Education reform’s devious blame game: The charter school movement doesn’t want you to know it’s failing
Insiders finger Wall Street for misspent funds and schools' poor performance. It's all part of a new PR strategy
Charter schools, which have been criticized for grabbing billions in taxpayer dollars with promises to reinvent public education using corporate efficiencies and values, are finding themselves under fire from industry insiders who are saying that these hyped market-based reforms don’t work.
The criticism comes in the wake of scandals by some of the sector’s biggest for-profit players that have given the industry a bad name. But the remarks appear to reflect a new public relations and lobbying strategy, where allies of non-profit charter operators are blaming their for-profit brethren as a way to duck political fallout, avoid scrutiny for many of the same practices and to boost their market niche.
“National for-profit charter school operators have increasingly been in the press lately and not for good reasons,” begins a January column by lobbyist-consultant Alex Medler on EducationPost.org. “Based on how often for-profit operators embarrass the charter sector, many are willing to say it’s time to ban them.”
Medler is not merely referring to investigative reports in 2015 that found hundreds of millions of dollars was misspent or missing. Nor is he referring to studies that show online charter school—the industry’s fastest-growing sector—are dogged by dropouts, poor academics and last fall’s stock price collapse of K12 Inc., the nation’s largest online charter operator. It has approximately 90,000 students enrolled in entirely Internet-delivered instruction in more than 20 states.
He is referring to all those threads and a more basic one: “hubris” that the marketplace and all its vaunted know-how could fundamentally transform public schools and improve learning.
“For-profits mistakenly assumed that inefficiency leads to bad schools,” he wrote. “They thought national scale and business savvy would allow them to outperform the competition. Chalk it up to outsiders’ hubris, but any school leader will tell you that running good schools is much more complicated than getting operations to fit together efficiently.” Medler added that state and local laws governing how public schools are to be run also confounded these would-be reformers. “Both the profit and quality quickly evaded most of them.”
Not News To Longtime Charter Critics
These comments are not coming from longtime charter foes like advocates for traditional public schools, but from an industry lobbyist-consultant. But Medler, who goes on to argue that non-profit charter schools are a healthier breed—his field’s new talking point—is not alone in revealing deep doubts about the charter school industry.
In an USnews.com commentary, charter consultant Andrew Rotherman noted that taking charter-related companies public—by selling stock—frequently yields bad outcomes. He cited Amplify, an education technology firm that was resold to private investors by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. “The company grew too fast,” he said and then floundered under “constant pressure of stock prices, earnings expectations and the short-term thinking plaguing public companies right now.”
James Merriman, the CEO of the New York City Charter School Center, added his voice to the naysayer chorus when he last month told Slate.com, “You can’t make a profit and get good results… any dollar converted [to profits] from being used inefficiently in an inner-city charter school is needed in the school.”
These statements by industry insiders about how free market tenets have not transformed public schools as promised are a notable crack in the propaganda armor surrounding the charter movement. But they also reflect a shrewd political move, where more enduring charter operators—who increasingly seem to be set up as non-profit businesses—are trying to uncouple themselves from their for-profit brethren in the public’s and lawmaker’s eyes.
“Yes, there is a recent trend with representatives from the charter school establishment openly criticizing the for-profits or even suggesting or implying that the for-profit companies like K12 Inc. should be covered under separate legislation (i.e., do not call them charter schools thus allowing remaining charters to distance themselves from the damaging news about online charters that continues to pop up across the country,” wrote Gary Miron, a professor of Evaluation, Measurement and Research at Western Michigan University’s College of Education and Human Development, in an e-mail to AlterNet. “In addition to the link you shared from Alex Education reform’s devious blame game: The charter school movement doesn’t want you to know it’s failing - Salon.com: