘citizens nominating committee’ who are not, themselves, elected. So, there’s that. In New York, I’m given to understand, the mayor has near absolute control over education policy and the appointment of superintendents.
You are a teacher, are you not? Are there some things that you would like to do, but cannot do, because of the constraints of public schools law? Are there some things that you would like to not do, but must do, again because of the constraints of public school law? As far as I can tell, those are the only questions that charter schools were originally intended to answer. Yeah, maybe the intent got sidetracked because conservatives hate both public education and unions of any kind… But, while I hate artichokes, I don’t use that as an excuse to never eat any vegetables of any kind…
I think the other promise of charter schools, most especially with involvement from public school teachers, is a virtuous cycle whereby experience and acumen travel back and forth between charters and traditional schools. In the longest of runs, charter schools and traditional public schools come to resemble each other more and more as they get better and better.
It may be true that charter schools were originally intended to be a laboratory for innovation that could not happen in a public school. That is no longer their purpose. They are now being eyed to supplant public schools.
When one or two charter schools existed in a district, no one really cared that much. I’ll use Springfield as an example – 9.3% of Springfield’s students are now in charter schools – and people want that number to go even higher. Remember, those 2,600 students are from parents who sought out the charter schools, who applied to them, and who are very likely among the most committed to education in the city. As they were skimmed off the top of the public schools, the public schools lost more than dollars. They lost top students.
The charter schools are also not sharing their “best practices” with the public schools. I have never heard of any practices moving back and forth between the schools, and in fact, I hear more about the charter schools’ “intellectual property” that they buy from their parent for-profit organizations.
First, and again, charter schools are public schools. Second, by sheer weight of numbers — teachers, administrators and students– and the investments made therein, public schools are never going to be supplanted by anything. Never. It is simply a complete and utter impossibility. Social security is never going to be privatized and the public school system isn’t either.
This is true. My point wasn’t about what is, but about what could be. If the teachers unions and the charter schools could get their respective acts together, both would share –each with the other– their best practices. That they don’t is not, wholly, a failure of charter schools.
I think charter schools are a good idea which, at present, is poorly implemented in the exact same way that democracy itself is, at present, a good idea poorly implemented. As I would not chuck democracy for the imperfections of its adherents, I would not do away with charters. There are many reasons for the poor implementation of charter schools, not least of which is political cowardice and inertia on the part of public school teacher.
http://educationnext.org/no-al-shanker-did-not-invent-the-charter-school/
soon enough though, but he began as a proponent and the AFT hasn’t completely forgotten the idea:
is the state not properly funding the public universities.
A friend of mine who is a professor in a state university said that under Republican governors, contracts would be negotiated, including things like modest raises, and then the State would have no funding for the raises.