In “The Nation” Noguera and Ravitch Demand Support for Public Schools and Tough Regulation of Charters
Pedro Noguera’s pithy and hard-hitting piece, Why Don’t We Have Real Data on Charter Schools? was just posted on the website of The Nation as part of an October 13 special edition of the magazine that will explore issues in education. Noguera is the New York University sociologist who has written extensively on the challenges for public schools in our nation’s big cities. Examining the discrepancy between what it used to be imagined that charter schools would become and today’s reality, Noguera concludes: “Charters were supposed to be laboratories for innovation Instead, they are stunningly opaque… In several cities throughout the country, there is a fierce conflict raging over the direction of education reform. At the center of this increasingly acrimonious debate is the question of whether or not charter schools—publicly funded schools that operate outside the rules (and often the control) of traditional public-school systems—should be allowed to proliferate.”
Noting that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan continues to say—without doing anything about it— “we ‘need to be willing to hold low-performing charters accountable,'” Noguera charges: “The problem here is that charter schools are frequently not accountable… To begin with, unlike public schools, which are required by law to show how they use public resources, most charters lack financial transparency… Transparency is especially important with for-profit charter schools to prevent fraud and the misuse of public funds. The Pennsylvania auditor general found that the state’s largest charter operator had pocketed $1.2 million in ‘improper lease-reimbursement payments.’… In New York City, Eva Moskowitz has emerged as a national spokeswoman for the charter movement; she makes over $500,000 a year—more than double what the city’s public-schools chancellor makes, even though Moskowitz is responsible for only a fraction of the number of students.”
Noguera explains that while charter schools pretend to accomplish better test results for the same kind of students, charters serve fewer students with severe disabilities, fewer extremely poor children, fewer English language learners, and fewer students with severe behavioral problems. His depiction of the danger of such disparities is blunt: “When this occurs, local pubic schools end up enrolling a disproportionate number of ‘high-need’ children—and not surprisingly, their performance statistics decline… If charter schools are going to serve as models of innovation, they should be required to operate on a level playing field and adopt clear guidelines concerning the rights of students and parents.”
The Nation‘s education issue also features a piece by education historian Diane Ravitch on Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter network in New York City: The Secret to Eva Moskowitz’s ‘Success.’ Ravitch explains that Moskowitz serves many fewer homeless students than the New York City Public Schools; no students with severe disabilities while severely disabled students make up 14.1 percent of the student population in Harlem’s public elementary schools; and half as many English language learners as neighboring public schools. According to Ravitch, Moskowitz also refuses to replace any students who drop out: “The only Success Academy school that offers grades three through eight (the testing grades) tested 116 third graders but only thirty-two eighth graders… Why the shrinking student In “The Nation” Noguera and Ravitch Demand Support for Public Schools and Tough Regulation of Charters | janresseger: