We’re a bunch of happy lefties, so of course we spend lots of time listening to public radio. Chances are the frequent guilt-inducing pledge drives are also leading us to contribute generously to our friendly local public radio station.
It’s also nice to have some underwriters helping with the mission. Or is it?
Lately, those little underwriting statements have been giving me a bit of indigestion. Instead of those friendly little messages from a local business or an altruistic contributor, there have been some messages that seem to be doing a bit of advocacy.
The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundaton has been on the air promoting its commitment to “developing teachers who help students achieve at our public charter school in Kansas City, Missouri.”
That’s nothing compared to the frequent underwriting statements from the Walton Family Foundation promoting quality school choice.
Even more troubling, it seems to be influencing the editorial content of WBUR. Start with the Boston Globe’s prominent Sunday story lamenting the loss of momentum for legislation to further expand charter schools.
State lawmakers originally planned to unveil a bill to increase the number of charter schools in Boston and other cities last fall, but five months later they have yet to produce any legislation, with time running out on the legislative calendar.
One of the key lawmakers reluctant to move forward with the bill is Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz of Boston, co-chairwoman of the Education Committee, who is concerned that allowing more charter schools could drain resources from traditional public schools, some of which have been forced to make cuts this year.
Sunday evening, the internets were full of emailed cries from Marc Kenen, executive director of the Massachusetts Charter School Association, citing the Globe in its campaign to flood Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz with emails.
Charter cap lift BLOCKED by Boston Senator – EMAIL HER NOW!
The Sunday Boston Globe in their lead Metro article cites State Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz from Boston as the key block to lifting the charter school cap. The full article is below.
Senator Chang-Diaz is using her position as Co-Chair of the Legislature’s Joint K-12 Education Committee to block the bill!If you sent an email to Sen. Chang-Diaz earlier this week, thank you!
If not, the Charter School movement urgently needs you to take 2 minutes and send an email to Senator Chang-Diaz RIGHT NOW!
Please tell her in your own words what your charter school has meant to your children and ask her to please support the bill.
She holds an important position that impacts children all across the state, so we want her to hear from people in every corner of the Commonwealth, urging her to Lift the Cap!
You can send her an email by clicking here: Take action now – Or you can call her at 617-722-1673
Thank you!
Marc Kenen, Executive Director
It seems the charter folks have been working on flooding Senator Chang-Diaz for the better part of the previous week, and the Globe article was in harmony with this campaign.
But that’s not all. WBUR jumped on the bandwagon, with an aggressive interview by Bob Oakes, pusing the senator on her intent to move legislation forward.
Legislation that would raise the number of charter schools allowed in Boston and other Massachusetts school districts is stalling on Beacon Hill.
The charter school cap was a major issue in the Boston mayor’s race, but now, as lawmakers face a deadline next week, it appears unlikely a bill will make it to the full Legislature for a vote.
Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz of Boston, co-chairwoman of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Education, joined WBUR’s Morning Edition to discuss the charter school issue.
But that’s not all. WBUR was back on the air Wednesday, this time with chief charter school senate advocate Barry FInegold.
Charter school advocates are calling on lawmakers to finalize a bill that would raise the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts.
A coalition backing the bill called on the Education Committee on Wednesday to release the bill before a legislative deadline next week.
State Sen. Barry Finegold, who sponsored the bill, says more charter schools would be part of improving education across the board.
“At the end of the day, I don’t think parents really care whether you call the school a district school or a charter school,” Finegold said. “What we really want to try to do is give any child the opportunity to get the best education possible.”
Charter schools are public schools that operate independently from local school districts. Advocates say charter school students consistently outperform academically their counterparts in traditional public schools.
Critics say charters drain financial resources from other schools.
The push on Beacon Hill came on the same day a lottery was being held for more than 13,000 Boston students seeking spots in charter schools. Only 2,000 will be selected.
The legislation would also give state education officials more flexibility to intervene in low-performing schools.
Oh. Nice to note that critics say charters drain financial resources from other schools. Fair and balanced, kind of like Fox News.
As a frequent donor to WBUR, I might also conclude that advocacy for charters could drain financial resources from WBUR.
They have already lost one contributor, me! It was during the last pledge drive. I was driving on 95 in rush hour and almost got in an accident when I heard the Walton Family Foundation Ad on public radio! Accepting money from the WALTON FAMILY FOUNDATION! What were they thinking! I still see purple when I think about it! Now, I’ve contributed automatically to public radio for years, but after hearing that I couldn’t get on the computer fast enough to cancel.
…aren’t you making NPR even more dependent on those foundations?
Its the disappointment. I “loved” and “respected” NPR! It’s like finding out the sweetheart you supported for years has decided to cast all feeling and beliefs aside and is now dating a Walton! -Needless to say, I’ve got to get a life! 🙂
The news coverage is very good and deep and uncolored except for the continued insistance of defining of charter schopl movement as “education reform”. At least Paul Grogan at the Boston Foundation has been open and honest about his belief thay teachers unions must be disempowered on the alter of privitized “public” education. Maybe like Foundations are privitizing “public radio”…or at least trying to.
peace
I remember thinking, back in the 90s, that NPR had fallen prey to affluent neoliberal thinking and I disagreed with at least a third of what I heard.
If we truly want to be educated about various ideas we can’t get upset or dissolutioned because a third of what we hear isn’t what we expected to hear or already agree with. That’s not very intellectually challenging, is it?
I was just responding to pablo’s surprise at hearing neoliberal conventional wisdom on WBUR.
they shouldn’t be coloring *any* of this BS.
It’s not like he was talking about an interesting columnist, or something. There is a flaw at the network and the network is owned by the public.
It’s a legit beef — and people should be upset about it.
…or providing false balance on something like global warming? That’s not what it sounded like Fenway49 was talking about.
Providing false balance on global warming may be far more egregious, but it’s still lousy when a media outlet skews its presentation of “facts” or engages in false-equivalency he said-she said journalism. And I think they’ve done that plenty. Take Pablo’s example: As Ryan points out, it’s disingenuous to say “Advocates say charter school students consistently outperform academically their counterparts in traditional public schools” when the research shows a very different picture.
And there’s no question they harass politicians, like Sen. Chang-Diaz, who don’t get in line with their preferred agenda. Do they think they know more about what students in Roxbury need than Sonia Chang-Diaz?
In Europe they generally eschew the very idea of “objective” journalism which Americans hold up as the standard. It’s generally considered impossible for an organization run and staffed by human beings truly to be objective. Thus you have right-leaning papers and left-leaning papers and everyone knows their angle. Many news outlets here (particularly on the right, which is not shy about it) can be categorized as well.
NPR is an odd case in that it’s clearly not Tea Party knuckle-dragging and “of” the right, but there’s a definite smug neoliberalism that works against progressive values on issues like this. It’s certainly not a place where things like single payer or reviving unions get much play. They were big on NAFTA, and more recently pushing the “deficit reduction” drumbeat even though it was (and is) the exact wrong thing for us to be doing from a macroecnomic standpoint.
of Very Serious People and Villager thinking. Maura Liaison is one of the bigger offenders when it comes to passing along unsourced and uncited bullshit about the economy.
My theory: most people have a point at which they stop questioning and start presuming. For NPR, that point is Washington, DC wisdom.
You made my point in one concise sentence.
The advocates are *wrong.* Studies have repeatedly been done and charters simply don’t perform any better than traditional public schools in the aggregate. There are a few great charters that benefit from nearly unlimited resources compared to traditional schools, but there are many, many more under-performing charters. The net result is charters perform no better and actually perform worse in many of the studies.
While the “advocates” are wrong, the critics are right. Charter schools *do* starve traditional public schools of resources. That is not in doubt, and it shouldn’t be stated in a way that could presume doubt — “critics say.” It is simply a *fact* that they starve resources, taking money away from districts and giving it to a small group of board members to play with on the off chance they don’t screw the whole thing up. School districts get no say in the matter.
Last year’s headlines represent it perfectly. Didn’t we all read that charter high schools in Boston do much better than traditional public schools in terms of graduation rates? I mean, a little better. I mean, a little better if you’re talking about 6-year graduation rates instead of 4-year rates. I mean, if you count kids who graduate from a traditional public school under the charter school they attended for half of 9th grade. So yeah, like I said, charter high schools in Boston do much better than traditional public schools in terms of graduation rates.
More and more, I’m really skeptical of charter schools, but there are good arguments for them. It’s possible that those who feel strongly against them hear more bias in the reports than there really is.
At minimum, I see no conflict with WBUR being supported by the Ewing Marion Kaufmann Foundation. It’s not like they’re building war machines.
I have a friend who loves to point out that Solyndra was founded by Obama donors — as if it’s any sort of surprise that people who want green energy are Democrats.
arguments for charters with the exception of 1) getting your kids out of tough public schools 2) getting your kids into a truly different experience like immersion in the Chinese languages or the performing arts. Every other argument is refuted rhetorical dung.
Innovation? Yeah, no excuses discipline. A kid doesn’t tuck in his shirt, suspend him. Extend the school day. Skill and drill on test prep. Lose 50% of a graduate class by senior year. Don’t enroll kids with serious learning disabilities.
We should have a 5-year moratorium on charter schools and a serious discussion on the need for them.
Mark, I was speaking to my teacher friend again about her “problem student”. To recap, she has a student who has serious behavioral issues. I think he is 3rd grade. Outbursts in class, taunting other students, runs out of the room at will, and just generally disruptive. She said she spent more than half her class time trying to settle this kid.
She was successful, after several months, in getting this student out of her classroom, but the student was just moved to another classroom in her school (though I think it is not quite a regular classroom). She tells me that she is still frequently asked to stop teaching in her classroom to come into the hall to try and calm this kid down because she is the best at it.
I asked her if this was an exceptional case, and she said that no, both in her school and all across the city, there are many kids like this in most classrooms. I asked her why they don’t remove these kids from the schools, put them in alternative schools, whatever, and she said that she wasn’t sure, she thought it was state policy that you have to progress the student through various levels before you can get the child removed.
Now obviously this child has an actual problem, and in 3rd grade, he can’t be exactly blamed, so you hate to give up on someone so early, but I would classify this as an absolute horrific situation for the rest of those students in the class and school, one which I would personally not be tolerating.
I doubt that a charter school would have to tolerate a student like this, so that is a major advantage for charter schools. I suspect that this behavior is correlated with poverty, so this doesn’t seem to be an issue in most wealthier public schools – maybe they have one kid every so often, and it sounds like the parent of such a kid may get advised to go to an urban school where they are more experienced in handling this.
Is there any attention being paid to this kind of thing in the state? Is there data available, research, people looking at this?
teachers, but I don’t know much about research on such disruptions. I have heard from Springfield teachers that they are not allowed to touch students who get out of control. If a kid refuses to cooperate, they have to call an administrator.
My sister teaches kindergarten in Granby, and she has had these kind of kids. Many kids on the autism spectrum–kids with Pervasive Developmental Disorder, for example–are extremely disruptive in the early grades because they aren’t developmentally ready for a regular classroom. I know of one student (not my sister’s) who regularly hits his teacher. I expect these kids exist in East Longmeadow and Longmeadow as well.
The significant differences are indeed money and parents who advocate for their children. Many of these kids should be in self-contained classrooms, be assigned one-on-one aides, or sent to completely alternative schools. But all of these options cost money. Special schools can cost from $60,000-$100,000 a year. A one-on-one aide is probably half the price. Self-contained classrooms can only accommodate so many kids before you need another classroom, another teacher, and more aides. Education is expensive, and the Commonwealth has decided not to pay what is needed to educate these kids. This isn’t a new problem. My mom’s been retired for 15 years and she had kids like these.
Special education kids also have rights to be in “the least restrictive” educational environment; regular education kids have a right to an education.
There are in the town I work in. Regardless of the backstory, I think a consistently disruptive kid needs to be removed when it effects the learning of others.
I would be interested in numbers, if only to dispel or prove the conventional wisdom. I don’t have direct experience with either urban or suburban public schools, but the conventional wisdom (backed by anecdotes told to me by urban district teachers) is that urban schools have significant populations of disruptive students, and that a significant amount of time is spent by teachers and aides dealing with them. The conventional wisdom (not backed by anecdotes, but backed by lack of horror stories told by suburban friends) is that such kids really aren’t prevalent in suburban districts.
My friend told me that if the parent agrees to move the child to a special school, it happens relatively quickly, but if the parent ignores the situation, or disputes it, the school has to go through a long and rigorous process. Maybe that’s the difference – a wealthier parent, knowing their child needs help, wants to help them because they know they can step in and support them later on in life; a poorer parent may not want to label their child as special needs because they know how hard that label will be to overcome, and they have no ability to step in.
I also don’t doubt that a significant number of parents in urban districts don’t care about their children that much due to being consumed with their own demons. Lots of untreated substance abuse issues, lots of drug dealing, arrests, gang issues; I’m pretty sure those parents aren’t helping their kids with their homework each night.
However, I think it would make sense to prevent the disruptive students from affecting the education of everyone else. Again, this is an area where a charter school has the ability to cherry-pick their students.
with this behavior, but it’s unlikely that parents of such children would seek to send their kids to charters. If the parents have a clue, they would keep their kids in public schools where they would get better special education services. If the parents are not clued in, they wouldn’t be likely to send their kids to a charter school.
Moving students to special schools is complicated. If the school is within the district, then it might not be a big deal. If it’s an outside placement like Valley West, the cost is substantial. If the kid needs to live at an outside placement, the cost is astronomical. Springfield probably has its own special schools. I know they have some for high school.
The trend in education these days is to try to keep kids out of special education because it costs more. No administrator will tell you this, but it’s cheaper to keep them in regular ed. Putting kids in special education is much more adversarial these days.
Poverty exacerbates most problems, and I would expect that Springfield has more kids with these kinds of problems. Granby is a working class community and people move here from Chicopee and Springfield. Some people choice their kids in.
There’s an East Longmeadow urban legend that Springfield people with special education kids move to East Longmeadow because of its special education services. We do well by our students, but this is a malicious myth. The fact is, people move from Springfield to the suburbs, and although I know people also move to Wilbraham and Longmeadow, I think more might move to EL because it’s less of a socio-economic jump. That has nothing to do with special education, however.
…but they certainly exist in my suburban system. All it takes sometimes is one in any given class, and others often feed off the one. Just the other day as a matter of fact, I was substitute teaching in a 6th grade class. One student was constantly talking out, getting out of his seat and dancing, and showing me no respect. Other kids were giving him the attention he clearly craved, both positive and negative. When I ejected him to the office the class instantly became one of the quietest I have had.
During the Payzant reign in Boston Public, Pia Durkin (now Superintendent in New Bedford) came to Boston Public Schools as Director of Special Ed after “leaving” Rhode Island. Mandated to decrease the SPED population In BPS, Pia made referrals of Special Ed student’s part of the principal’s evaluation and school WSIP (Whole School Improvement Plan). A High SPED referral = bad evaluation! Principals across the city set-up “teams” (gatekeepers) who prescreened any teachers SPED referral! Teachers stopped referring students because they were targeted and told it was their fault a kid wasn’t succeeding. The teacher wasn’t “engaging” the student, and the student wasn’t SPED. It was the birth of “diversify your instruction” and unsupported inclusion in the BPS.
It appears that when Boston Public closed the boys & girl’s reform schools for students with ODD issues, they placed them in LAB (Learning Adaptive Behavior) Clusters around the city. LAB Clusters were supposed to service only ED (emotionally disturbed} kids but hiding the ODD kids in LAB’s amounted to a significant cost saving to the BPS. It seems the State and Feds picked up the cost of services for the ED kids, but not for the ODD kids. The City was supposed to pick the cost to service the ODD’s.
Pia catches wind of this and, overnight, mainstreams the ODD students out of the LAB Clusters and into regular ed population. Teachers were told if a kid was a constant behavior problem it was their fault! I can remember the fights, extortion, drugs, and weapons those “children,” and oftentimes their bad behavior supporting parents, brought to our classrooms. That dysfunction continues in BPS to this day.
I’ve come to find out that school districts, especially large ones like Las Vegas, keep the ED and ODD populations in separate schools because they require different interventions, and the ODD kids often exploit the ED kids. Colleagues of mine working in functional districts were horrified that Boston Public put those two populations all together!
…to “mandate” that SPED numbers be brought down? A public school system in a given community is supposed to serve all students who reside in that community. Some of those students are going to have special needs. If the numbers in one community happen to be on the high side, that is not the fault of any administrator can the administrator cannot and should not be expected to artificially decrease that number. Is the state really going to look at a school system and accuse the school system of doing something wrong because it has “too many” SPED kids? Families with SPED children can’t be forced to move or send the kids to private school; in fact the private schools are the ones under no obligation to provide the necessary extra services.
SPED numbers down in other systems. There doesn’t need to be.
People figure out pretty quickly what’s what without a direct order from above. School systems are cash-strapped and keeping the budget down is paramount. We had a SPED director in Granby who was clearly trying to keep kids out of SPED. She opposed the placement kid who clearly needed a residential placement. Then she had a world of shit drop on her from me, our state senator, state rep, and others. She realized she wasn’t in Lawrence anymore. We may not have money, but we take care of our kids, and our parents know how to advocate for themselves.
If it’s a mandate from the state to provide services the state needs to pony up. I also believe elected school committees should be allowed to raise taxes on their district’s population.
beggars would ride.
The broadcaster’s ties to the nuclear industry and one-sided coverage of energy issues, have led some environmentalists to call NPR “Nuclear Powered Radio.”
there are a number of issues where NPR is just bad at and clearly makes inappropriate assumptions or otherwise colors certain stories in certain ways that simply isn’t good journalism.
Conversations on things like the minimum wage that they’ve had on NPR have caused me to just turn it off… and I can’t remember what the topic was, but there was one day where they were having a fundraising drive a couple months ago and I was about to donate, but then really sloppily covered a story with an angle that made me queasy… and I can say for certain that they lost a donation that day.
I look at the Kauffman and Walton underwriting statements as political advocacy ads, and understated but thematically similar announcement as those 501.C.4 ads from Americans for Prosperity. I wonder if they would accept an underwriting statement from “Blue Mass Group, making Massachusetts a little more liberal every day.” Or, perhaps, they would do an underwriting statement lauding my commitment to improving public education through school committee service.
Now that they are taking a bunch of money and making advocacy underwriting announcements from the charter school industry, the aggressive pro-charter “news” content is most troubling. Is the WBUR newsroom for sale? Has it been bought by Kauffman and Walton?
If WBUR and WGBH play the same program, perhaps I should take my ears and financial contributions down to 89.7.
Do you think WBUR has earned the coveted key ally designation noted by former Education Secretary Paul Reville? As I understand it, there is a rigorous, criteria based application process for those seeking that special status…
When we force NPR to be reliant on private funding, especially in the context of the Citizens United decision, the more we assure that issues like this will take place.