Jeff Bryant: The Democrats’ Dilemma On Charter Schools

The Democrats’ Dilemma On Charter Schools:

The Democrats’ Dilemma On Charter Schools

President Donald Trump’s adamant promotion of “school choice” and his selection of Betsy DeVos for education secretary have put advocates for charter schools in the Democratic party in a bind, and now they’re scrambling to keep the luster of the well-polished charter school brand unblemished.

Their latest tactic is to carefully distinguish charters from the system of school vouchers Trump and DeVos favor, but they serve this cause poorly by making erroneous claims about how the charter industry works in most communities and what these schools do to harm public education.

The latest misfire comes from David Leonhardt’s op-ed in Monday’s New York Times in which he takes on DeVos and her preference for vouchers while denigrating charter skeptics as people who need to get “an open mind.”

It’s a precarious tightrope Leonahrdt attempts to walk, and he stumbles quite badly.

First, A Little Background

First, it’s important to understand the source of the school choice schism in the Democratic party goes back 25 years, Jeffrey Henig explains in Education Week, when proponents of school choice came up with two different ways to achieve their goals: school vouchers and charter schools.

While conservatives favored vouchers, which were a creation of free-market economist Milton Friedman, political centrists and some left-leaning people became infatuated with charters because they were birthed by “business-oriented moderates and technocrats” who became the predominant force in the Democratic party during Bill Clinton’s presidential administration.

Around the turn of the century, these two strains of school choice advocacy united after pro-voucher forces, largely funded by the Walton Family Foundation (of Walmart fame), encountered a series of stinging defeats at the ballot box and a rising tide of anti-voucher sentiment among the general public.

Voucher advocates welcomed their union with charter school fans because it gave their cause a bipartisan aura and some support from the civil rights community. “Charter proponents … welcomed the political and philanthropic support of the pro-voucher forces,” Henig writes, because they needed rightwing leverage and money to undermine opposition coming from teachers’ unions and public school advocates.

For conservatives, the bipartisan unification for school choice established the slippery slope to potentially privatize public education. Moderate and lefty supporters of charter schools, on the other hand, got a Faustian bargain that gave them “education reformer” cred and the favor of Wall Street investors in exchange for colluding with the right wing.

With Trump and DeVos, the bargain Democrats made on charter schools has come due.

What Leonhardt Gets Wrong

So what’s a charter-loving Democrat to do? Based on what Leonhardt writes for the Times, many are choosing to re-up their support with false claims and deceptive rhetoric.

Leonhardt begins his column by calling attention to a new study showing the voucher program in the District of Columbia has had a negative impact on student achievement – a worthwhile news item to note for sure. But it becomes quickly apparent Leonhardt brings the subject up not to lambast DeVos but to miscast charter school skeptics as actors in a “caricature” debate over the fate of public education.

That’s a convenient strawman that leads him to state there are those who “conflate vouchers … with charter schools,” but he cites no credible sources to substantiate his belief that critics of DeVos and school choice are incapable of distinguishing between charters and vouchers.

Most concerning about Leonhardt’s column, though, is the many misleading statements he makes about how charter schools operate and what their impact is.

He cites a few credible studies showing positive impacts of charter schools on student achievement, but he doesn’t appear to have read credible reports that have found otherwise.

For instance, the most rigorous and most expensive study of charter school performance commissioned by the US Department of Education found no overall positive effect for charter schools.

A recent study of charter schools in Texas found charters overall have no positive impact on test scores and have a negative impact on earnings later in life.

So it’s totally misleading for Leonhardt to argue charters have “flourished” (whatever that means) when their track record is decidedlymixed at best.

Leohardt then piles on one misleading statement after another.

His assertion that “charter-school systems are subject to rigorous evaluation and oversight” is counter factual to reports from the charter industry itself that show only about 3 percent of charter schools are closed for under-performing, and even those that are closed have operated an average of 6.2 years.

In Ohio, only one of 10 charter school students attend a school rated high performing.

In Michigan, charter schools score worse on national assessments, known as “The Nation’s Report Card,” than their traditional public-school The Democrats’ Dilemma On Charter Schools:

AFT President: Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump Are Dismantling Public Education | Time.com

Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos Undermine Public Education | Time.com:

AFT President: Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump Are Dismantling Public Education

Donald Trump may say teachers are important, but he spent his first 100 days undermining the schools most educators work in —America’s public schools.

One of President Trump’s first acts was to appoint the most anti-public education person ever to lead the Department of Education. Betsy DeVos has called public schools a “dead end” and bankrolled a private school voucher measure in Michigan that the public defeated by a two-to-one ratio. When that failed, she spent millions electing legislators who then did her bidding slashing public school budgets and spreading unaccountable for-profit charters across the state. The result? Nearly half of Michigan’s charter schools rank in the bottom of U.S. schools, and Michigan dropped from 28th to 41st in reading and from 27th to 42nd in math compared with other states.

Now DeVos is spreading this agenda across the country with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence’s blessing. They’ve proposed a budget that takes a meat cleaver to public education and programs that work for kids and families. After-school and summer programs — gone. Funding for community schools that provide social, emotional, health and academic programs to kids — gone. Investments to keep class sizes low and provide teachers with the training and support they need to improve their craft — gone. Their budget cuts financial aid for low-income college students grappling with student debt at the same time the Trump administration is making it easier for private loan servicers to prey on students and families.

The Trump/DeVos budget funnels more than $1 billion to new voucher and market strategies even though study after study concludes those strategies have hurt kids. Recent studies of voucher programs in Ohio and Washington, D.C., show students in these programs did worse than those in traditional public schools. Further, private voucher schools take money away from neighborhood public schools, lack the same accountability that public schools have, fail to protect kids from discrimination, and increase segregation.

It’s dangerous in education when the facts don’t matter to people. But it doesn’t stop there. Schools must be safe and welcoming places for all children, and that’s a belief shared both by parents who send their kids to voucher schools and those who send their kids to public schools. But Trump and DeVos have acted to undermine the rights of kids who look or feel different, and to cut funding for school health and safety programs.

What Trump and DeVos are doing stands in stark contrast to the bipartisan consensus we reached in 2015 when Congress passed a new education law that shifted the focus from testing back to teaching, pushed decision-making back to states and communities, and continued to invest funds in the schools that need it the most. It offered an opportunity to focus on what we know works best for kids and schools—promoting children’s well-being, engaging in powerful learning, building teacher capacity, and fostering cultures of collaboration.

The Trump/DeVos agenda not only jeopardizes that work, their view that education is a commodity as opposed to a public good threatens the foundation of our democracy and our responsibility to provide opportunity to all of America’s young people.

Americans have a deep connection to and belief in public education. I see it every day as I crisscross the nation talking to parents, teachers, students and community members about what they want for their public schools. And it transcends politics. It’s one of the reasons we saw such a massive grass-roots response to the DeVos nomination from every part of the country.

A recent poll by Harvard and Politico showed that while parents want good public school choices to meet the individual needs of their kids, they do not want those choices pit against one another or used to drain money from other public schools. In other words, the DeVos/Trump agenda is wildly out of step with what Americans want for their kids.

It’s what I saw when I took DeVos to visit public schools in Van Wert, Ohio, last month. This is an area that voted more than 70 percent for Trump, but people Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos Undermine Public Education | Time.com:

St. Hope schools founded by former Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson will unionize, labor group says | The Sacramento Bee

St. Hope schools founded by former Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson will unionize, labor group says | The Sacramento Bee:

Kevin Johnson’s charter schools have long angered unions. Now teachers there may join one.

A majority of teachers at the St. Hope Public Schools charter system have signed a petition to become members of the Sacramento City Teachers Association, the labor union announced Wednesday.

If completed in the coming months, as SCTA officials expect, the marriage of the activist-style teachers union and the charter school system founded by former Mayor Kevin Johnson would be an odd pairing within the Sacramento City Unified School District.

No other independent charter schools in the district have unionized, and education labor leaders have long been critical of Johnson and his wife, Michelle Rhee. The Sacramento teachers union has remained an ardent opponent of St. Hope since it won school board approval to convert Sacramento High School to a charter campus in 2003.

Rhee is a prominent advocate for charter schools, chairs the board for St. Hope and is the former chancellor for Washington, D.C., public schools, where she drew controversy for bucking the teachers union.

“It used to be insurance companies and the trial lawyers doing the big fight,” said Sacramento political consultant Andrew Acosta. “Now you have this becoming much more of teachers unions vs. charter school playing itself out.”

The Sacramento teachers union has eyed St. Hope schools for years. John Borsos, executive director for the labor group, said there have been periods since the school system was created more than a decade ago that educators expressed an interest in trying to organize.

“From the moment St. Hope was created, there was always a belief that if educators decided it was right for them, then being unionized made sense,” Borsos said.

St. Hope has more than 1,600 students and 100 teachers in four schools: Sacramento Charter High, P.S. 7 Middle School, P.S. 7 Elementary and Oak Park Prep. Its largest school – the high school – has more than 900 students and occupies the former campus of Sacramento High School. The city’s oldest high school, Sacramento High faced possible state takeover in 2003. It closed in June and reopened the next fall as a charter. Within a few years, its graduation rates improved and academic performance improved and its dropout rates fell. By 2009, more than 70 percent of its graduating class was accepted to a four-year college.

Stephanie Farland, a consultant on charter school oversight in California, said she sees the benefits that students can receive when there is no labor agreement. But she also sees the price that young or new teachers pay because of high involvement, home visits and long hours.

“Charter schools often are successful because they have highly engaged and involved staff,” said Farland, executive director of Sacramento-based Collaborative Solutions for Charter Authorizers, which works with school districts and county education offices in California.

One of the reasons, she said, is that “most charters don’t have union rules they have to follow. They really work the teachers pretty hard.”

That translates into historically high turnover rates and burnout, she said. “While they are there, they are doing a great job,” Farland said. “But once they burn out, there are really no protections for them.”

She said she understands the need for teachers to be paid well and fairly. “But for the charters that are successful and have high expectations for teacher involvement, I think unionization is going to hurt that.”

Statewide, about 30 percent of charter schools had some form of collective bargaining agreement or representation in 2015, according to the California Charter Schools Association.

“I think it has a lot to do with the national political context,” Borsos said. “I think there’s a lot of uncertainty and concern. And I think that one thing the labor movement has represented is stability, job security and professional advocacy. And the national turmoil has percolated down into the communities. I think people are feeling the turbulence.”

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Borsos said the labor group expects that “when people see the success that St. Hope educators have,” teachers at other charters will want to join in.

The SCTA cited a lack of transparency and high turnover as key issues with the St. Hope system.

Kingsley Melton, a law and public service teacher at Sacramento High, was among those who talked to co-workers about signing the SCTA petition.

“It was not easy,” Melton said of those conversations. “But it was easy to talk about theSt. Hope schools founded by former Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson will unionize, labor group says | The Sacramento Bee: