http://coreteachers.com/
http://www.coreteachers.com/
February 19th, 2009
Protect Public Education this Wednesday, February 25th
http://coreteachers.com/2009/02/19/protect-public-education-this-wednesday-february-25th/cpsprotest-2/
Take the day off on February 25th or come after work to 125 S. Clark to protest the proposed school closings, consolidations, turn-arounds and phase-outs.
If your school wants a bus, CORE made sure you will get reimbursed by the union. Hold the CTU accountable and call Sandy Shultz at 312.329.6226 for information on the buses.
Also, CORE pushed to ensure that there will be a phone banking session from 4pm to 8pm at CTU headquarters (4th floor of the Merchandise Mart) this upcoming Monday and Tuesday, the 23rd and 24th of February. Come out and let’s use our union’s resources to actually support and mobilize members.
Twenty Two schools are targeted and your school could be next. The probation list and underutilized school list are a mile long, we cannot let the Board unilateraly close our schools and replace them with unproven and unaccountable charter, turnaround and contract schools.
Help restore democracy and fairness to the educational system in Chicago.
Contact coreteachers@gmail.com for more information.
NEXT CORE CITY-WIDE MEETING
Come to the next city-wide CORE meeting
WHEN: Wednesday March 4th, 4:15pm
WHERE: The United Electrical Workers Hall, 37 S. Ashland
PROTEST REN2010
Stop Renaissance 2010http://coreteachers.com/2009/02/09/http2009cpshearingsblogspotcom/stop-ren2010/
Check out CORE member Al Ramirez’s new video on the protests against Ren 2010 this past Wednesday, January 28th.
Also view Labor Beat’s coverage of the January 28th protest. CORE and the Grassroots Education Movement helped organize the event, we are calling for a moratorium on Renaissance 2010.
Labor Beat’s coverage of January 28th protest
December 21st, 2008
Teachers demand turnaround moratorium (via Chi-Town Daily News)
Groups representing teachers and parents of Chicago Public Schools students appeared yesterday at a Board of Education meeting to protest the district's approach to turning around troubled schools.
December 21st, 2008
Charter schools Obama praised ripped at board meeting (via Chicago Sun-Times
Posted in News | No Comments »
A parade of teachers, parents and students complained Wednesday about the new breed of Chicago schools President-elect Barack Obama touted the day before when he tapped Chicago’s school chief to be his U.S. secretary of education.
Read more: Charter schools Obama praised ripped at board meeting.
December 18th, 2008
Obama’s Betrayal of Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of Schooling (via truthout.org)
Since the 1980s, but particularly under the Bush administration, certain elements of the religious right, corporate culture and Republican right wing have argued that free public education represents either a massive fraud or a contemptuous failure. Far from a genuine call for reform, these attacks largely stem from an attempt to transform schools from a public investment to a private good, answerable not to the demands and values of a democratic society but to the imperatives of the marketplace.
October 23rd, 2008
Next Meeting Wednesday, October 29th
Check out Core’s next meeting on Wednesday October 29th
Where: 1805 S. Loomis at the Rudy Lozano Library in the auditorium
When: 4:00pm
We always meet the Wednesday before the monthly union meetings at the same time and the same place.
October 8th, 2008
Renaissance 2010 Strikes Again
Renaissance 2010 Strikes Again from jackson potter on Vimeo.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
Teachers put to an unfair test
A teacher in the New York City Public Schools explains how standardized testing distorts kids' learning and undermines teachers unions.
February 27, 2009
ACROSS THE country, the neoliberal educational model continues to be pushed. Privately managed and publicly funded charter schools are multiplying. In public schools, teachers are being forced to teach narrowly to standardized tests, and there's a push to deny union rights like seniority and tenure in favor of standardized test-driven evaluation and merit pay.
Examples of such moves abound. Following Hurricane Katrina, all union teachers were fired in New Orleans, and more than half the schools in that city became charter schools. In Washington, D.C., hundreds of teachers have been fired and at least 21 schools have been closed. In addition, Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of D.C. schools is proposing to "dilute tenure protection and link individual teacher pay and job security to improved student achievement," according to the Washington Post.
New York City is no exception. Advertisements for charter schools are being sent out en masse to residents of Harlem and placed in subway cars. Each year, there seems to be more of an explicit push to tailor instruction to fit standardized tests--complete with breakdowns and analyses of previous years' tests--so as to "help" teachers better teach to the test. The number of periodic assessments that eat into instructional time and cause immense amount of stress on students continues to rise.
Shockingly, some of the most dramatic moves toward a neoliberal educational model have been agreed to by the leadership of my union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT)--and even proclaimed as victories!
The oft-stated justification by union leadership for these concessions is that accepting neoliberal-lite proposals will allow for the union to have a say in what happens and head off more draconian attacks.
For starters, the UFT opened its own charter school in the fall of 2005, and has since added another. Our union's leadership proudly proclaims the school as the "first union-operated charter school in the country."
Then, in the fall of 2007, the UFT agreed to a "pilot," "voluntary" school-wide merit pay scheme. Rather than rewarding individual teachers, the plan gives a bloc of money to each school on the basis of the school's performance as a whole. This money is to be distributed by a committee of four, which must come to a consensus--and it includes two representatives of the school administration.
Thus, the potential exists for the principal to insist on an unequal division of the approximately $3,000 allotted per teacher.
Each school that is selected has to vote on whether to accept the program. But given the state of the economy, this is a lot of money to turn down, even for teachers who are opposed to merit pay and the move towards privatization. My school has been chosen for this program for the two years of the program's existence, and each year, it has passed (although this year by a very narrow margin).
The justification from our union leadership is that if we are going to have charter schools anyway, let them be union-run. If merit pay is coming anyway, let it be group merit pay instead of individual merit pay.
But this gets it backwards. The privatizers see such examples as victories. Charter schools are a step away from public control, and for that reason, most are nonunion. We should be fighting to keep public schools public, not jumping on the charter school bandwagon--while, of course, fighting to unionize charter schools that do exist.
If the neoliberals get their way, more of our educational funding will go towards merit pay and charter schools, which will undermine public education and union rights. For example, while the stimulus bill includes a welcome $54 billion for education, the New York Times reported that, "Programs that tie teacher pay to performance will most likely receive money."
In fact, a February 19 New York City Department of Education announcement stated, "New York City can also apply for grants to expand its Schoolwide Performance Bonus Program, which rewards educators for improving student achievement, from the $200 million Teacher Incentive Funds." This money could be better used to prevent budget cuts, lower existing class sizes or to increase teacher salaries across the board.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MEANWHILE, THIS fall, the UFT agreed to "Teacher Data Reports" that apply to Grade 4-8 English Language Arts (ELA) and math teachers. The reports break down the performance of the students of each teacher on New York State tests.
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and UFT President Randi Weingarten jointly announced these reports as "a "new tool to help teachers learn about their own strengths and opportunities for development." The letter announcing the reports extolled the supposed virtues of the report--and even had the audacity to claim that the idea came from teachers themselves! "[M]any of you have told us how useful it would be to better understand how your efforts are influencing student progress," the letter stated.
I have heard of teachers complain of lack of mentoring, support and materials (including basics like books and copies), but never of not knowing or having a breakdown of our students' scores on standardized tests. In fact, we have been subjected to countless breakdowns of such "data."
At the same time, the letter spelled out clearly that "the Teacher Data Reports are not to be used for evaluation purposes" or in determining tenure. It is also specified that reports are to be a private document to be shared with each teacher and their principal. Again, our union leadership proclaimed a victory in keeping the data private and fending off attempts to use such data for evaluation.
But if the reports are not useful in teacher training and development, what are they useful for? Especially given the context of this push towards performance-based evaluation and merit pay, it is impossible to see these reports as anything but a foot in the door toward teacher evaluation on the basis of test scores, and ultimately publicly releasing this data.
The experience at my school has helped to shed light on the true nature of these reports. I'm a teacher at a middle school in New York City, one that is being "phased out" (read: closed down) over the next two years. In fact, the first discussion of Teacher Data Reports came at the meeting where the announcement of our school closing was made.
Several representatives from the DOE came in to close our school. One of them pointed out that the Teacher Data Reports "would be out there" when we apply for new jobs--an apparent effort to scare us into teaching to the test. And as our school closes, "excess" teachers become part of the teacher reserve and will have to apply for new jobs. The implicit threat here is that this data will determine whether we will be hired at a new school.
Our principal "rolled out" the Teacher Data Initiative at a recent faculty meeting. She started by explaining that we are all "accountable" for education: teachers, students, administrators, and parents (she forgot to mention Chancellor Klein and the politicians who perpetuate the testing craze, school segregation and overcrowded classes).
Whether we like it or not, we were told, education is becoming a business, and these data reports will hold us accountable according to a business model. The principal also mentioned that we could look at these reports to evaluate our own teaching practices. But that was clearly secondary to the overwhelming message that these were primarily for the sake of accountability.
It was pointed out by staff members that according to the UFT/DOE agreement: (1) the reports are supposed to be kept between teachers and their principal and (2) they cannot be used for the sake of evaluation. The principal did not contest these points, but also claimed that this data can be shared with other principals. So when we apply for new jobs principals will look at our Teacher Data Reports while deciding whether to hire us or not.
This was bad enough, but despite verbally agreeing that these reports were supposed to be private, she handed out all ELA and math teachers' data reports to every faculty member, compiled and stapled, apparently for the sake of comparison.
As I was steamed from the discussion, I didn't even realize what the principal was handing out, and didn't even look at the reports--and still haven't. But a colleague called me and explained what the principal had done. This is in clear violation of the UFT/DOE agreement that the reports were to be private.
Many people on the staff were outraged, and several of us called the district representative from our union. The next day, a union meeting was held. Everyone at the meeting (which was about two-thirds of the chapter) signed a letter expressing our outrage, which was forwarded to the leaders of the UFT and the DOE.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
AFTER A couple of weeks of e-mails and phone calls to the union and to higher-ups in the DOE, a superintendent from the Department of Education came in to apologize, along with a vice president from the UFT. Notably, our principal was absent--and has yet to directly apologize to the staff. The superintendent said that all principals were given professional development outlining the use of data reports, and that it was very clear that reports were to be handed out only in individual meetings.
The superintendent also said that she is considering disciplinary against my principal. But she refused to guarantee this, or state exactly what that the action would be. On the issue of administrators sharing reports with other administrators, the superintendent stated that this was not allowed. However, this same superintendent was present when it was said that the data would be "out there."
The superintendents' new position on the confidentiality of the data is definitely a welcome development, as statements from the UFT and DOE have been unclear on this issue. Nonetheless, what is to stop principals from discretely sharing the data and this data informing hiring decisions?
A couple of conclusions can be drawn from this experience. The idea expressed in the joint letter from Weingarten/Klein that the Teacher Data Initiative would be a "new tool to help teachers learn about their own strengths and opportunities for development" is absurd. The incident at my school--along with my principal's and a DOE representative's initial framing of the issue--should prove beyond a doubt that Teacher Data Reports are ultimately meant to be a tool for the evaluation of teachers.
If this data is used for evaluation, teachers will face additional pressure to spend weeks of teaching students how to take the test, poring through old exams and dumbing down instruction to only cover the types of problems found on previous tests. In any case, we can expect principals to threaten to use these reports as evaluative tools either explicitly or otherwise.
Moreover, I refuse to believe that my principal didn't get the idea that these reports are a "tool for accountability" from somewhere up the chain. It's only because we came together as a united staff that the DOE felt the need to change the tone of the conversation with our staff.
Finally, we need to argue that the Teacher Data Initiative should be abolished immediately. It serves no useful purpose for professional development. There can be no effective mechanism to prevent the data's misuse among administrators, either sharing it with staff or administrators or using it, in practice, as a tool for evaluation.
We must demand that swift and dramatic action be taken, lest other principals feel that they can get away with sharing the reports publicly or among themselves.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
What you can do
A New York City teacher group, Justice Not Just Tests! [1] has launched a petition campaign to demand that the UFT: (1) Retract its support for the teacher data reports and merit pay programs; (2) Oppose all initiatives that promote a focus on standardized tests; (3) Oppose categorically the use of standardized tests in a high-stakes manner; and (4) Support alternative assessments like portfolios and other performance based assessments.
For more information, write to jnjt@nycore.org [2].
Source:
http://socialistworker.org/2009/02/27/teachers-put-to-an-unfair-test
February 27, 2009
ACROSS THE country, the neoliberal educational model continues to be pushed. Privately managed and publicly funded charter schools are multiplying. In public schools, teachers are being forced to teach narrowly to standardized tests, and there's a push to deny union rights like seniority and tenure in favor of standardized test-driven evaluation and merit pay.
Examples of such moves abound. Following Hurricane Katrina, all union teachers were fired in New Orleans, and more than half the schools in that city became charter schools. In Washington, D.C., hundreds of teachers have been fired and at least 21 schools have been closed. In addition, Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of D.C. schools is proposing to "dilute tenure protection and link individual teacher pay and job security to improved student achievement," according to the Washington Post.
New York City is no exception. Advertisements for charter schools are being sent out en masse to residents of Harlem and placed in subway cars. Each year, there seems to be more of an explicit push to tailor instruction to fit standardized tests--complete with breakdowns and analyses of previous years' tests--so as to "help" teachers better teach to the test. The number of periodic assessments that eat into instructional time and cause immense amount of stress on students continues to rise.
Shockingly, some of the most dramatic moves toward a neoliberal educational model have been agreed to by the leadership of my union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT)--and even proclaimed as victories!
The oft-stated justification by union leadership for these concessions is that accepting neoliberal-lite proposals will allow for the union to have a say in what happens and head off more draconian attacks.
For starters, the UFT opened its own charter school in the fall of 2005, and has since added another. Our union's leadership proudly proclaims the school as the "first union-operated charter school in the country."
Then, in the fall of 2007, the UFT agreed to a "pilot," "voluntary" school-wide merit pay scheme. Rather than rewarding individual teachers, the plan gives a bloc of money to each school on the basis of the school's performance as a whole. This money is to be distributed by a committee of four, which must come to a consensus--and it includes two representatives of the school administration.
Thus, the potential exists for the principal to insist on an unequal division of the approximately $3,000 allotted per teacher.
Each school that is selected has to vote on whether to accept the program. But given the state of the economy, this is a lot of money to turn down, even for teachers who are opposed to merit pay and the move towards privatization. My school has been chosen for this program for the two years of the program's existence, and each year, it has passed (although this year by a very narrow margin).
The justification from our union leadership is that if we are going to have charter schools anyway, let them be union-run. If merit pay is coming anyway, let it be group merit pay instead of individual merit pay.
But this gets it backwards. The privatizers see such examples as victories. Charter schools are a step away from public control, and for that reason, most are nonunion. We should be fighting to keep public schools public, not jumping on the charter school bandwagon--while, of course, fighting to unionize charter schools that do exist.
If the neoliberals get their way, more of our educational funding will go towards merit pay and charter schools, which will undermine public education and union rights. For example, while the stimulus bill includes a welcome $54 billion for education, the New York Times reported that, "Programs that tie teacher pay to performance will most likely receive money."
In fact, a February 19 New York City Department of Education announcement stated, "New York City can also apply for grants to expand its Schoolwide Performance Bonus Program, which rewards educators for improving student achievement, from the $200 million Teacher Incentive Funds." This money could be better used to prevent budget cuts, lower existing class sizes or to increase teacher salaries across the board.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MEANWHILE, THIS fall, the UFT agreed to "Teacher Data Reports" that apply to Grade 4-8 English Language Arts (ELA) and math teachers. The reports break down the performance of the students of each teacher on New York State tests.
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and UFT President Randi Weingarten jointly announced these reports as "a "new tool to help teachers learn about their own strengths and opportunities for development." The letter announcing the reports extolled the supposed virtues of the report--and even had the audacity to claim that the idea came from teachers themselves! "[M]any of you have told us how useful it would be to better understand how your efforts are influencing student progress," the letter stated.
I have heard of teachers complain of lack of mentoring, support and materials (including basics like books and copies), but never of not knowing or having a breakdown of our students' scores on standardized tests. In fact, we have been subjected to countless breakdowns of such "data."
At the same time, the letter spelled out clearly that "the Teacher Data Reports are not to be used for evaluation purposes" or in determining tenure. It is also specified that reports are to be a private document to be shared with each teacher and their principal. Again, our union leadership proclaimed a victory in keeping the data private and fending off attempts to use such data for evaluation.
But if the reports are not useful in teacher training and development, what are they useful for? Especially given the context of this push towards performance-based evaluation and merit pay, it is impossible to see these reports as anything but a foot in the door toward teacher evaluation on the basis of test scores, and ultimately publicly releasing this data.
The experience at my school has helped to shed light on the true nature of these reports. I'm a teacher at a middle school in New York City, one that is being "phased out" (read: closed down) over the next two years. In fact, the first discussion of Teacher Data Reports came at the meeting where the announcement of our school closing was made.
Several representatives from the DOE came in to close our school. One of them pointed out that the Teacher Data Reports "would be out there" when we apply for new jobs--an apparent effort to scare us into teaching to the test. And as our school closes, "excess" teachers become part of the teacher reserve and will have to apply for new jobs. The implicit threat here is that this data will determine whether we will be hired at a new school.
Our principal "rolled out" the Teacher Data Initiative at a recent faculty meeting. She started by explaining that we are all "accountable" for education: teachers, students, administrators, and parents (she forgot to mention Chancellor Klein and the politicians who perpetuate the testing craze, school segregation and overcrowded classes).
Whether we like it or not, we were told, education is becoming a business, and these data reports will hold us accountable according to a business model. The principal also mentioned that we could look at these reports to evaluate our own teaching practices. But that was clearly secondary to the overwhelming message that these were primarily for the sake of accountability.
It was pointed out by staff members that according to the UFT/DOE agreement: (1) the reports are supposed to be kept between teachers and their principal and (2) they cannot be used for the sake of evaluation. The principal did not contest these points, but also claimed that this data can be shared with other principals. So when we apply for new jobs principals will look at our Teacher Data Reports while deciding whether to hire us or not.
This was bad enough, but despite verbally agreeing that these reports were supposed to be private, she handed out all ELA and math teachers' data reports to every faculty member, compiled and stapled, apparently for the sake of comparison.
As I was steamed from the discussion, I didn't even realize what the principal was handing out, and didn't even look at the reports--and still haven't. But a colleague called me and explained what the principal had done. This is in clear violation of the UFT/DOE agreement that the reports were to be private.
Many people on the staff were outraged, and several of us called the district representative from our union. The next day, a union meeting was held. Everyone at the meeting (which was about two-thirds of the chapter) signed a letter expressing our outrage, which was forwarded to the leaders of the UFT and the DOE.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
AFTER A couple of weeks of e-mails and phone calls to the union and to higher-ups in the DOE, a superintendent from the Department of Education came in to apologize, along with a vice president from the UFT. Notably, our principal was absent--and has yet to directly apologize to the staff. The superintendent said that all principals were given professional development outlining the use of data reports, and that it was very clear that reports were to be handed out only in individual meetings.
The superintendent also said that she is considering disciplinary against my principal. But she refused to guarantee this, or state exactly what that the action would be. On the issue of administrators sharing reports with other administrators, the superintendent stated that this was not allowed. However, this same superintendent was present when it was said that the data would be "out there."
The superintendents' new position on the confidentiality of the data is definitely a welcome development, as statements from the UFT and DOE have been unclear on this issue. Nonetheless, what is to stop principals from discretely sharing the data and this data informing hiring decisions?
A couple of conclusions can be drawn from this experience. The idea expressed in the joint letter from Weingarten/Klein that the Teacher Data Initiative would be a "new tool to help teachers learn about their own strengths and opportunities for development" is absurd. The incident at my school--along with my principal's and a DOE representative's initial framing of the issue--should prove beyond a doubt that Teacher Data Reports are ultimately meant to be a tool for the evaluation of teachers.
If this data is used for evaluation, teachers will face additional pressure to spend weeks of teaching students how to take the test, poring through old exams and dumbing down instruction to only cover the types of problems found on previous tests. In any case, we can expect principals to threaten to use these reports as evaluative tools either explicitly or otherwise.
Moreover, I refuse to believe that my principal didn't get the idea that these reports are a "tool for accountability" from somewhere up the chain. It's only because we came together as a united staff that the DOE felt the need to change the tone of the conversation with our staff.
Finally, we need to argue that the Teacher Data Initiative should be abolished immediately. It serves no useful purpose for professional development. There can be no effective mechanism to prevent the data's misuse among administrators, either sharing it with staff or administrators or using it, in practice, as a tool for evaluation.
We must demand that swift and dramatic action be taken, lest other principals feel that they can get away with sharing the reports publicly or among themselves.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
What you can do
A New York City teacher group, Justice Not Just Tests! [1] has launched a petition campaign to demand that the UFT: (1) Retract its support for the teacher data reports and merit pay programs; (2) Oppose all initiatives that promote a focus on standardized tests; (3) Oppose categorically the use of standardized tests in a high-stakes manner; and (4) Support alternative assessments like portfolios and other performance based assessments.
For more information, write to jnjt@nycore.org [2].
Source:
http://socialistworker.org/2009/02/27/teachers-put-to-an-unfair-test
Paul Moore on Michelle Rhee
This Washington Post article...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/24/AR2009022403740_Comments.html
.....inspired this comment.
As her corporate masters have been forced to stand down by the
collapse of their global economy, of course Michelle Rhee's tune has
begun to change. It's out with the arrogant bluster of the bully and
in with the false humility of the abandoned and panic-stricken bureaucrat.
Rhee looked around the other day and her financial backers were gone.
Gates, and Broad, and Dell, and Robertson went to see about their own
survival. Rhee still longs to be a superstar in the dismantling of
public education. She will miss the Time magazine covers and the
mention of her name in presidential debates. And she still dreams of
smashing teachers seniority rights and thus their unions but that
whole project is being shutdown before you can say the Icelandic
banking system or credit default swaps.
When the history of Michelle Rhee's brief tenure in Washington, D.C.
is written it will go something like this. Lacking any discernible
qualifications, her shocking appointment as Chancellor of D.C. public
schools, can be understood only when you realize that Rhee was brought
in to inflict maximum damage on the district's public schools and its
children. And as a cultist (Teach For America, New Teacher Project)
and true believer she came at a bargain basement salary. Really
qualified superintendents were courted (Fenty visited Miami with
several members of the D.C. commission to interview Dr. Rudolph Crew)
but those candidates would have asked questions. They could not be
counted on to mindlessly take a club to D.C.'s public schools. The
havoc and chaos that Rhee caused was no accident. It was the plan!
But Michelle Rhee appeared on the scene because and when the "global
economy" was riding herd on this planet. Globalization is at the very
foundation of business model for schools, charters, vouchers, data
driven instruction, merit pay, standardized testing, and most
perversely of all, paying students to consume their version of
education. It was the reason the Business Roundtable and Bill Gates
were interested in public education at all. The CEO's wanted a profit
making private school system and Gates wanted visas for Indians and
Taiwanese who work for less.
Michelle Rhee got humble and then disappeared as the global economy
crashed and burned.
Paul A. Moore
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/24/AR2009022403740_Comments.html
.....inspired this comment.
As her corporate masters have been forced to stand down by the
collapse of their global economy, of course Michelle Rhee's tune has
begun to change. It's out with the arrogant bluster of the bully and
in with the false humility of the abandoned and panic-stricken bureaucrat.
Rhee looked around the other day and her financial backers were gone.
Gates, and Broad, and Dell, and Robertson went to see about their own
survival. Rhee still longs to be a superstar in the dismantling of
public education. She will miss the Time magazine covers and the
mention of her name in presidential debates. And she still dreams of
smashing teachers seniority rights and thus their unions but that
whole project is being shutdown before you can say the Icelandic
banking system or credit default swaps.
When the history of Michelle Rhee's brief tenure in Washington, D.C.
is written it will go something like this. Lacking any discernible
qualifications, her shocking appointment as Chancellor of D.C. public
schools, can be understood only when you realize that Rhee was brought
in to inflict maximum damage on the district's public schools and its
children. And as a cultist (Teach For America, New Teacher Project)
and true believer she came at a bargain basement salary. Really
qualified superintendents were courted (Fenty visited Miami with
several members of the D.C. commission to interview Dr. Rudolph Crew)
but those candidates would have asked questions. They could not be
counted on to mindlessly take a club to D.C.'s public schools. The
havoc and chaos that Rhee caused was no accident. It was the plan!
But Michelle Rhee appeared on the scene because and when the "global
economy" was riding herd on this planet. Globalization is at the very
foundation of business model for schools, charters, vouchers, data
driven instruction, merit pay, standardized testing, and most
perversely of all, paying students to consume their version of
education. It was the reason the Business Roundtable and Bill Gates
were interested in public education at all. The CEO's wanted a profit
making private school system and Gates wanted visas for Indians and
Taiwanese who work for less.
Michelle Rhee got humble and then disappeared as the global economy
crashed and burned.
Paul A. Moore
Thursday, February 26, 2009
District 3 (Upper West Side) Meeting and Comments
See Leonie Haimson below this
From Bijou Miller, Co-President of District 3 President Council
For those of you who did not make the joint Pres. Council/CEC meeting
at PS 241, I wanted to post this because, in my opinion, what
happened tonight was the DOE at its worst- In point of fact, I
thought I had seen its worst, until tonight.
There was a joint Presidents' Council/CEC meeting tonight. Our Pres.
Council meeting began at 6 P.M. Upon arriving, I noticed that there
was a huge crowd already in the auditorium. I assumed that it was
people getting there early for the 6:30 CEC meeting, which had a very
long agenda. Instead, to my surprise, I discovered a rally being
held for the Harlem Success Academy- I later found out that
this "hearing" was being held under the auspices of the Charter
School Institute of the State University of New York. I also found
out that someone had bused in a busload of children who were given
caps blazoned with the Harlem Success Academy logo. If this was a
hearing to get community feedback, it certainly had a very biased
atmosphere.
I was told that PS 241 parents had not been told about this hearing
and apparently, if you wanted to speak, you had to somehow contact
the "Hearing Registration Officer" on the day of the hearing BEFORE
it started (the window of opportunity was from 5 to 5:30p.m.)
I did not attend this "hearing" as I had to conduct our own meeting
but from what I gleaned, I do not think the State University got the
response they had expected.
In fact, many parents were angry and outraged and that anger and
outrage carried over into the CEC meeting (which was delayed for
forty five minutes because of this hearing).
At the CEC meeting, parents from 241 and other schools were
understandably upset. The upshot is this: There was no consultation
with the CEC about putting a new school into PS 241. For some
reason, the DOE decided that the District Leadership Team was the
group to take input from the community and help decide what new
schools would be chosen. The process, if you can call it that, was
rushed. DLT meetings are usually in the late afternoon, which is
inconvenient for many parents- 241 parents were still reeling from
finding out that their school was being phased out so I do not think
they even had the DLT on their radar- And why should they? No one,
including myself, a DLT member, ever thought that the DLT would be
involved. Heck, most parents don't even know what a DLT is.
At any rate, when parents did come to the meetings (there were really
only three and we also had to get feedback about MS 44), the response
was very anti-charter. John White, the Office of Portfolio
Development, who is running this show,(and who was at this hearing
tonight), stated that the feeling was that 241 families would not put
their kids into another public school-that the DOE felt a charter
would attract more families. Let me also say that the DLT was told
there were at least two viable options for 241, one a charter and one
a public. The DLT was never ever given any information on the public
option. We asked for info but he put it off or changed the subject
at least twice. It was quite obvious that a charter was the DOE's
choice and that Harlem Success was the specific choice. At the second
meeting, White had even invited Harlem Success parents to come
and "testify" about how great their school was. So the deck was
definitely stacked. Nonetheless, at the third meeting, there was
still parent and DLT input asking that we be given public school
options to consider.
One other point- At the last meeting, White said that whatever the
charter school might be, they would be required to hold their initial
lottery for only 241 zoned families. In addition, he stated that the
241 parents would have first priority at other area public schools-
five in all. They are PS 149 Sojourner Truth
P.S. 76 Phillip Randolph
P.S. 165 Robert E. Simon
P.S. 180 Hugo Newman
P.S. 185 John M. Langston
So, the zoned families of 241 would have first choice at six schools-
So there are zoning issues that need to be addressed and it is quite
possible that a lawsuit is in the making- The CEC should have been
consulted about the fact that, when PS 241 is phased out, there will
no longer be a zoned public school in that building (yes, charter
schools are public schools but they are not zoned because they will
take from throughout the district...) . Additionally, the DOE is for
all intents and purposes, dissolving the zone lines for PS 241
families- they now have a zone that includes five other public
schools- That is a zoning issue that should have been presented to
the CEC.
But there is one more thing- It was implied that the charter school
would be a new charter or a new branch of an existing charter.
Tonight, we found out from those who attended the rally, that in
fact, the branch of Harlem Success that is moving into 241 is already
established and so they are moving in their own already settled
population- How are they going to absorb the PS 241 kids that are in
first and second grade?
I think that every District 3 parent should be outraged about this.
It is a classic bait and switch with parents being told one (or two
or three) different scenarios and then being presented with the one
they feared the most. PS 241 parents are a small body and there are
many working parents who do not have the time or means to organize
and protest this situation. The Charter School Institute is asking
for any testimony that was not heard tonight be emailed or faxed to
them BY MARCH 10th (It must be received no later than noon.)SEnd your
written testimony to charters@suny. edu or fax it to 518 427-6510. In
your written testimony, please identify in a brief fashion, the
subject of your testimony (that is their words, not mine).
In addition, please contact your elected officials, especially Danny
O'Donnell and Bill Perkins. And of course, any connections to the
press is great.
Bijou Miller, Co-President of District 3 President Council
Leonie comments
I agree with Bijou that this is one of the most outrageous things that the DOE has ever tried to do -- and they have done alot.
To close a zoned school w/out the CEC's approval -- essentially eliminating the zone -- and putting a charter school in its place is blatantly illegal: state law and chancellor's regs require that all changes in zoning must be approved by the CEC.
People should be aware that in state law, to convert a regular public school to a charter takes a vote of the parent body. This simply skips that entire step.
If this is goes forward it is an extremely dangerous precedent. It would essentially allow the DOE to unilaterally close any zoned school in the entire city and put a charter school in its place -- to privatize our entire public school system. Don't think they won't try.
Eva Moskowitz is extremely wired and already has a chain of charter schools that she is intent on expanding. She uses the parents at her schools as her own political tools. She had them all call Juan Gonzalez today to protest his column and tied up his phone lines from 3-5 PM.
Privatizing the system and turning the best schools into charters, which then excluded the neediest students, is what they did in New Orleans but it took a nearly unprecedented national disaster to do it. here we only have Hurricane Bloomberg/Klein .
It is also not extremely unlikely that they can give the parents at PS 141 priority over the parents who are zoned for the particular schools below. This is a line they are offering to shut up 141 parents but I doubt its legal. This would also be in a sense redrawing zoning lines, to give preference to 141 parents to the parents who already live within the attendance zones.
This should not be allowed to stand.
--
Leonie Haimson
From Bijou Miller, Co-President of District 3 President Council
For those of you who did not make the joint Pres. Council/CEC meeting
at PS 241, I wanted to post this because, in my opinion, what
happened tonight was the DOE at its worst- In point of fact, I
thought I had seen its worst, until tonight.
There was a joint Presidents' Council/CEC meeting tonight. Our Pres.
Council meeting began at 6 P.M. Upon arriving, I noticed that there
was a huge crowd already in the auditorium. I assumed that it was
people getting there early for the 6:30 CEC meeting, which had a very
long agenda. Instead, to my surprise, I discovered a rally being
held for the Harlem Success Academy- I later found out that
this "hearing" was being held under the auspices of the Charter
School Institute of the State University of New York. I also found
out that someone had bused in a busload of children who were given
caps blazoned with the Harlem Success Academy logo. If this was a
hearing to get community feedback, it certainly had a very biased
atmosphere.
I was told that PS 241 parents had not been told about this hearing
and apparently, if you wanted to speak, you had to somehow contact
the "Hearing Registration Officer" on the day of the hearing BEFORE
it started (the window of opportunity was from 5 to 5:30p.m.)
I did not attend this "hearing" as I had to conduct our own meeting
but from what I gleaned, I do not think the State University got the
response they had expected.
In fact, many parents were angry and outraged and that anger and
outrage carried over into the CEC meeting (which was delayed for
forty five minutes because of this hearing).
At the CEC meeting, parents from 241 and other schools were
understandably upset. The upshot is this: There was no consultation
with the CEC about putting a new school into PS 241. For some
reason, the DOE decided that the District Leadership Team was the
group to take input from the community and help decide what new
schools would be chosen. The process, if you can call it that, was
rushed. DLT meetings are usually in the late afternoon, which is
inconvenient for many parents- 241 parents were still reeling from
finding out that their school was being phased out so I do not think
they even had the DLT on their radar- And why should they? No one,
including myself, a DLT member, ever thought that the DLT would be
involved. Heck, most parents don't even know what a DLT is.
At any rate, when parents did come to the meetings (there were really
only three and we also had to get feedback about MS 44), the response
was very anti-charter. John White, the Office of Portfolio
Development, who is running this show,(and who was at this hearing
tonight), stated that the feeling was that 241 families would not put
their kids into another public school-that the DOE felt a charter
would attract more families. Let me also say that the DLT was told
there were at least two viable options for 241, one a charter and one
a public. The DLT was never ever given any information on the public
option. We asked for info but he put it off or changed the subject
at least twice. It was quite obvious that a charter was the DOE's
choice and that Harlem Success was the specific choice. At the second
meeting, White had even invited Harlem Success parents to come
and "testify" about how great their school was. So the deck was
definitely stacked. Nonetheless, at the third meeting, there was
still parent and DLT input asking that we be given public school
options to consider.
One other point- At the last meeting, White said that whatever the
charter school might be, they would be required to hold their initial
lottery for only 241 zoned families. In addition, he stated that the
241 parents would have first priority at other area public schools-
five in all. They are PS 149 Sojourner Truth
P.S. 76 Phillip Randolph
P.S. 165 Robert E. Simon
P.S. 180 Hugo Newman
P.S. 185 John M. Langston
So, the zoned families of 241 would have first choice at six schools-
So there are zoning issues that need to be addressed and it is quite
possible that a lawsuit is in the making- The CEC should have been
consulted about the fact that, when PS 241 is phased out, there will
no longer be a zoned public school in that building (yes, charter
schools are public schools but they are not zoned because they will
take from throughout the district...) . Additionally, the DOE is for
all intents and purposes, dissolving the zone lines for PS 241
families- they now have a zone that includes five other public
schools- That is a zoning issue that should have been presented to
the CEC.
But there is one more thing- It was implied that the charter school
would be a new charter or a new branch of an existing charter.
Tonight, we found out from those who attended the rally, that in
fact, the branch of Harlem Success that is moving into 241 is already
established and so they are moving in their own already settled
population- How are they going to absorb the PS 241 kids that are in
first and second grade?
I think that every District 3 parent should be outraged about this.
It is a classic bait and switch with parents being told one (or two
or three) different scenarios and then being presented with the one
they feared the most. PS 241 parents are a small body and there are
many working parents who do not have the time or means to organize
and protest this situation. The Charter School Institute is asking
for any testimony that was not heard tonight be emailed or faxed to
them BY MARCH 10th (It must be received no later than noon.)SEnd your
written testimony to charters@suny. edu or fax it to 518 427-6510. In
your written testimony, please identify in a brief fashion, the
subject of your testimony (that is their words, not mine).
In addition, please contact your elected officials, especially Danny
O'Donnell and Bill Perkins. And of course, any connections to the
press is great.
Bijou Miller, Co-President of District 3 President Council
Leonie comments
I agree with Bijou that this is one of the most outrageous things that the DOE has ever tried to do -- and they have done alot.
To close a zoned school w/out the CEC's approval -- essentially eliminating the zone -- and putting a charter school in its place is blatantly illegal: state law and chancellor's regs require that all changes in zoning must be approved by the CEC.
People should be aware that in state law, to convert a regular public school to a charter takes a vote of the parent body. This simply skips that entire step.
If this is goes forward it is an extremely dangerous precedent. It would essentially allow the DOE to unilaterally close any zoned school in the entire city and put a charter school in its place -- to privatize our entire public school system. Don't think they won't try.
Eva Moskowitz is extremely wired and already has a chain of charter schools that she is intent on expanding. She uses the parents at her schools as her own political tools. She had them all call Juan Gonzalez today to protest his column and tied up his phone lines from 3-5 PM.
Privatizing the system and turning the best schools into charters, which then excluded the neediest students, is what they did in New Orleans but it took a nearly unprecedented national disaster to do it. here we only have Hurricane Bloomberg/Klein .
It is also not extremely unlikely that they can give the parents at PS 141 priority over the parents who are zoned for the particular schools below. This is a line they are offering to shut up 141 parents but I doubt its legal. This would also be in a sense redrawing zoning lines, to give preference to 141 parents to the parents who already live within the attendance zones.
This should not be allowed to stand.
--
Leonie Haimson
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
MAYOR BLOOMBERG, U.S. SECRETARY OF EDUCATION DUNCAN, AND SCHOOLS CHANCELLOR KLEIN DETAIL HOW THE AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT WILL HELP NYC
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 19, 2009
No. 84
www.nyc.gov
MAYOR BLOOMBERG, U.S. SECRETARY OF EDUCATION DUNCAN, AND SCHOOLS CHANCELLOR KLEIN DETAIL HOW THE AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT WILL HELP NYC SCHOOLS
Stimulus Money Could Help City Avoid Severe Staffing Reductions in Public Schools
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg joined with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein today to announce how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will help New York City public schools in the coming years. Based on preliminary analysis, the City estimates it will receive $535 million in State Fiscal Stabilization Grants in each of the next two years, if the funds are allocated to local school aid through the traditional formulas. In addition to the stabilization grants, the City’s preliminary analysis estimates that its schools are eligible to receive in each of the next two years approximately $300 million from an expansion of Title I funds for high-needs students, approximately $100 million from the expansion of Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funding, and more than $25 million in educational technology funds. At today’s announcement, the Mayor, Secretary, and Chancellor were joined by State Senate Majority Leader Malcolm A. Smith, Assemblywoman Rhoda S. Jacobs, the American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, Council of School Supervisors and Administrators President Ernest Logan, and Explore Charter School Founder and Director Morty Ballen in Brooklyn.
“Support from Washington will help us to weather this economic crisis. Working with the State, we hope we’ll be able to keep more of our teachers in our public school classrooms,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “We all want to ensure that our schools keep innovating and that our students keep learning – while shielding our schools and classrooms from potential harm. I am confident our colleagues in Albany will join me in making our difficult budget situation as tolerable as possible for all of our schools.”
“We’re not just facing an economic crisis in America. We’re facing an education crisis. A University of Washington report says up to 600,000 education jobs are at risk,” said Secretary Duncan. “But we’re also facing a historic opportunity to remake public education – a once-in-a-lifetime chance to lift the quality of education for every child in America.”
“Stimulus dollars will go a long way in helping us to prevent our country’s financial crisis from turning into a crisis in our classrooms,” said Chancellor Klein. “We look forward to working with our partners at the State level to ensure this money is directed equitably and where it’s needed the most – our classrooms.”
“The passage of the federal stimulus bill will allow New York school children, their parents and their teachers, to rest easier in the coming budget year,” said State Senate Majority Leader Smith. “With the influx of desperately needed funding, I am confident that we will continue to make a meaningful investment in our most critical resource – our children. Our schools, from Binghamton to Brentwood, and every town in between, will benefit from the investments in the bill, particularly for our high needs districts throughout the state. I am hopeful that between the direct school grants, expanded state aid and opportunities for additional funding, we can continue to improve student performance while ensuring a wise and productive use of public funds.”
“Parents and teachers here in New York City and all across America are applauding President Obama for his strong and steadfast commitment to our nation’s children and public schools, and rightly so. In addition to providing a much needed boost for the economy, the stimulus package also represents an investment in education that will help prevent severe cuts to public services – a huge step to averting layoffs in schools and providing teachers and students with the tools and supports they need to succeed,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. “While this aid is exactly what our schools need, parents must understand that we are not out of the woods yet. The State has to make sure that the stimulus money is spent wisely and actually gets into classrooms. Even so, the package is truly a bold first step, and we are grateful to President Obama and Secretary Duncan for their recognition and support of public education.”
“We applaud President Obama and Congress for making education an important priority of the stimulus package and paying close attention to the needs of economically disadvantaged youngsters and special education students,” said Council of School Supervisors and Administrators President Ernest Logan. During this time of severe economic crisis, we look forward to working with the city and state to ensure that this funding goes as far as possible to protect our children's education.”
In addition to the stabilization funds, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act also allows states and school districts to apply for $5 billion in grants to support new approaches to closing the achievement gap and boosting student achievement . Working in cooperation with the -New York State Education Department, New York City would be able to use these funds to -continue building on the momentum of the reform efforts and enormous progress in improving graduation rates. These grants, which will be allocated by the U.S. Department of Education, are known as the Race to the Top Fund. This includes $650 million to provide funds to school districts that have made significant gains in closing the achievement gap to expand their work and to document and share their successful practices. These funds could help further implementation of the New York City Department of Education’s (DOE) computer system that allows teachers to share effective instructional strategies between schools. The remaining $4.35 billion in the fund will be awarded to states, working with local districts, that have demonstrated innovative ways to boost student performance and closing the achievement gap. New York City can also apply for grants to expand its Schoolwide Performance Bonus Program, which rewards educators for improving student achievement, from the $200 million Teacher Incentive Funds.
Charter schools such as Brooklyn’s Explore Charter School may also be eligible to apply for funding for renovation and repair of school facilities. Named a National Charter School of the Year by the Center for Education Reform, Explore Charter earned an A on its 2007-2008 Progress Report. The school serves 425 students, and more than 1,700 families are on the school’s waiting list.
-30-
Contact: Stu Loeser / Marc LaVorgna (212) 788-2958
Jo Ann Webb (USDOE) (202) 401-1576
David Cantor (NYCDOE) (212) 374-5141
Austin Shafran (Sen. Smith) (917) 417-3711
Brian Gibbons (UFT) (212) 598-9233
Chiara Coletti (CSA) (718) 852-3000
February 19, 2009
No. 84
www.nyc.gov
MAYOR BLOOMBERG, U.S. SECRETARY OF EDUCATION DUNCAN, AND SCHOOLS CHANCELLOR KLEIN DETAIL HOW THE AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT WILL HELP NYC SCHOOLS
Stimulus Money Could Help City Avoid Severe Staffing Reductions in Public Schools
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg joined with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein today to announce how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will help New York City public schools in the coming years. Based on preliminary analysis, the City estimates it will receive $535 million in State Fiscal Stabilization Grants in each of the next two years, if the funds are allocated to local school aid through the traditional formulas. In addition to the stabilization grants, the City’s preliminary analysis estimates that its schools are eligible to receive in each of the next two years approximately $300 million from an expansion of Title I funds for high-needs students, approximately $100 million from the expansion of Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funding, and more than $25 million in educational technology funds. At today’s announcement, the Mayor, Secretary, and Chancellor were joined by State Senate Majority Leader Malcolm A. Smith, Assemblywoman Rhoda S. Jacobs, the American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, Council of School Supervisors and Administrators President Ernest Logan, and Explore Charter School Founder and Director Morty Ballen in Brooklyn.
“Support from Washington will help us to weather this economic crisis. Working with the State, we hope we’ll be able to keep more of our teachers in our public school classrooms,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “We all want to ensure that our schools keep innovating and that our students keep learning – while shielding our schools and classrooms from potential harm. I am confident our colleagues in Albany will join me in making our difficult budget situation as tolerable as possible for all of our schools.”
“We’re not just facing an economic crisis in America. We’re facing an education crisis. A University of Washington report says up to 600,000 education jobs are at risk,” said Secretary Duncan. “But we’re also facing a historic opportunity to remake public education – a once-in-a-lifetime chance to lift the quality of education for every child in America.”
“Stimulus dollars will go a long way in helping us to prevent our country’s financial crisis from turning into a crisis in our classrooms,” said Chancellor Klein. “We look forward to working with our partners at the State level to ensure this money is directed equitably and where it’s needed the most – our classrooms.”
“The passage of the federal stimulus bill will allow New York school children, their parents and their teachers, to rest easier in the coming budget year,” said State Senate Majority Leader Smith. “With the influx of desperately needed funding, I am confident that we will continue to make a meaningful investment in our most critical resource – our children. Our schools, from Binghamton to Brentwood, and every town in between, will benefit from the investments in the bill, particularly for our high needs districts throughout the state. I am hopeful that between the direct school grants, expanded state aid and opportunities for additional funding, we can continue to improve student performance while ensuring a wise and productive use of public funds.”
“Parents and teachers here in New York City and all across America are applauding President Obama for his strong and steadfast commitment to our nation’s children and public schools, and rightly so. In addition to providing a much needed boost for the economy, the stimulus package also represents an investment in education that will help prevent severe cuts to public services – a huge step to averting layoffs in schools and providing teachers and students with the tools and supports they need to succeed,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. “While this aid is exactly what our schools need, parents must understand that we are not out of the woods yet. The State has to make sure that the stimulus money is spent wisely and actually gets into classrooms. Even so, the package is truly a bold first step, and we are grateful to President Obama and Secretary Duncan for their recognition and support of public education.”
“We applaud President Obama and Congress for making education an important priority of the stimulus package and paying close attention to the needs of economically disadvantaged youngsters and special education students,” said Council of School Supervisors and Administrators President Ernest Logan. During this time of severe economic crisis, we look forward to working with the city and state to ensure that this funding goes as far as possible to protect our children's education.”
In addition to the stabilization funds, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act also allows states and school districts to apply for $5 billion in grants to support new approaches to closing the achievement gap and boosting student achievement . Working in cooperation with the -New York State Education Department, New York City would be able to use these funds to -continue building on the momentum of the reform efforts and enormous progress in improving graduation rates. These grants, which will be allocated by the U.S. Department of Education, are known as the Race to the Top Fund. This includes $650 million to provide funds to school districts that have made significant gains in closing the achievement gap to expand their work and to document and share their successful practices. These funds could help further implementation of the New York City Department of Education’s (DOE) computer system that allows teachers to share effective instructional strategies between schools. The remaining $4.35 billion in the fund will be awarded to states, working with local districts, that have demonstrated innovative ways to boost student performance and closing the achievement gap. New York City can also apply for grants to expand its Schoolwide Performance Bonus Program, which rewards educators for improving student achievement, from the $200 million Teacher Incentive Funds.
Charter schools such as Brooklyn’s Explore Charter School may also be eligible to apply for funding for renovation and repair of school facilities. Named a National Charter School of the Year by the Center for Education Reform, Explore Charter earned an A on its 2007-2008 Progress Report. The school serves 425 students, and more than 1,700 families are on the school’s waiting list.
-30-
Contact: Stu Loeser / Marc LaVorgna (212) 788-2958
Jo Ann Webb (USDOE) (202) 401-1576
David Cantor (NYCDOE) (212) 374-5141
Austin Shafran (Sen. Smith) (917) 417-3711
Brian Gibbons (UFT) (212) 598-9233
Chiara Coletti (CSA) (718) 852-3000
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Stop the use of teacher data reports and the abuse of standardized testing!
Email me if you want a pdf to circulate around your schoolJustice Not Just Tests Petition:
Stop the use of teacher data reports and the abuse of standardized testing!
We the undersigned UFT members:
Are opposed to the existence of the teacher data reports which rate teachers based on their student’s progress on standardized tests. These reports:
- Promote competition among teachers, discourage the use of creative or relevant pedagogy, force teachers to ignore diverse learning styles and promote test prep.
Are opposed to the use of merit pay which promotes testing, diverts much needed funds from schools ($20 million this year, with only a fraction of schools participating) and scapegoats teachers for government’s failure to address the socio/economic inequities faced by students and their communities.
Are opposed to any use of standardized tests for students in K-2 classrooms:
-- Standardized tests have a long and notorious history of misrepresenting the intellectual capabilities of young children based on race, class and immigrant status.
Oppose the use of standardized tests to close schools, which mostly occurs in schools with high percentages of low-income students and students of color:
- This is used to bully principals and teachers into narrowing the curriculum to test prep only; there is no evidence that closing schools improves education, but it does demoralize staff and communities; it is used to force the re-organization of schools which pushes more experienced, higher paid teachers out of the system.
We call on our union to:
- retract their support for the teacher data reports and merit pay programs
- to oppose all initiatives that promote a focus on standardized tests
- to oppose categorically the use of standardized tests in a high stakes manner
- support alternative assessments like portfolios and other performance based assessments
We are one hundred thousand working educators strong in the UFT. Join a grassroots movement within our union to promote the best interests of our school communities.
Sponsored by Justice-Not-Just-Tests (A NYCORE Working Group: www.nycore.org)
Name (Print) School Email (Not DOE E-mail) Phone (Optional)
Pleas send completed petitions to: or Email jnjt@nycore.org to arrange pick-up
JNJT or
425 11 street FAX 718-408-9472
brooklyn, ny, 11215
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Charter schools and the attack on public education
ISR Issue 62, November–December 2008
Charter schools and the attack on public education
By SARAH KNOPP
In a stock market prospectus uncovered by education author Jonathan Kozol, the Montgomery Securities group explains to Corporate America the lure of privatizing education. Kozol writes:
The idea that our education system should serve the needs of the free market and even be run by private interests is not new. “Those parts of education,” wrote the economist Adam Smith in his famous 1776 work, The Wealth of Nations, “for the teaching of which there are not public institutions, are generally the best-taught.”2 More recently, Milton Friedman introduced the idea of market-driven education in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom. With the economic downturn of the early 1970s, Friedman’s ultra-right-wing free-market ideas would become guiding principles for the U.S. government and be forced onto states throughout the world. The push toward privatization and deregulation, two of the key tenets of what is known as neoliberalism, haven’t just privatized formerly public services; they have unabashedly channeled public money into private coffers. “Philanthropreneurs,”3 corporations, and ideologues are currently using charter schools to accomplish these goals in education.
Friedman chose as his last battle before dying in 2006 to use his clout to push for the privatization of New Orleans’ public schools.4 He advocated for vouchers—government-funded certificates permitting parents to send their child to the school of their choice—but those who support his ideas have switched tracks slightly, pushing now for charter schools.
A charter school is any school that is funded publicly but governed by institutions outside the public school system. A company, a non-governmental organization, a university, or any group of people who write a charter can become autonomous from a public school board and control the budget, curriculum, and select the group of students in a school. They receive public money, and, in exchange, they set out quantifiable results that they will achieve. One quarter of charter schools are run by for-profit operators (called EMOs, Educational Management Organizations), but most are run by nonprofit entities (usually grouped under CMOs, Charter Management Organizations.)5
Charter schools take many different forms—“independent” charter schools, those that are overseen only by the state board of education, and “dependent” charter schools, those that report directly to the local school board. In both cases there is little oversight. There is also a difference between freestanding, “start-up” charters that are created from scratch, and conversions, where a charter operator takes over all (or part) of a previously existing public school, building and all.
Credit for the concept of charter schools has been given, depending on the source, to Ray Budde, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, and Al Shanker, the conservative leader of the American Federation of Teachers. But the early pioneers of the “small schools” movement, which has been transformed to some extent into the charter movement, were progressives who believed—rightly—that bureaucracy and mandates were harming children. Most of the early small schools were intended to be “laboratories” that could create “best practices” and pressure all public schools to adopt the same. People like Deborah Meier, who helped to create Central Park East Elementary School in Harlem, believed that they could create better schools by winning a degree of autonomy from school districts. And in many cases they did. The impulse today to win autonomy from school-district bureaucracy, mind-numbing standardized curriculum, and stifling and militaristic climates is even stronger, since No Child Left Behind legislation has accelerated these trends.
But many of the original small schools have largely been dismantled. They have collapsed or been taken apart under the pressure of the enormous weight of standardization pushed since No Child Left Behind. Many have also been gobbled up by the corporate sector.
An important book by Michael and Susan Klonsky, early participants in Chicago’s small schools movement, Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society, tells an important story. The Klonskys, longtime advocates of small and autonomous schools, chronicle in great detail how the concept of “autonomy”—which the pioneers had hoped would mean democracy—turned into privatization when it crashed into the slick and well-funded strategists of the “Ownership Society.”
Still, because the noble intentions of some of the pioneers of the charter school movement (to create laboratories that prove what all educators know: that creativity, individual attention, and curricular relevance are the roots of good education) took shape so recently, and because there are some good charter schools, many progressives are disoriented in the current climate. Teachers who support the idea of public education, while recognizing the horrible state of some of our schools, aren’t sure what to do or what position to take when their unions fail to oppose charters, or worse, even endorse them. Some of the best books on the topic, like Keeping the Promise? The Debate Over Charter Schools, published by Rethinking Schools, provide a wealth of crucial information and perspectives for those concerned with education. While it argues that “school reform cannot be isolated from solving society’s larger injustices,” it is ambivalent about the impact of charter schools: “The question facing the charter school movement is whether it will fulfill its founding promise of reform that empowers the powerless, or whether it will become a vehicle to further enrich the powerful and stratify our schools.”7 Founding promises notwithstanding, an honest look at the balance of forces inside the charter movement makes a strong case for the latter. In another example, Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society ends up supporting the supposedly pro-union charter school Green Dot.
Liberals who support the idea of charter schools give cover to politicians who champion privatization schemes. One of the main platforms for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is support for charter schools. He told Teach for America, “I have been a big fan of public charter schools throughout my career. In the Illinois legislature, I was a leading advocate of public charters and helped pass legislation that authorized Chicago to create 15 new charter schools. I’ve said before that more resources alone will not improve our schools.”8 In a speech to the National Education Association this summer, Obama made two concrete policy suggestions about education—teacher bonuses based on students’ test scores, if the unions approve (merit pay by another name), and an increase in charter schools. Not surprisingly, Republican presidential candidate John McCain agreed totally, adding only that any obstacles to the expansion of charters should be wiped away. The candidates both recognize that charter schools can shift the blame for bad schools onto “bad management,” and can be used to justify the underfunding of public schools. They recognize that the dominant force within the charter school movement is that of corporate and nonprofit entrepreneurs. And so should we.
If we recognize the rapid acceleration of corporate-style charters, and admit that progressive forces are dwarfed by the billions of dollars invested in this movement by the private sector, we should try to group our forces around a completely different movement with a different vision rather than trying to recapture the charter movement (if it were ever ours).
Charter schools are, according to Kozol, a bridge toward vouchers:
Who’s driving the charter school movement?
Today more than one million children attend some four thousand charter schools nationally.10# The Chicago Teachers Union has shrunk by 10 percent since the onset of Renaissance 2010, a program to break away one hundred schools from the Chicago Public School District. In Los Angeles 7 percent of children in public school, 45,000 students, attend charter schools.11 And that number is growing rapidly: in California, charter schools grew by 13.2 percent in 2006/07, increasing to 617 schools.12 Joel Klein, chancellor of schools in the New York public school system, has announced his intention that all of New York’s schools should be charters.13 Thirty percent of the students in Dayton, Ohio, attend charter schools.14 About 30 percent of the children in Washington, D.C., attend these schools, and 9 percent in Arizona. Georgia has sixty charter schools, double what it had in 2005. Florida has 334, and Texas 237.15
The different pace at which states and districts are becoming “charterized” depends on the differing state laws governing charters and the degree of centralization in these areas. For example, charter schools seem to be moving most quickly in areas where control of the school district is centralized in the hands of a mayor or has been put into receivership by the state. The pace is especially quick in areas where local politicians have an explicit pro-charter and free market agenda, in areas where people are more disenfranchised (like in Washington, D.C.) or in areas where a “shock” (to use Naomi Klein’s metaphor) has wiped the slate clean for charter laboratories (like in New Orleans).
In New Orleans, 57 percent of public school students attended charter schools at the end of 2007, and that percentage has probably increased. Before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Public School Board ran 123 schools. After the storm, they were taken over by the state of Louisiana and most were turned over to subcontractors. There is now a three-tier school district; select students attend publicly funded charters, others attend state-run schools (the Recovery School District) with a student-to-teacher ratio as high as 40:1 in some schools and no local school board to complain to, and still another group attends the least desirable Orleans Parish schools, where there is a security guard for every thirty-seven students.16
An important article by Bill Quigley describes this system and tells how Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and the U.S. Department of Education had already put $20.9 million in special funds on the table for charter schools by September 30, 2005. (Another $20 million followed.)17 About two months later all 7,500 public school teachers and other school employees in New Orleans were fired and forced to reapply for their jobs, effectively busting the United Teachers of New Orleans. Over a year and a half later, as chronicled in the New Orleans Teachers Union Report No Experience Necessary: How the New Orleans School Takeover Experiment Devalues Experienced Teachers, well over three hundred students were still on wait-lists to gain admission to public schools. The shortages of classroom spaces in the public schools were so bad in 2007 that the NAACP filed suit on behalf of a wait-listed student.18 But the money was readily available, and the red tape not so thick, for privately run charters.
In one heroic case, parents, teachers, and students began squatting in Martin Luther King Jr. School in the Lower 9th Ward, in an attempt to force the reopening of the school. They were offered several million dollars if they would reopen—as a charter.19 In such cases, teachers and parents who decide to form charter schools don’t do so out of hostility to public schools, but out of necessity. In New Orleans in particular, this is a conscious design on the part of the charter movement.
Road to privatization?
This flood tide of charter schools leads some to believe that our school system may soon be wholly broken apart and effectively privatized; but what about the role of public education in supplying a steady stream of workers that have basic proficiencies in math and English necessary in the workplace?
Charter schools fit the needs of the establishment perfectly. Education is still compulsory and paid for by the state. Children are still controlled while their parents are at work, and this is still supported by our regressive tax structure. And charter schools are excellent teachers of free-market, “personal responsibility” ideology. The American Dream is promised to all those who strive to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. If you want your child to get ahead, make sure that he or she is one of the lucky few to get a seat in a charter school. For the rich, charters have added benefits; they are being used to dismantle the power of teachers’ unions, and they are excellent tools for channeling tax money into the pockets of enterprising individuals. This is true even when the charter schools are run by nonprofit companies. And no matter what the rhetoric dished out for public consumption, siphoning public money into private hands is the goal, as the statement by the Montgomery Securities group quoted above shows.
According to U.S. Census data, well over $800 billion is spent on education, public and private, at all levels in the United States each year.20 This makes it roughly the same size as the U.S. trade deficit with China. The private sector wants to get its hands on this money. Along with politicians, it is determined to break the power of the teachers’ unions and to attack one of the last bastions of decently paid American workers. The budget problems resulting from the current recession will provide them cover in doing this.
The Walton Family Foundation of Wal-Mart is the single biggest investor in charter schools in the United States, giving $50 million a year to support them.21 The Waltons specialize in giving money to opponents of public education. “Empowering parents to choose among competing schools,” said John Walton, son of Wal-Mart’s founder, “will catalyze improvement across the entire K–12 education system.”22 According to a National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) report, “Some critics argue that it is the beginning of the ‘Wal-Martization’ of education, and a move to for-profit schooling, from which the family could potentially financially benefit. John Walton owned 240,000 shares of Tesseract Group Inc. (formerly known as Education Alternatives Inc.), which is a for-profit company that develops/manages charter and private schools as well as public schools.”23 Wal-Mart is a notorious union-busting firm, famous for keeping its health-care costs down by discouraging unhealthy people from working at its stores, paying extremely low wages with poor benefits, and violating child labor laws. The company has reportedly looted more than $1 billion in economic development subsidies from state and local governments.24 Its so-called philanthropy seems also to be geared to the looting of public treasuries.
As for a coordinated effort, the private incursion into public schools is being pushed by a band of jackals grouped around Bill Gates and the $2 billion that his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have sunk into the education “reform” movement. The foundation funded a 2006 study by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce called Tough Choices or Tough Times, “signed by a bipartisan collection of prominent politicians, businesspeople, and urban school superintendents,” which
In the beginning, the Gateses used their dollars and employees to push school districts such as Los Angeles to break up mega-high schools into “small learning communities.” But now they are advising superintendents to give up that project and go straight for independent charters. Gates’ $60 million project, “Ed in ’08: Strong American Schools,”26 will use the elections this year to influence politicians to accept their three mandates: standardization of curriculum nationally, merit pay for teachers, and more time in schools. The campaign’s money comes from Bill Gates and Eli Broad, a Los Angeles real estate magnate. Roy Romer, the former superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, is its spokesman, and it counts among its supporters a diverse crowd—from Rod Paige, the former secretary of education, who once called teachers’ unions “terrorist organizations,” to Janet Murguia, president and CEO of the corporate-backed National Council of La Raza. It trumpets success stories, like its “Mission Possible: Greensboro, North Carolina,”27 where 383 teachers were paid bonuses in direct relation to their students’ test scores.
The movement also has regional boosters. In Los Angeles, Eli Broad, the billionaire who tried to engineer the mayoral takeover of Los Angeles schools, gave Steve Barr and his nonprofit Green Dot $10 million. Last spring Green Dot took over the 2,600-student Locke High School from the Los Angeles Unified School District and has a goal of expanding to forty-one schools throughout Los Angeles.28 Green Dot is supported by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who invited Green Dot executive Marshall Tuck onto his five-person educational advisory board. Villaraigosa is currently pushing for a $7 billion bond measure for the November ballot in Los Angeles, $450 million of which would be earmarked for charter schools if his friend (and former school board member) Caprice Young has her way.29 It’s not surprising that Green Dot’s ties with Democratic Party politicians are so strong, since founder Steve Barr cut his political teeth campaigning for Gary Hart, Bruce Babbitt, and Michael Dukakis.30
Globally, companies are being coached about how to get their hands on state money allocated for public services. An important new book called The Global Assault on Teachers and Their Unions: Stories for Resistance chronicles an international movement to privatize education.31 “Education corporations” are popping up in China on the ashes of public elementary schools. “City Academies” in England are being handed over to private sponsors. Reports shared among these policy-makers offer strategies for how to accomplish this deregulation. One such report is “The Politics of Education Reform: Bolstering the Supply and Demand: Overcoming Institutional Blocks,” published by the World Bank in 1999.32 (The institutional “blocks” are, of course, teachers’ organizations.)
There is no monolithic bloc of evil government and corporate forces marching along a single road map to privatization. Some charter schools were created on the genuine initiative of community members or teachers and parents. In some schools, like ones based specifically on antiracist curriculum, students are undoubtedly learning in a better atmosphere than they were before. But in Los Angeles, for example, while these represent only a handful of the 147 charters, dominated by EMOs and CMOs, they are used to blunt criticism of the dominant, corporate trend in the charter school movement.
There are a few pernicious assumptions shared by almost all charter operators, large and small, for-profit and nonprofit, dependent and independent, start-ups or conversions. The first assumption is that government education budgets will stay the same or continue to decrease. If it is given that public schools will be underfunded, the charter movement touts the belief that schools can succeed by having better management—less bureaucracy and corruption. The second shared assumption is that there is a role for the private sector in decision-making. Those who realize that money does make the difference in schools are attracted by the lucrative “partnership” contracts and money being dangled in front of charter schools by corporate interests. Others simply believe that private forces will be more efficient managers of schools than public school boards. And the corporate interests simply want to get their hands on the money. But all concede a role for private forces in running the schools. A third premise is that teachers’ right to collective representation and bargaining is an institutional “block” to progress, because teachers are in some way to blame for the abysmal state of the schools. We have to push back against these assumptions if we are to win quality education for all.
On what grounds do we object to charter schools?
While nonprofit charter schools are more pervasive than their for-profit counterparts, for the quarter of charters that are for-profit, the obvious problem is that the drive to make a profit will compromise educational quality. And for-profits and non-profits are under similar pressure to expand as quickly as possible.
Edison Schools Incorporated is one of the largest for-profit charter school companies. It ran twenty schools in Philadelphia alone until it was discredited this year. With board members like John Chubb of the Hoover Institution and Brookings Institution, it made a bald-faced attempt to turn millions of dollars in profits by controlling 157 schools. (Not very successfully, though; it was traded on the NASDAQ for four years but only showed one quarter of profitability.33) The most fundamental problem with a private model of education is that a company’s profits depend directly on cost-cutting. The cheaper the services they provide, just as in private prisons and hospitals, the more profit they turn. So there is always an incentive to do things on the cheap—poorly maintained physical plant and equipment, low pay for teachers and other staff, and larger class sizes mean bigger rates of return.
The dynamic works in fundamentally similar ways with nonprofit entities. The pressure to cut costs in order to have money left over for expansion forces nonprofit entities to act in a similar fashion to their for-profit cousins. Every nonprofit charter operator is under immense pressure right now to expand as quickly as possible and to measure success by how quickly they are able to replicate themselves. The newest mandate from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is that we need to close thousands of broken inner-city schools and replace them with charters. There is fierce competition over who will get the contracts, especially among nonprofits. And nonprofits are, of course, allowed to pay their administrators very high salaries as well as keeping a small profit.
And then there is corruption. Celerity, a nonprofit charter school that made an attempt to co-locate on the campus of Wadsworth Elementary in Los Angeles, contracts out all its services to a for-profit firm, Nova, run by the same owner. This backdoor model—of a nonprofit funneling dollars to a separate, for-profit entity—is common. Kent Fischer explained it in the St. Petersburg Times:
The profit motive drives business…. More and more, it’s driving Florida school reform. The vehicle: charter schools. This was not the plan. These schools were to be “incubators of innovation,” free of the rules that govern traditional districts. Local school boards would decide who gets the charters, which spell out how a school will operate and what it will teach. To keep this deal, lawmakers specified that only nonprofit groups would get charters. But six years later, profit has become pivotal.... For-profit corporations create nonprofit foundations to obtain the charters, and then hire themselves to run the schools.34
Whether it’s technically legal, “contracting out” or direct corruption and profiteering, abounds. In their article “The Corporate Surge Against Public Schools,” Steven Miller and Jack Gerson cite many cases of such corruption. Brenda Belton, charter oversight chief for the D.C. Board of Education, admitted to arranging $650,000 in sweetheart contracts for herself and her friends, and C. Steven Cox, CEO of a large chain of charter schools in California, was indicted on 113 felony counts of misappropriating public funds.35
Charters don’t perform better.
As far as teaching American kids high-level skills to get them ready for the job market, data conflict (at best) as to whether charter schools fail more often than public schools do. The New York Times, in an editorial titled “Exploding the Charter School Myth,” uses statistics from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to argue that fourth-graders in freestanding charter schools showed worse performance than their public school counterparts in math and reading scores. (The data were different, however, for those students in charter schools affiliated with public school districts.) As the editorial argues, “the problem with failing public schools is that they often lack both resources and skilled, experienced teachers. While there are obvious exceptions, some charter schools embark on a path that simply re-creates the failures that they were developed to replace.”36
According to the important book Charter School Dustup: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement,37 a study published in 2005 by scholars with the Economic Policy Institute and the Teachers’ College at Columbia University, “an analysis of California found that socioeconomically disadvantaged Asian-origin and Latino students in charter schools had composite test scores (literacy, mathematics, science, and social studies) that were about 4 to 5 percent lower than their counterparts in public primary schools.” Overall, in every state besides Arizona, they found charter schools’ performance is no higher than that of public schools in every demographic category. The comparisons were no better for low-income Black students.
The charter school movement cooks the books to try and prove otherwise. KIPP Schools, a nonprofit company that runs fifty-two schools nationwide and was formed in a partnership between ex–Teach for America (an anti-union organization) teachers and Donald Fisher, cofounder of Gap Inc., illustrates this point. It claims the highest test scores in the Bronx. But one comparison found that 42 percent of entering fourth-graders entering the KIPP school passed state reading tests, as compared to 25 percent for the surrounding public schools. They are starting with a group of students who already have better test scores.
In California, charter schools did worse than regular public schools at achieving their Adequate Yearly Progress goals, even though those goals are flawed because they are set by No Child Left Behind mandates.38 By a slightly better measure, “academic momentum,” which tries to measure improvements in schools, 24.8 percent of charter schools, and only 19.6 percent of public schools earned a “high” ranking. But by the same token, 26.3 percent of charter schools got a “poor” ranking, as compared to only 19.6 percent of public schools. The best charter schools seem to be improving slightly faster than California public schools, but a higher percentage of charter schools perform poorly. Perhaps charter schools aren’t the great equalizers that they claim to be.
When charters do succeed, it’s because they have lots of extra money. All schools should have access to these extra funds—especially the ones that need it most!
This is seen most acutely in New Orleans, where charter schools are in most cases genuinely better than the public schools because they receive a higher rate of funding. The charter schools funded by the Walton family, according to Liza Featherstone of the Nation, receive a higher per-pupil allotment than public schools.39 They are then used as a stick with which to beat public schools as though they were on a level playing field.
Additionally, at Granada Hills High School charter in Los Angeles, the governing board has been able to increase the amount of money flowing into the classrooms by cutting out the larger district bureaucracy to an extent. The fact that schools with more money can do better simply serves to make our point: that more money will make a better school. They all should have it, not a select few. If this means dramatically cutting bureaucracy everywhere, then that’s what we should stand for—not eviscerating public schooling.
The point is that public schools are of poor quality when they are underfunded; the poor quality is then used as an excuse for gutting public education even more. Using classic sharp business practices, the promoters of for-profit schooling are willing to pump some money into the charter schools in order to “prove” they are better, only to cut corners and boost profits once the charters have won the day.
Charters choose their students, which decreases the amount of power and due process that students and parents have. They are more likely to exclude English language learners and special education students. They pursue a different goal than fighting for quality education for all.
At KIPP schools, like many other charters, a condition of admission is that students’ parents have to spend a certain amount of volunteer time at the school. This automatically excludes children whose parents already spend the least time with them (due to working multiple jobs, lack of child care, or any number of difficult issues). While in some cases strictly competitive admissions cannot be used in charters receiving federal funds (although the rules are very flexible, as in New Orleans), these schools can select their students and transfer or expel students with less due process than they are afforded in regular schools.
This means, firstly, that charter schools select for students with the most resourceful parents, the children who already have a head start in the race. Miranda Restovic told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that she felt like she was applying to college when she tried to get her three-year-old into a charter school. “Although I am thrilled with the increased public school options, I am skeptical as to the (admissions) processes being friendly to all families,” Restovic said. “It’s really difficult if you don’t have the time to make constant inquiries and don’t have connections at the school to call and prod.”40
A study of California charter schools by USC bears out Restovic’s observation. The parents of students The parents of students in California charter schools are more educated than their public school counterparts. Sixty percent of parents whose children attend charter schools had attended at least some college, as compared to 54 percent of parents of their public school counterparts. Forty percent of children in charter schools in California are on free or reduced lunch, as compared to the 50 percent average in California public schools overall.41
English language learners (ELL) are less likely to go to charter schools; in California, 16 percent of charter school students are ELL, as compared to 25 percent in other public schools.42 Charters, whether consciously or unconsciously, select for those students who are going to boost their test scores the most. Once English language learners get to charter schools, they may not be getting the services that they need: 44.9 percent of charter schools in the USC study ranked poorly for reclassification of students to Fluent English Proficient.43
Secondly, charters’ ability to select students fundamentally changes the dynamics of the relationship between parents and schools. Parents of struggling students, or those who disagree with the charter board, or who don’t fulfill obligations for the school are always under threat of transfer to another school. They don’t have the same potential power and due process that they do in a public school that their child is required to attend by law.
“Autonomy” for whom? Who calls the shots?
Green Dot, the Broad- (and Gates-?) funded nonprofit that runs twelve schools in Los Angeles, takes over schools by promising equality and evoking civil rights language like “grass-roots control.” For teachers, it promises more local control over curriculum. We want to get away, it argues to teachers hungry for such promises, from mandates and scripts. The problem is that this academic freedom is a lie. These schools are measured by the same standardized tests that all schools are, and they are well aware of it. There is no less—and arguably more—pressure for a charter to “teach to the test” since their raison d’être is that they can help students to “perform better.”
Green Dot promises more academic freedom and local control. A couple of paragraphs from Green Dot’s own website, however, illustrate the limitations of these promises.
In addition, Green Dot can, unlike regular public schools, refuse to admit new students if it is full.
In the agreement between Green Dot and the Asociacion de Maestros/NEA/AFT, the bargaining representative of the teachers, it is made clear in no uncertain terms that “the Board maintains final authority over decisions regarding adminstrative decisions.” Unlike most charter school companies, Green Dot accepts unions. However, according to a New York Times report, “The union representing Green Dot teachers...has a 33-page contract that offers competitive salaries but no tenure, and it allows class schedule and other instructional flexibility outlawed by the 330-page contract governing most Los Angeles schools.”45
An NPR report describes the tremendous pressure put on teachers in a KIPP school.
The same report explains that during the nine-hour school days at KIPP academies, students practice “call and response” style learning; in other words, they are taught to “respond in unison” as the teacher snaps her fingers; a traditional rote method not particularly designed to encourage teacher or student creativity. The picture of conformity is reinforced by the fact that most charter school companies require their students to wear uniforms.
Schools will be better when teachers are paid more and the profession is more attractive. Teachers’ unions are a fundamental part of winning this; and the charter school movement is an attack on these unions.
It’s clear that the high-powered think tanks and business-driven efforts to promote charter schools are part of a package that includes eliminating teachers’ unions. In New York City, for example, right-wing foundations, with the support of billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Department of Education chancellor Joel Klein, are working to keep unions out of the city’s charter schools. In November 2005 the Atlantic Legal Foundation—“a legal arm of the most stridently anti-union corporations and allied far-right interest groups”47—held a seminar in New York City at the prestigious Harvard Club to discuss “union prevention” in the city’s forty-seven charter schools.48 The conference’s opening session was entitled, “Leveling the Playing Field: What New York Charter School Leaders Need to Know About Union Organizing.” Among the scheduled speakers at a main panel were Caryl Cohen, a representative of New York’s Department of Education’s charter school arm, the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence, and Norman Atkins, one of the the founders and leaders of two charter school networks Chancellor Joel Klein has invited to New York. According to Atkins, the consensus of the panel was that “good charter schools organize themselves in ways that keep unions out.”49
“Local control” should include the right to teacher self-representation as well as an independent voice for parents and students. But most charters, even those that wear the progressive mantle, are hostile to this idea. An excellent example is the Los Angeles Leadership Academy run by Roger Lowenstein. It is a “social justice school” that encourages teachers to use lessons from movements for social change, and encourages students to attend antiwar demonstrations. The school recruits teachers who have been involved in community organizing and who are committed to progressive, antiracist pedagogy.
The teachers learned a lesson in social justice, though, when they tried to win the right to representation and collective bargaining by affiliating to the California Teachers Association. Roger Lowenstein hired high-paid anti-union law firms to keep the union out in what one veteran union organizer called “one of the toughest oppositions a teachers’ union has possibly ever faced.”50 Lowenstein argued to the Public Employee Relations Board that it should have no role in overseeing the union election or investigating unfair labor practices because the Leadership Academy is “not a public school.” If he was referring to the decision-making process—rather than the source of funding, which is, of course, public—he is absolutely right. Teachers quickly found out that the school’s advocacy for struggle, protest, and collectively “speaking truth to power” rang hollow when it came to their right to organize themselves.
The main source of poor school quality (and poor performance) is that public schools, at least in poor and working-class communities, are deliberately underfunded and resource starved, precisely in communities where more resources are needed for these schools to succeed; they are then expected to perform according to criteria that their lack of funding makes difficult for them to fulfill. The failure is then used to justify more public school cuts and the diversion of public funds into charter schools.
The next biggest factor in the quality of the school is the quality of teaching. This is directly related to the ability of teachers to shape the curriculum, the amount of collaborative planning time and individual tutoring time that they have, and their rate of pay and experience. All these things increase with the power of teachers’ unions. So if one accepts the idea that unions can play the role of fighting for better quality schools, more democratic accountability of schools, and better compensation for teachers, and that these are essential for good schools, then unions for teachers should be a community demand. This may not happen, however, until teachers’ unions prove through action that they support the needs and struggles of the parents and students in their communities. But teachers cannot have a serious voice in any process of school improvement unless they have the right to collective bargaining.
The slow destruction of union power that occurs when subcontracting creates lots of small workplaces—in place of large, highly unionized ones—has been a fact across many industries. “Whipsawing” is a term used to describe the effect on unions like the UAW when workers in smaller, spun-off shops get inferior contracts, and those contracts are used to pressure workers in bigger plants to accept similar concessions. The same could apply to the effect of charter schools in education.
Some suggest, then, that we have to seek out “pro-union” charter operators and make deals with them. But if we are speaking of privately run CMOs, then genuine power for their teachers would threaten the board’s hegemony in the schools. Some, like Green Dot, are willing to allow teachers a contract, and claim to be pro-union. But in their contract with the AMU/CTA/NEA teachers’ union, one can find few guarantees of any kind of real teacher voice (in the form of voting). According to the contract between Green Dot and the “union,” in effect until 2010,
The Board will make all staffing decisions. By contrast, the United Teachers of Los Angeles contract with Los Angeles Unified District requires faculty votes on key aspects of running the school, like the schedule and certain discretionary budget items, and guarantees that class assignments will be chosen by the teachers, through seniority, and not arbitrarily by the administration.52 This vision of unionism, typified by SEIU (a representative of which sits on Green Dot’s board) is antithetical to real power or democracy for teachers. A large union cuts a deal with the employer, quickly begins to collect dues from members, and in exchange for “neutrality” on the part of the boss gives away key workplace rights. Green Dot specifically aims to hire younger, more inexperienced teachers and gives incentives for senior teachers to leave.
Many suspect Green Dot of signing somewhat toothless union contracts as a way of keeping more combative unions out. This wouldn’t be surprising given the presence of SEIU on their board of directors. SEIU is currently engaged in undermining the legitimate teachers’ union of Puerto Rico (the FMPR) in the wake of the strike that the FMPR led last spring. After the strike, the Puerto Rican government decertified the FMPR. SEIU helped the Asociacion de Maestros (coincidentally, the same name as the teachers’ union at Green Dot schools) to try to win representation of the Puerto Rican teachers. The FMPR was not allowed to contest them.53
Their strategy and ours
New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein has openly declared his wish to make all New York public schools charter schools. Rather than oppose the idea outright, then-United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten chose to play ball on the chancellor’s field. In addition to inviting Steve Barr of Green Dot to New York to partner with the UFT in opening Green Dot schools, she also conceded that New York teachers would be willing to accept some form of merit pay. Merit pay hooks teacher bonuses (money that otherwise could be spent on salaries) to student test performance.
If this “appeasement” strategy was designed to convince Klein to stop blaming teachers for the problems in New York’s schools, it didn’t work. Shortly thereafter, Klein teamed up with civil rights figure Al Sharpton to launch the Education Equality Project, whose main goal is to remove the “block” that the teachers’ union supposedly creates to “reform.” Sharpton said, “But we cannot say that we’re going to close this achievement gap but protect ineffective teachers or principals or school chiefs or not challenge parents.”54 Perhaps if the teachers in New York had decided to build genuine alliances with New York parents—particularly in communities of color—to fight for access to more resources, against dictatorial mandates, and to define what “quality education” means from the ground up, then Sharpton wouldn’t have gotten any traction for blaming the teachers. A more convincing explanation for failure of Black students is gross underfunding and pervasive segregation.
Weingarten may also justify her actions on the basis that we have to make concessions to some charter schools—and so we may as well pick the “pro-union” ones. But rather than trying to play an appeasement game with charters, we should oppose them. The charter school movement may have to slow down under the weight of their own contradictions—they promise better scores but can’t deliver because their modus operandi rests on stripping teachers of their rights and, in many cases, maximizing profits. But another factor that will determine the pace of privatization is the amount and quality of struggle that we can wage, and the clarity with which we can wage it. And whether, in the process, we can begin to cooperate as parents, teachers, and students to formulate those demands that would begin to shape public education to meet the goals and vision that most people have for it.
A few examples illustrate the kind of struggles that might hold out hope for our side. In February 2008, 26,000 Puerto Rican teachers struck for more than a week against the colonial government’s plans for education. The strike had many demands—opposing Law 45 that outlaws public sector strikes on the island, just salaries for teachers, and the right to democratically choose their representation in collective bargaining. Among those demands, though, was one to stop the creep of charters into Puerto Rican education. At the conclusion of the strike, an agreement was signed by teachers’ union president Rafael Feliciano-Hernandez and the minister of education on the island guaranteeing to keep charter schools out. The agreement will be hard to enforce, but it established a precedent of teachers fighting the seemingly inevitable tide of privatization. (It’s also important to note that the Puerto Rican teachers’ resistance to charters began in 1993, which may explain why they’ve staved them off). Yet, as we can see from the above-mentioned joint attack from Puerto Rico’s governor and SEIU, the struggle is far from over.
The other examples are smaller in scope. In 2004, as many of Chicago public schools were threatened with mass closures, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system developed a plan to close Senn High School on the North Side and turn it into a Naval Academy charter school. The ominous move to establish military charter schools—spurred by the military’s shrinking pool of willing volunteers as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grind on—is not limited to Senn, nor to Chicago alone, as one 2008 report outlines:
According to Jesse Sharkey, a teacher at Senn,
In the end, the Senn students, parents, and teachers won a partial victory. The school stayed open. However, in compliance with a December 2004 decision by the school board, one wing of their building was occupied by the Naval Academy. The charter fixed up their wing of the dilapidated building, including adding new air-conditioning, new computers, and science labs. The academy students, housed in the same building as “regular” Senn students, wear their own uniforms, have their own teachers, and operate by their own rules. The body of Senn was saved through the activism of its community—but one of its limbs has been infected by the viral creep of the charter movement working in conjunction with the military.
In a similar vein, teachers and parents in Los Angeles mounted a fight against charter takeover of school space in 2008. In California, Proposition 39 states that charter schools should be given access to space in public education buildings that is not being utilized. This seems like a strange concept in a city where tens of thousands of students go to “year-round” schools due to overcrowding, and trailer-like bungalows have taken over the recreation areas of most schools to create extra space. Nevertheless, forty charters completed applications to co-locate on Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD) campuses in the fall of 2008. They had receptive friends on the school board. However, in some notable cases, they were stymied. A group of more than seventy parents as well as teachers from Wadsworth Elementary spoke at and protested an LAUSD board meeting to keep Celerity Charter School off their campus—and won. Similar organizing happened at Logan Elementary, where a proposal to house middle-school children on an elementary school campus was being considered. In fact, according to an estimate by Crenshaw High School UTLA Chapter Chair Alex Caputo-Pearl, parents, students, and teachers at fifteen of the forty schools facing co-location with charters organized against them. At the time of writing, only sixteen of the forty applications for co-location had been accepted by LAUSD. The protests are widely seen as the reason why more charters were not accepted onto LAUSD campuses.
It appears that the charter school movement can be opposed, but it has to be fought school by school. In schools where there are parents, teachers, and students who understand the issues and can oppose charter takeover, charters can be stopped. These small struggles will not, however, stem the national tide until they are strong and viable enough to cohere into a powerful movement for a different vision of public education. The only way to challenge charter schools is to show that they are a stepping stone to privatization, that is, to the denial of publicly funded education as a basic right for all. Also, in their current status, in most instances, charters offer opportunities for private interests to profit by siphoning state funds. We must show that public education suffers not because it is public, but because it is poorly funded by states with other priorities, such as funding corporate handouts.
Here are some ideas for what we can do to begin to win the battle for public education:
1. Fight for resources
We cannot accept the logic that the amount of money available to schools is fixed, even in the current economic meltdown. At the state level, corporate tax rates are criminally low, and at the federal level, a tiny fraction of the money going to the war in Iraq would make giant strides toward fixing our schools. In every case the charter schools that do the best are the ones that receive extra money (usually from private foundations who want to see public schools replaced by charters). There is nothing complicated about the fact that more resources make better schools. If politicians didn’t believe this, they wouldn’t send their students to private schools that spend ten thousand or twenty thousand dollars more per student per year than our public schools do. Granted, only a massive struggle on the scale of the civil rights movement will force them to give us what we want for all children, not just their own. Students should not have to compete to get into the best schools while others are abandoned to horrible conditions in schools festering like wounds in already devastated neighborhoods. All schools need to be made better.
2. Wage an educational campaign against charters.
To date, none of the large teachers’ unions has launched a public relations battle against the charter takeover. Often the objection is that this is too politically difficult, since “the public supports charters.” This is not surprising, though, given that no national force has ever made the case against them. No doubt we’ll lose a battle that we choose not to fight.
3. Welcome charter schoolteachers into our unions but demand that they have all the key provisions of our contracts.
Charter schoolteachers aren’t the enemy. We welcome them into our unions, but must demand that they have all the key contract provisions that larger locals have. We should try to group them into larger bargaining units to avoid the fracturing of our power that happens when we are balkanized. We also can’t allow organizing to try to improve and democratize these charter schools to rob resources from our large public schools. If we wage these fights, charters can’t gain the traction that they need to continue their expansion. Teachers’ unions need to resist the temptation to fall into an organizing model that values representation at whatever cost—a model to which much of the rest of the labor movement has resorted. If we don’t have strong contracts that help to win better conditions for students and teachers and democratize the decision-making process in the schools, unions aren’t worth much.
4. Fight all mandates and corporate incursions into our schools.
Charter schools are just the extreme end of the whole spectrum of the corporate takeover of our schools. Already, schools that are wholly public are being forced into serving the military and business interests of this country. The tendrils of Corporate America reach deep into our schools via nepotistic contracts—from the $3 billion testing industry accelerated under No Child Left Behind, to McGraw-Hill and its Reading First program pushed through by the Bush administration. And as Jonathan Kozol chronicles in Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, teaching children obedience and corporate values (such as kindergartners being asked to role-play workplace managers) is, along with drill-and-kill methodologies, increasingly erasing all the best practices that came out of the educational reforms of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. We need to oppose mandates and all incursions of the private sector into the running of our schools.
New visions for the kind of schools that we want for our children will rise out of the struggles against the attacks that we are facing. This is fundamentally about fighting for democracy in the schools.
At Woodland Hills Academy, the parents and teachers at the school have appealed for (and won) a degree of autonomy from Los Angeles Unified School District, even though the school is not a charter. They have set up a Humanities Academy that makes financial and curricular decisions democratically. The school is known as a college- prep middle school, and has very good performance by all measures. The example of Woodland Hills Academy suggests that the things that are most tempting about some of the better charters—control over what is taught, escape from drill-and-kill mentality, and democratic decision-making—can be achieved inside the public school system as well, by teachers, parents, and students organizing.
In other areas, too, teachers’ unions have partnered with others to try to create innovative schools that attempt to wriggle out from under the grasp of mandates and bureacratic decisions. In Boston, the Pilot School project has done this, and in Los Angeles, Innovation Division schools are experimenting with more collaborative and autonomous decision-making within the schools.57
Teachers who are committed to social justice should put themselves in the camp of those who have fought through direct action for equal access to quality public education. Our role models should reach from the former slaves who forced the Freedmen’s Bureau to create the first public schools in the South and the students who pushed for integration of the public school system during the civil rights movement, to the undocumented students fighting for access to public universities in the United States today.
As long as we have a system built on inequality, the policy makers will attempt to use schools to institutionally and ideologically buttress the division between the haves and have-nots. They will mostly succeed. But in the struggles to come for genuine equality, access to schools to meet the needs of every single child, not a select few among those who live in poverty, will be a call and a slogan of our movements. For the vast majority, this means quality education in public schools. Those who join that fight will determine what the word “quality” means, and will have an opportunity to force these concessions from policy makers until people decide that concessions are not enough.
Sarah Knopp is a teacher in Los Angeles.
1 Jonathan Kozol, “The big enchilada,” Harper’s Magazine, August 2007.
2 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 721.
3 Term coined by Steven Miller and Jack Gerson. Their article “The corporate surge against public schools” can be found at www.educatorroundtable.net/showDiary.do?diaryId=718.
4 See Milton Friedman, “The promise of vouchers,” Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2005.
5 Michael Klonsky and Susan Klonsky, Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society (New York: Routledge, 2008), 93.
6 Ibid.
7 Leigh Dingerson, Barbara Miner, Bob Peterson, and Stephanie Walters, eds. Keeping the Promise? The Debate Over Charter Schools (Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, 2008), xv.
8 Teach for America’s alumni magazine, One Day, allowed alumni to submit questions for Obama and McCain, www.teachforamerica.org/alumni/one_day/summer2008_electionwatch.htm.
9 “Separate and unequal: America’s apartheid schools,” interview in ISR 45, Jan–Feb 2006.
10 American Federation of Teachers, “Charter schools,” www.aft.org/topics/charters.
11 Howard Blume, “Ask a reporter,” Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2008.
12 “Charter schools indicators: A report from the Center on Educational Governance, University of Southern California,” www.usc.edu/dept/education/cegov/CSI_08_v6.pdf, 3.
13 One has to wonder whether this is because he recently received the $1 million Eli Broad Excellence in Education award.
14 Bill Quigley, “A special report on Katrina and education: experimenting on someone else’s children; fighting for the right to learn in New Orleans,” CounterPunch, August 6, 2007, www.counterpunch.org/quigley08062007.html.
15 Klonsky and Klonsky, Small Schools, 118; and Zein El-Amine and Lee Glazer, “‘Evolution’ or destruction? A look at Washington, D.C.,” in Keeping the Promise?, 53.
16 Leigh Dingerson, “Unlovely: How the market is failing the children of New Orleans,” Keeping the Promise?, 17.
17 Bill Quigley, “Fighting for the right to learn: the public education experiment in New Orleans two years after Katrina,” Black Agenda Report, August 8, 2007, www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?Itemid=33&id=307&option=com_content&task=view.
18 “No experience necessary: How the New Orleans school experiment devalues experienced teachers.” A joint report of the United Teachers New Orleans, Louisiana Federation of Teachers, and the American Federation of Teachers, June 2007. Available online at www.aft.org/presscenter/releases/downloads/NoExperReport_07.pdf.
19 “Privatization and the Katrina Solution,” Michael Molina interviewed by Gillian Russom and Sarah Knopp, Socialist Worker, May 28, 2008.
20 U.S. Census Bureau, “School expenditures, by type of control and level of instruction in constant (2003-2004) dollars, 1970-2004,” www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2007/tables/07s0205.xls.
21 Klonsky and Klonsky, Small Schools, 115.
22 Brian C. Hassell and Thomas Toch, “Big box: how the heirs of the Wal-Mart fortune have fueled the charter school movement,” November 7, 2006, Education Sector Connecting the Dots series, www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?doc_id=422193. John Walton died in a plane crash in 2005.
23 Quoted in Bill Berkowitz, “Philanthropy the Wal-Mart way,” Media Transparency, October 12, 2005, www.mediatransparency.com/story.php?storyID=88.
24 Joe Allen, “The horrible house of Walton,” Socialist Worker, December 2, 2005. See “Shopping for subsidies: how Wal-Mart uses taxpayer money to finance its never-ending growth,” Good Jobs First, May 2004; Amy Joyce, “Labor deal with Wal-Mart criticized,” Washington Post, November 1, 2005.
25 Steve Miller and Jack Gerson, “The corporate surge against public schools,” www.educatorroundtable.net/showDiary.do?diaryId=718.
26 See the Ed in ’08 site at www.edin08.com.
27 “Strong American schools: mission possible: Greensboro, North Carolina,” Ed in ’08, www.edin08.com/uploadedFiles/FAQs/SAS.MissionPossible.Nov14.2007.pdf.
28 Green Dot’s Board of Directors includes SEIU Local 1877’s president, Mike Garcia. SEIU has a very cozy relationship with those sections of Corporate America who have government contract services, and has a plan to “organize” charter schools, but they intend to do so by making deals with charter operators who will undermine some of the key elements of teachers’ power in collective bargaining.
29 Howard Blume, “Mayor pushes school bonds,” Los Angeles Times, June 19, 2008.
30 Howard Fine, “Unsentimental education,” Los Angeles Business Journal, June 4, 2007.
31 Mary Compton and Lois Weiner, eds., The Global Assault on Teachers and Their Unions: Stories for Resistance, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
32 “The politics of education reform: Bolstering supply and demand; Overcoming institutional blocks.” World Bank documents and reports. http://www-wds.worldbank.org:80/servlet/main?menuPK=64187510&pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=
523679&entityID=000094946_01082504044865.
33 Helen Huntley, “Legislators, teachers balk at deal for Edison Schools,” St. Petersburg Times, September 26, 2003, www.sptimes.com/2003/09/26/Businness/Legislators__?teachers.shtml.
34 Quoted in Klonsky and Klonsky, Small Schools, 108.
35 Miller and Gerson, “Corporate surge against public schools.”
36 Editorial, New York Times, August 27, 2006.
37 Martin Conroy, Rebecca Jacobsen, Lawrence Mishel, and Richard Rothstein. The Charter School Dustup: Examining Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement (Washington: Economic Policy Institute, 2005).
38 See “Charter schools indicators: a report,” 10.
39 Quoted in Klonsky and Klonsky, Small Schools, 145.
40 Sarah Carr, “Getting into New Orleans schools can be a tough task,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 17, 2008.
41 See “Charter schools indicators: a report,” 15.
42 Ibid., 16.
43 Ibid., 8.
44 See www.greendot.org/school_model.
45 Sam Dillon, “Maverick leads charge for charter schools,” New York Times, July 24, 2004.
46 Larry Abramson, “For charter schools, New Orleans is a citywide lab,” NPR, July 16, 2008.
47 Leo Casey, “Who’s afraid of teacher voice? Charter schools and union organizing,” November 17, 2005, Edwise, http://edwize.org/whos-afraid-of-teacher-voice-charter-schools-and-union-organizing.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Personal communication.
51 See “Agreement between Green Dot Public Schools, a California not-for-profit corporation and the Asociacion de Maestros Unidos/CTA/NEA effective through June 30, 2010.” An earlier version of the contract is available online at http://amunidos.org/pdf_docs/AMUContractFinal%20FY2006.pdf.
52 Ibid.
53 Marazan, Cesar Rosado. “SEIU to Raid Union Representing 40,000 Teachers in Puerto Rico.” Labor Notes Online, www.?labornotes.org/node/1517.
54 Greg Toppo, “Sharpton, education plan may tear union ties,” USA Today June 11, 2008.
55 Therese Quinn, Erica Meiners, Bill Ayers, “Child soldiers,” ?January 8, 2008, http://billayers.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/child-soldiersby-therese-quinn-erica-meiners-bill-ayers/.
56 Jesse Sharkey, “Get the military out of our schools,” Socialist Worker, October 14, 2008.
57 See Dan French, “Boston’s pilot schools: an alternative to charter schools” in Keeping the Promise?, 67.
Charter schools and the attack on public education
By SARAH KNOPP
In a stock market prospectus uncovered by education author Jonathan Kozol, the Montgomery Securities group explains to Corporate America the lure of privatizing education. Kozol writes:
“The education industry,” according to these analysts, “represents, in our opinion, the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control” that have either voluntarily opened or, they note in pointed terms, have “been forced” to open up to private enterprise. Indeed, they write, “the education industry represents the largest market opportunity” since health-care services were privatized during the 1970’s.... From the point of view of private profit, one of these analysts enthusiastically observes, “The K–12 market is the Big Enchilada.”1
The idea that our education system should serve the needs of the free market and even be run by private interests is not new. “Those parts of education,” wrote the economist Adam Smith in his famous 1776 work, The Wealth of Nations, “for the teaching of which there are not public institutions, are generally the best-taught.”2 More recently, Milton Friedman introduced the idea of market-driven education in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom. With the economic downturn of the early 1970s, Friedman’s ultra-right-wing free-market ideas would become guiding principles for the U.S. government and be forced onto states throughout the world. The push toward privatization and deregulation, two of the key tenets of what is known as neoliberalism, haven’t just privatized formerly public services; they have unabashedly channeled public money into private coffers. “Philanthropreneurs,”3 corporations, and ideologues are currently using charter schools to accomplish these goals in education.
Friedman chose as his last battle before dying in 2006 to use his clout to push for the privatization of New Orleans’ public schools.4 He advocated for vouchers—government-funded certificates permitting parents to send their child to the school of their choice—but those who support his ideas have switched tracks slightly, pushing now for charter schools.
A charter school is any school that is funded publicly but governed by institutions outside the public school system. A company, a non-governmental organization, a university, or any group of people who write a charter can become autonomous from a public school board and control the budget, curriculum, and select the group of students in a school. They receive public money, and, in exchange, they set out quantifiable results that they will achieve. One quarter of charter schools are run by for-profit operators (called EMOs, Educational Management Organizations), but most are run by nonprofit entities (usually grouped under CMOs, Charter Management Organizations.)5
Charter schools take many different forms—“independent” charter schools, those that are overseen only by the state board of education, and “dependent” charter schools, those that report directly to the local school board. In both cases there is little oversight. There is also a difference between freestanding, “start-up” charters that are created from scratch, and conversions, where a charter operator takes over all (or part) of a previously existing public school, building and all.
Credit for the concept of charter schools has been given, depending on the source, to Ray Budde, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, and Al Shanker, the conservative leader of the American Federation of Teachers. But the early pioneers of the “small schools” movement, which has been transformed to some extent into the charter movement, were progressives who believed—rightly—that bureaucracy and mandates were harming children. Most of the early small schools were intended to be “laboratories” that could create “best practices” and pressure all public schools to adopt the same. People like Deborah Meier, who helped to create Central Park East Elementary School in Harlem, believed that they could create better schools by winning a degree of autonomy from school districts. And in many cases they did. The impulse today to win autonomy from school-district bureaucracy, mind-numbing standardized curriculum, and stifling and militaristic climates is even stronger, since No Child Left Behind legislation has accelerated these trends.
But many of the original small schools have largely been dismantled. They have collapsed or been taken apart under the pressure of the enormous weight of standardization pushed since No Child Left Behind. Many have also been gobbled up by the corporate sector.
An important book by Michael and Susan Klonsky, early participants in Chicago’s small schools movement, Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society, tells an important story. The Klonskys, longtime advocates of small and autonomous schools, chronicle in great detail how the concept of “autonomy”—which the pioneers had hoped would mean democracy—turned into privatization when it crashed into the slick and well-funded strategists of the “Ownership Society.”
The first decentralizing wave of Chicago school reform was decimated by the 1995 mayoral takeover that saw many of the leaders of the small schools movement recruited into the district administration, charter school organization, or the foundations. Others were encouraged to become charter school operators themselves—and did. Surviving small schools were pressured to give up many of their innovations and conform to standardized, and even scripted, modes of instruction and assessment.6
Still, because the noble intentions of some of the pioneers of the charter school movement (to create laboratories that prove what all educators know: that creativity, individual attention, and curricular relevance are the roots of good education) took shape so recently, and because there are some good charter schools, many progressives are disoriented in the current climate. Teachers who support the idea of public education, while recognizing the horrible state of some of our schools, aren’t sure what to do or what position to take when their unions fail to oppose charters, or worse, even endorse them. Some of the best books on the topic, like Keeping the Promise? The Debate Over Charter Schools, published by Rethinking Schools, provide a wealth of crucial information and perspectives for those concerned with education. While it argues that “school reform cannot be isolated from solving society’s larger injustices,” it is ambivalent about the impact of charter schools: “The question facing the charter school movement is whether it will fulfill its founding promise of reform that empowers the powerless, or whether it will become a vehicle to further enrich the powerful and stratify our schools.”7 Founding promises notwithstanding, an honest look at the balance of forces inside the charter movement makes a strong case for the latter. In another example, Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society ends up supporting the supposedly pro-union charter school Green Dot.
Liberals who support the idea of charter schools give cover to politicians who champion privatization schemes. One of the main platforms for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is support for charter schools. He told Teach for America, “I have been a big fan of public charter schools throughout my career. In the Illinois legislature, I was a leading advocate of public charters and helped pass legislation that authorized Chicago to create 15 new charter schools. I’ve said before that more resources alone will not improve our schools.”8 In a speech to the National Education Association this summer, Obama made two concrete policy suggestions about education—teacher bonuses based on students’ test scores, if the unions approve (merit pay by another name), and an increase in charter schools. Not surprisingly, Republican presidential candidate John McCain agreed totally, adding only that any obstacles to the expansion of charters should be wiped away. The candidates both recognize that charter schools can shift the blame for bad schools onto “bad management,” and can be used to justify the underfunding of public schools. They recognize that the dominant force within the charter school movement is that of corporate and nonprofit entrepreneurs. And so should we.
If we recognize the rapid acceleration of corporate-style charters, and admit that progressive forces are dwarfed by the billions of dollars invested in this movement by the private sector, we should try to group our forces around a completely different movement with a different vision rather than trying to recapture the charter movement (if it were ever ours).
Charter schools are, according to Kozol, a bridge toward vouchers:
In the long run, charter schools are being strategically used to pave the way for vouchers. The voucher advocates, who are very powerful and funded by right-wing foundations and families, recognize that the word “voucher” has been successfully discredited.... They have now shrewdly decided the best way to break down resistance to vouchers is by supporting charters, which represents a halfway step in the same direction. One of the intentions of this, by creating selective institutions, usually with extra forms of funding, is to discredit the entire public enterprise in America. We already have the privatization of the military, as we’ve seen with the private military contractors in Iraq; we’ve seen the privatization of the prison system. Well, the next step is the privatization of public schools. It’s a matter of ideology. In rare occasions, a charter school created by teachers in the public system and in collaboration with activist parents in the community have had at least short-term success.... They tend very quickly—even when they’re started by teachers with the best intentions—to enter into collaboration with the private sector.9
Who’s driving the charter school movement?
Today more than one million children attend some four thousand charter schools nationally.10# The Chicago Teachers Union has shrunk by 10 percent since the onset of Renaissance 2010, a program to break away one hundred schools from the Chicago Public School District. In Los Angeles 7 percent of children in public school, 45,000 students, attend charter schools.11 And that number is growing rapidly: in California, charter schools grew by 13.2 percent in 2006/07, increasing to 617 schools.12 Joel Klein, chancellor of schools in the New York public school system, has announced his intention that all of New York’s schools should be charters.13 Thirty percent of the students in Dayton, Ohio, attend charter schools.14 About 30 percent of the children in Washington, D.C., attend these schools, and 9 percent in Arizona. Georgia has sixty charter schools, double what it had in 2005. Florida has 334, and Texas 237.15
The different pace at which states and districts are becoming “charterized” depends on the differing state laws governing charters and the degree of centralization in these areas. For example, charter schools seem to be moving most quickly in areas where control of the school district is centralized in the hands of a mayor or has been put into receivership by the state. The pace is especially quick in areas where local politicians have an explicit pro-charter and free market agenda, in areas where people are more disenfranchised (like in Washington, D.C.) or in areas where a “shock” (to use Naomi Klein’s metaphor) has wiped the slate clean for charter laboratories (like in New Orleans).
In New Orleans, 57 percent of public school students attended charter schools at the end of 2007, and that percentage has probably increased. Before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Public School Board ran 123 schools. After the storm, they were taken over by the state of Louisiana and most were turned over to subcontractors. There is now a three-tier school district; select students attend publicly funded charters, others attend state-run schools (the Recovery School District) with a student-to-teacher ratio as high as 40:1 in some schools and no local school board to complain to, and still another group attends the least desirable Orleans Parish schools, where there is a security guard for every thirty-seven students.16
An important article by Bill Quigley describes this system and tells how Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and the U.S. Department of Education had already put $20.9 million in special funds on the table for charter schools by September 30, 2005. (Another $20 million followed.)17 About two months later all 7,500 public school teachers and other school employees in New Orleans were fired and forced to reapply for their jobs, effectively busting the United Teachers of New Orleans. Over a year and a half later, as chronicled in the New Orleans Teachers Union Report No Experience Necessary: How the New Orleans School Takeover Experiment Devalues Experienced Teachers, well over three hundred students were still on wait-lists to gain admission to public schools. The shortages of classroom spaces in the public schools were so bad in 2007 that the NAACP filed suit on behalf of a wait-listed student.18 But the money was readily available, and the red tape not so thick, for privately run charters.
In one heroic case, parents, teachers, and students began squatting in Martin Luther King Jr. School in the Lower 9th Ward, in an attempt to force the reopening of the school. They were offered several million dollars if they would reopen—as a charter.19 In such cases, teachers and parents who decide to form charter schools don’t do so out of hostility to public schools, but out of necessity. In New Orleans in particular, this is a conscious design on the part of the charter movement.
Road to privatization?
This flood tide of charter schools leads some to believe that our school system may soon be wholly broken apart and effectively privatized; but what about the role of public education in supplying a steady stream of workers that have basic proficiencies in math and English necessary in the workplace?
Charter schools fit the needs of the establishment perfectly. Education is still compulsory and paid for by the state. Children are still controlled while their parents are at work, and this is still supported by our regressive tax structure. And charter schools are excellent teachers of free-market, “personal responsibility” ideology. The American Dream is promised to all those who strive to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. If you want your child to get ahead, make sure that he or she is one of the lucky few to get a seat in a charter school. For the rich, charters have added benefits; they are being used to dismantle the power of teachers’ unions, and they are excellent tools for channeling tax money into the pockets of enterprising individuals. This is true even when the charter schools are run by nonprofit companies. And no matter what the rhetoric dished out for public consumption, siphoning public money into private hands is the goal, as the statement by the Montgomery Securities group quoted above shows.
According to U.S. Census data, well over $800 billion is spent on education, public and private, at all levels in the United States each year.20 This makes it roughly the same size as the U.S. trade deficit with China. The private sector wants to get its hands on this money. Along with politicians, it is determined to break the power of the teachers’ unions and to attack one of the last bastions of decently paid American workers. The budget problems resulting from the current recession will provide them cover in doing this.
The Walton Family Foundation of Wal-Mart is the single biggest investor in charter schools in the United States, giving $50 million a year to support them.21 The Waltons specialize in giving money to opponents of public education. “Empowering parents to choose among competing schools,” said John Walton, son of Wal-Mart’s founder, “will catalyze improvement across the entire K–12 education system.”22 According to a National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) report, “Some critics argue that it is the beginning of the ‘Wal-Martization’ of education, and a move to for-profit schooling, from which the family could potentially financially benefit. John Walton owned 240,000 shares of Tesseract Group Inc. (formerly known as Education Alternatives Inc.), which is a for-profit company that develops/manages charter and private schools as well as public schools.”23 Wal-Mart is a notorious union-busting firm, famous for keeping its health-care costs down by discouraging unhealthy people from working at its stores, paying extremely low wages with poor benefits, and violating child labor laws. The company has reportedly looted more than $1 billion in economic development subsidies from state and local governments.24 Its so-called philanthropy seems also to be geared to the looting of public treasuries.
As for a coordinated effort, the private incursion into public schools is being pushed by a band of jackals grouped around Bill Gates and the $2 billion that his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have sunk into the education “reform” movement. The foundation funded a 2006 study by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce called Tough Choices or Tough Times, “signed by a bipartisan collection of prominent politicians, businesspeople, and urban school superintendents,” which
called for a series of measures including: (a) replacing public schools with what the report called “contract schools,” which would be charter schools writ large; (b) eliminating nearly all the powers of local school boards—their role would be to write and sign the authorizing agreements for the contract schools; (c) eliminating teacher pensions and slashing health benefits; and (d) forcing all 10th graders to take a high school exit examination based on 12th grade skills, and terminating the education of those who failed (i.e., throwing millions of students out into the streets as they turn 16).25
In the beginning, the Gateses used their dollars and employees to push school districts such as Los Angeles to break up mega-high schools into “small learning communities.” But now they are advising superintendents to give up that project and go straight for independent charters. Gates’ $60 million project, “Ed in ’08: Strong American Schools,”26 will use the elections this year to influence politicians to accept their three mandates: standardization of curriculum nationally, merit pay for teachers, and more time in schools. The campaign’s money comes from Bill Gates and Eli Broad, a Los Angeles real estate magnate. Roy Romer, the former superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, is its spokesman, and it counts among its supporters a diverse crowd—from Rod Paige, the former secretary of education, who once called teachers’ unions “terrorist organizations,” to Janet Murguia, president and CEO of the corporate-backed National Council of La Raza. It trumpets success stories, like its “Mission Possible: Greensboro, North Carolina,”27 where 383 teachers were paid bonuses in direct relation to their students’ test scores.
The movement also has regional boosters. In Los Angeles, Eli Broad, the billionaire who tried to engineer the mayoral takeover of Los Angeles schools, gave Steve Barr and his nonprofit Green Dot $10 million. Last spring Green Dot took over the 2,600-student Locke High School from the Los Angeles Unified School District and has a goal of expanding to forty-one schools throughout Los Angeles.28 Green Dot is supported by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who invited Green Dot executive Marshall Tuck onto his five-person educational advisory board. Villaraigosa is currently pushing for a $7 billion bond measure for the November ballot in Los Angeles, $450 million of which would be earmarked for charter schools if his friend (and former school board member) Caprice Young has her way.29 It’s not surprising that Green Dot’s ties with Democratic Party politicians are so strong, since founder Steve Barr cut his political teeth campaigning for Gary Hart, Bruce Babbitt, and Michael Dukakis.30
Globally, companies are being coached about how to get their hands on state money allocated for public services. An important new book called The Global Assault on Teachers and Their Unions: Stories for Resistance chronicles an international movement to privatize education.31 “Education corporations” are popping up in China on the ashes of public elementary schools. “City Academies” in England are being handed over to private sponsors. Reports shared among these policy-makers offer strategies for how to accomplish this deregulation. One such report is “The Politics of Education Reform: Bolstering the Supply and Demand: Overcoming Institutional Blocks,” published by the World Bank in 1999.32 (The institutional “blocks” are, of course, teachers’ organizations.)
There is no monolithic bloc of evil government and corporate forces marching along a single road map to privatization. Some charter schools were created on the genuine initiative of community members or teachers and parents. In some schools, like ones based specifically on antiracist curriculum, students are undoubtedly learning in a better atmosphere than they were before. But in Los Angeles, for example, while these represent only a handful of the 147 charters, dominated by EMOs and CMOs, they are used to blunt criticism of the dominant, corporate trend in the charter school movement.
There are a few pernicious assumptions shared by almost all charter operators, large and small, for-profit and nonprofit, dependent and independent, start-ups or conversions. The first assumption is that government education budgets will stay the same or continue to decrease. If it is given that public schools will be underfunded, the charter movement touts the belief that schools can succeed by having better management—less bureaucracy and corruption. The second shared assumption is that there is a role for the private sector in decision-making. Those who realize that money does make the difference in schools are attracted by the lucrative “partnership” contracts and money being dangled in front of charter schools by corporate interests. Others simply believe that private forces will be more efficient managers of schools than public school boards. And the corporate interests simply want to get their hands on the money. But all concede a role for private forces in running the schools. A third premise is that teachers’ right to collective representation and bargaining is an institutional “block” to progress, because teachers are in some way to blame for the abysmal state of the schools. We have to push back against these assumptions if we are to win quality education for all.
On what grounds do we object to charter schools?
While nonprofit charter schools are more pervasive than their for-profit counterparts, for the quarter of charters that are for-profit, the obvious problem is that the drive to make a profit will compromise educational quality. And for-profits and non-profits are under similar pressure to expand as quickly as possible.
Edison Schools Incorporated is one of the largest for-profit charter school companies. It ran twenty schools in Philadelphia alone until it was discredited this year. With board members like John Chubb of the Hoover Institution and Brookings Institution, it made a bald-faced attempt to turn millions of dollars in profits by controlling 157 schools. (Not very successfully, though; it was traded on the NASDAQ for four years but only showed one quarter of profitability.33) The most fundamental problem with a private model of education is that a company’s profits depend directly on cost-cutting. The cheaper the services they provide, just as in private prisons and hospitals, the more profit they turn. So there is always an incentive to do things on the cheap—poorly maintained physical plant and equipment, low pay for teachers and other staff, and larger class sizes mean bigger rates of return.
The dynamic works in fundamentally similar ways with nonprofit entities. The pressure to cut costs in order to have money left over for expansion forces nonprofit entities to act in a similar fashion to their for-profit cousins. Every nonprofit charter operator is under immense pressure right now to expand as quickly as possible and to measure success by how quickly they are able to replicate themselves. The newest mandate from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is that we need to close thousands of broken inner-city schools and replace them with charters. There is fierce competition over who will get the contracts, especially among nonprofits. And nonprofits are, of course, allowed to pay their administrators very high salaries as well as keeping a small profit.
And then there is corruption. Celerity, a nonprofit charter school that made an attempt to co-locate on the campus of Wadsworth Elementary in Los Angeles, contracts out all its services to a for-profit firm, Nova, run by the same owner. This backdoor model—of a nonprofit funneling dollars to a separate, for-profit entity—is common. Kent Fischer explained it in the St. Petersburg Times:
The profit motive drives business…. More and more, it’s driving Florida school reform. The vehicle: charter schools. This was not the plan. These schools were to be “incubators of innovation,” free of the rules that govern traditional districts. Local school boards would decide who gets the charters, which spell out how a school will operate and what it will teach. To keep this deal, lawmakers specified that only nonprofit groups would get charters. But six years later, profit has become pivotal.... For-profit corporations create nonprofit foundations to obtain the charters, and then hire themselves to run the schools.34
Whether it’s technically legal, “contracting out” or direct corruption and profiteering, abounds. In their article “The Corporate Surge Against Public Schools,” Steven Miller and Jack Gerson cite many cases of such corruption. Brenda Belton, charter oversight chief for the D.C. Board of Education, admitted to arranging $650,000 in sweetheart contracts for herself and her friends, and C. Steven Cox, CEO of a large chain of charter schools in California, was indicted on 113 felony counts of misappropriating public funds.35
Charters don’t perform better.
As far as teaching American kids high-level skills to get them ready for the job market, data conflict (at best) as to whether charter schools fail more often than public schools do. The New York Times, in an editorial titled “Exploding the Charter School Myth,” uses statistics from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to argue that fourth-graders in freestanding charter schools showed worse performance than their public school counterparts in math and reading scores. (The data were different, however, for those students in charter schools affiliated with public school districts.) As the editorial argues, “the problem with failing public schools is that they often lack both resources and skilled, experienced teachers. While there are obvious exceptions, some charter schools embark on a path that simply re-creates the failures that they were developed to replace.”36
According to the important book Charter School Dustup: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement,37 a study published in 2005 by scholars with the Economic Policy Institute and the Teachers’ College at Columbia University, “an analysis of California found that socioeconomically disadvantaged Asian-origin and Latino students in charter schools had composite test scores (literacy, mathematics, science, and social studies) that were about 4 to 5 percent lower than their counterparts in public primary schools.” Overall, in every state besides Arizona, they found charter schools’ performance is no higher than that of public schools in every demographic category. The comparisons were no better for low-income Black students.
The charter school movement cooks the books to try and prove otherwise. KIPP Schools, a nonprofit company that runs fifty-two schools nationwide and was formed in a partnership between ex–Teach for America (an anti-union organization) teachers and Donald Fisher, cofounder of Gap Inc., illustrates this point. It claims the highest test scores in the Bronx. But one comparison found that 42 percent of entering fourth-graders entering the KIPP school passed state reading tests, as compared to 25 percent for the surrounding public schools. They are starting with a group of students who already have better test scores.
In California, charter schools did worse than regular public schools at achieving their Adequate Yearly Progress goals, even though those goals are flawed because they are set by No Child Left Behind mandates.38 By a slightly better measure, “academic momentum,” which tries to measure improvements in schools, 24.8 percent of charter schools, and only 19.6 percent of public schools earned a “high” ranking. But by the same token, 26.3 percent of charter schools got a “poor” ranking, as compared to only 19.6 percent of public schools. The best charter schools seem to be improving slightly faster than California public schools, but a higher percentage of charter schools perform poorly. Perhaps charter schools aren’t the great equalizers that they claim to be.
When charters do succeed, it’s because they have lots of extra money. All schools should have access to these extra funds—especially the ones that need it most!
This is seen most acutely in New Orleans, where charter schools are in most cases genuinely better than the public schools because they receive a higher rate of funding. The charter schools funded by the Walton family, according to Liza Featherstone of the Nation, receive a higher per-pupil allotment than public schools.39 They are then used as a stick with which to beat public schools as though they were on a level playing field.
Additionally, at Granada Hills High School charter in Los Angeles, the governing board has been able to increase the amount of money flowing into the classrooms by cutting out the larger district bureaucracy to an extent. The fact that schools with more money can do better simply serves to make our point: that more money will make a better school. They all should have it, not a select few. If this means dramatically cutting bureaucracy everywhere, then that’s what we should stand for—not eviscerating public schooling.
The point is that public schools are of poor quality when they are underfunded; the poor quality is then used as an excuse for gutting public education even more. Using classic sharp business practices, the promoters of for-profit schooling are willing to pump some money into the charter schools in order to “prove” they are better, only to cut corners and boost profits once the charters have won the day.
Charters choose their students, which decreases the amount of power and due process that students and parents have. They are more likely to exclude English language learners and special education students. They pursue a different goal than fighting for quality education for all.
At KIPP schools, like many other charters, a condition of admission is that students’ parents have to spend a certain amount of volunteer time at the school. This automatically excludes children whose parents already spend the least time with them (due to working multiple jobs, lack of child care, or any number of difficult issues). While in some cases strictly competitive admissions cannot be used in charters receiving federal funds (although the rules are very flexible, as in New Orleans), these schools can select their students and transfer or expel students with less due process than they are afforded in regular schools.
This means, firstly, that charter schools select for students with the most resourceful parents, the children who already have a head start in the race. Miranda Restovic told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that she felt like she was applying to college when she tried to get her three-year-old into a charter school. “Although I am thrilled with the increased public school options, I am skeptical as to the (admissions) processes being friendly to all families,” Restovic said. “It’s really difficult if you don’t have the time to make constant inquiries and don’t have connections at the school to call and prod.”40
A study of California charter schools by USC bears out Restovic’s observation. The parents of students The parents of students in California charter schools are more educated than their public school counterparts. Sixty percent of parents whose children attend charter schools had attended at least some college, as compared to 54 percent of parents of their public school counterparts. Forty percent of children in charter schools in California are on free or reduced lunch, as compared to the 50 percent average in California public schools overall.41
English language learners (ELL) are less likely to go to charter schools; in California, 16 percent of charter school students are ELL, as compared to 25 percent in other public schools.42 Charters, whether consciously or unconsciously, select for those students who are going to boost their test scores the most. Once English language learners get to charter schools, they may not be getting the services that they need: 44.9 percent of charter schools in the USC study ranked poorly for reclassification of students to Fluent English Proficient.43
Secondly, charters’ ability to select students fundamentally changes the dynamics of the relationship between parents and schools. Parents of struggling students, or those who disagree with the charter board, or who don’t fulfill obligations for the school are always under threat of transfer to another school. They don’t have the same potential power and due process that they do in a public school that their child is required to attend by law.
“Autonomy” for whom? Who calls the shots?
Green Dot, the Broad- (and Gates-?) funded nonprofit that runs twelve schools in Los Angeles, takes over schools by promising equality and evoking civil rights language like “grass-roots control.” For teachers, it promises more local control over curriculum. We want to get away, it argues to teachers hungry for such promises, from mandates and scripts. The problem is that this academic freedom is a lie. These schools are measured by the same standardized tests that all schools are, and they are well aware of it. There is no less—and arguably more—pressure for a charter to “teach to the test” since their raison d’être is that they can help students to “perform better.”
Green Dot promises more academic freedom and local control. A couple of paragraphs from Green Dot’s own website, however, illustrate the limitations of these promises.
While the Home Office provides Recommended Practices to schools, principals and teachers have ultimate autonomy to decide whether to follow those Recommended Practices or take different approaches….
Local control works in Green Dot’s school model because schools and all stake-holders within them are held accountable for student results. If students in a particular school or classroom are not performing up to expectations, then teachers and principals are held accountable and local control can be taken away. Green Dot’s accountability system defines quarterly and annual performance targets for each school and teacher as well as the period of time that a school or teacher can under-perform before Green Dot’s Education Team will intervene with supports and/or take away a school’s local control.44 [emphasis added]
In addition, Green Dot can, unlike regular public schools, refuse to admit new students if it is full.
In the agreement between Green Dot and the Asociacion de Maestros/NEA/AFT, the bargaining representative of the teachers, it is made clear in no uncertain terms that “the Board maintains final authority over decisions regarding adminstrative decisions.” Unlike most charter school companies, Green Dot accepts unions. However, according to a New York Times report, “The union representing Green Dot teachers...has a 33-page contract that offers competitive salaries but no tenure, and it allows class schedule and other instructional flexibility outlawed by the 330-page contract governing most Los Angeles schools.”45
An NPR report describes the tremendous pressure put on teachers in a KIPP school.
Many of the teachers here are young; Feinberg is in her third year. Charter schools have the freedom to hire whom they want, and for this school, being young and enthusiastic counts for a lot. Feinberg knows that she and the school face tremendous pressure to improve the test scores of the city’s most challenging students. “But it’s great pressure, I mean it’s pressure that makes you work harder, that gives you a sense of urgency every day that they must learn these skills,” Feinberg says. “If you don’t produce the results that need to be produced, it’s very possible that you could lose your job.”46
The same report explains that during the nine-hour school days at KIPP academies, students practice “call and response” style learning; in other words, they are taught to “respond in unison” as the teacher snaps her fingers; a traditional rote method not particularly designed to encourage teacher or student creativity. The picture of conformity is reinforced by the fact that most charter school companies require their students to wear uniforms.
Schools will be better when teachers are paid more and the profession is more attractive. Teachers’ unions are a fundamental part of winning this; and the charter school movement is an attack on these unions.
It’s clear that the high-powered think tanks and business-driven efforts to promote charter schools are part of a package that includes eliminating teachers’ unions. In New York City, for example, right-wing foundations, with the support of billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Department of Education chancellor Joel Klein, are working to keep unions out of the city’s charter schools. In November 2005 the Atlantic Legal Foundation—“a legal arm of the most stridently anti-union corporations and allied far-right interest groups”47—held a seminar in New York City at the prestigious Harvard Club to discuss “union prevention” in the city’s forty-seven charter schools.48 The conference’s opening session was entitled, “Leveling the Playing Field: What New York Charter School Leaders Need to Know About Union Organizing.” Among the scheduled speakers at a main panel were Caryl Cohen, a representative of New York’s Department of Education’s charter school arm, the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence, and Norman Atkins, one of the the founders and leaders of two charter school networks Chancellor Joel Klein has invited to New York. According to Atkins, the consensus of the panel was that “good charter schools organize themselves in ways that keep unions out.”49
“Local control” should include the right to teacher self-representation as well as an independent voice for parents and students. But most charters, even those that wear the progressive mantle, are hostile to this idea. An excellent example is the Los Angeles Leadership Academy run by Roger Lowenstein. It is a “social justice school” that encourages teachers to use lessons from movements for social change, and encourages students to attend antiwar demonstrations. The school recruits teachers who have been involved in community organizing and who are committed to progressive, antiracist pedagogy.
The teachers learned a lesson in social justice, though, when they tried to win the right to representation and collective bargaining by affiliating to the California Teachers Association. Roger Lowenstein hired high-paid anti-union law firms to keep the union out in what one veteran union organizer called “one of the toughest oppositions a teachers’ union has possibly ever faced.”50 Lowenstein argued to the Public Employee Relations Board that it should have no role in overseeing the union election or investigating unfair labor practices because the Leadership Academy is “not a public school.” If he was referring to the decision-making process—rather than the source of funding, which is, of course, public—he is absolutely right. Teachers quickly found out that the school’s advocacy for struggle, protest, and collectively “speaking truth to power” rang hollow when it came to their right to organize themselves.
The main source of poor school quality (and poor performance) is that public schools, at least in poor and working-class communities, are deliberately underfunded and resource starved, precisely in communities where more resources are needed for these schools to succeed; they are then expected to perform according to criteria that their lack of funding makes difficult for them to fulfill. The failure is then used to justify more public school cuts and the diversion of public funds into charter schools.
The next biggest factor in the quality of the school is the quality of teaching. This is directly related to the ability of teachers to shape the curriculum, the amount of collaborative planning time and individual tutoring time that they have, and their rate of pay and experience. All these things increase with the power of teachers’ unions. So if one accepts the idea that unions can play the role of fighting for better quality schools, more democratic accountability of schools, and better compensation for teachers, and that these are essential for good schools, then unions for teachers should be a community demand. This may not happen, however, until teachers’ unions prove through action that they support the needs and struggles of the parents and students in their communities. But teachers cannot have a serious voice in any process of school improvement unless they have the right to collective bargaining.
The slow destruction of union power that occurs when subcontracting creates lots of small workplaces—in place of large, highly unionized ones—has been a fact across many industries. “Whipsawing” is a term used to describe the effect on unions like the UAW when workers in smaller, spun-off shops get inferior contracts, and those contracts are used to pressure workers in bigger plants to accept similar concessions. The same could apply to the effect of charter schools in education.
Some suggest, then, that we have to seek out “pro-union” charter operators and make deals with them. But if we are speaking of privately run CMOs, then genuine power for their teachers would threaten the board’s hegemony in the schools. Some, like Green Dot, are willing to allow teachers a contract, and claim to be pro-union. But in their contract with the AMU/CTA/NEA teachers’ union, one can find few guarantees of any kind of real teacher voice (in the form of voting). According to the contract between Green Dot and the “union,” in effect until 2010,
It is understood and agreed that the Board retains all of its powers and authority to direct, manage and control to the full extent of the charter school law and the regulations of a 501.C3 California corporation. Input from the staff will be considered and decisions will be derived in a collaborative model; final decisions will rest with the Board. Included in, but not limited to, those duties are the right to: ...establish educational policies with regard to admitting students; ...determine the number of personnel and types of personnel needed; ...establish budget procedures and determine budgetary allocations; contract out work and take action on any matter in the event of an emergency.51
The Board will make all staffing decisions. By contrast, the United Teachers of Los Angeles contract with Los Angeles Unified District requires faculty votes on key aspects of running the school, like the schedule and certain discretionary budget items, and guarantees that class assignments will be chosen by the teachers, through seniority, and not arbitrarily by the administration.52 This vision of unionism, typified by SEIU (a representative of which sits on Green Dot’s board) is antithetical to real power or democracy for teachers. A large union cuts a deal with the employer, quickly begins to collect dues from members, and in exchange for “neutrality” on the part of the boss gives away key workplace rights. Green Dot specifically aims to hire younger, more inexperienced teachers and gives incentives for senior teachers to leave.
Many suspect Green Dot of signing somewhat toothless union contracts as a way of keeping more combative unions out. This wouldn’t be surprising given the presence of SEIU on their board of directors. SEIU is currently engaged in undermining the legitimate teachers’ union of Puerto Rico (the FMPR) in the wake of the strike that the FMPR led last spring. After the strike, the Puerto Rican government decertified the FMPR. SEIU helped the Asociacion de Maestros (coincidentally, the same name as the teachers’ union at Green Dot schools) to try to win representation of the Puerto Rican teachers. The FMPR was not allowed to contest them.53
Their strategy and ours
New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein has openly declared his wish to make all New York public schools charter schools. Rather than oppose the idea outright, then-United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten chose to play ball on the chancellor’s field. In addition to inviting Steve Barr of Green Dot to New York to partner with the UFT in opening Green Dot schools, she also conceded that New York teachers would be willing to accept some form of merit pay. Merit pay hooks teacher bonuses (money that otherwise could be spent on salaries) to student test performance.
If this “appeasement” strategy was designed to convince Klein to stop blaming teachers for the problems in New York’s schools, it didn’t work. Shortly thereafter, Klein teamed up with civil rights figure Al Sharpton to launch the Education Equality Project, whose main goal is to remove the “block” that the teachers’ union supposedly creates to “reform.” Sharpton said, “But we cannot say that we’re going to close this achievement gap but protect ineffective teachers or principals or school chiefs or not challenge parents.”54 Perhaps if the teachers in New York had decided to build genuine alliances with New York parents—particularly in communities of color—to fight for access to more resources, against dictatorial mandates, and to define what “quality education” means from the ground up, then Sharpton wouldn’t have gotten any traction for blaming the teachers. A more convincing explanation for failure of Black students is gross underfunding and pervasive segregation.
Weingarten may also justify her actions on the basis that we have to make concessions to some charter schools—and so we may as well pick the “pro-union” ones. But rather than trying to play an appeasement game with charters, we should oppose them. The charter school movement may have to slow down under the weight of their own contradictions—they promise better scores but can’t deliver because their modus operandi rests on stripping teachers of their rights and, in many cases, maximizing profits. But another factor that will determine the pace of privatization is the amount and quality of struggle that we can wage, and the clarity with which we can wage it. And whether, in the process, we can begin to cooperate as parents, teachers, and students to formulate those demands that would begin to shape public education to meet the goals and vision that most people have for it.
A few examples illustrate the kind of struggles that might hold out hope for our side. In February 2008, 26,000 Puerto Rican teachers struck for more than a week against the colonial government’s plans for education. The strike had many demands—opposing Law 45 that outlaws public sector strikes on the island, just salaries for teachers, and the right to democratically choose their representation in collective bargaining. Among those demands, though, was one to stop the creep of charters into Puerto Rican education. At the conclusion of the strike, an agreement was signed by teachers’ union president Rafael Feliciano-Hernandez and the minister of education on the island guaranteeing to keep charter schools out. The agreement will be hard to enforce, but it established a precedent of teachers fighting the seemingly inevitable tide of privatization. (It’s also important to note that the Puerto Rican teachers’ resistance to charters began in 1993, which may explain why they’ve staved them off). Yet, as we can see from the above-mentioned joint attack from Puerto Rico’s governor and SEIU, the struggle is far from over.
The other examples are smaller in scope. In 2004, as many of Chicago public schools were threatened with mass closures, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system developed a plan to close Senn High School on the North Side and turn it into a Naval Academy charter school. The ominous move to establish military charter schools—spurred by the military’s shrinking pool of willing volunteers as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grind on—is not limited to Senn, nor to Chicago alone, as one 2008 report outlines:
Chicago has the most militarized public school system in the nation, with Cadet Corps for students in middle school, over 10,000 students participating in JROTC programs, over 1,000 students enrolled in one of the five, soon-to-be six autonomous military high schools, and hundreds more attending one of the nine military high schools that are called “schools within a school.” Chicago now has a Marine Military Academy, a Naval Academy, and three army high schools. When an air force high school opens next year, Chicago will be the only city in the nation to have academies representing all branches of the military. And Chicago is not the only city moving in this direction: the public school systems of other urban centers with largely Black and immigrant low-income students, including Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Oakland, are being similarly reformed—and deformed—through partnerships with the Department of Defense.55
According to Jesse Sharkey, a teacher at Senn,
In [some] ways, our school is a remarkable community resource, with plenty of morale. Our students come from 70 nationalities, speak 57 different languages and still maintain a sense of unity and mutual respect. Senn students have performed 70,000 hours of community service over the past five years and have been recognized with a national service award. Senn has also developed some of the city’s most successful academic programs for at-risk kids. So instead of waiting for the ax to fall, we began to fight back. We researched the effect that the military takeover would have on our school and community, and wrote fact sheets. We made flyers about our concerns and put up 3,500 of them, with another 500 in Spanish. We reached out and met with community organizations, launched a Web site, wrote press releases and organized to get people out to support us. On October 5, we brought about 700 people out to the CPS forum at our school. The mood in the room was electric. Students had been preparing all week—they had written speeches, drawn dozens of handmade signs and brought along many of their parents. When CPS officials tried to show us a slick promotional video about the Navy ROTC program, the room rebelled. The entire audience stood up and turned its back to the presentation.56
In the end, the Senn students, parents, and teachers won a partial victory. The school stayed open. However, in compliance with a December 2004 decision by the school board, one wing of their building was occupied by the Naval Academy. The charter fixed up their wing of the dilapidated building, including adding new air-conditioning, new computers, and science labs. The academy students, housed in the same building as “regular” Senn students, wear their own uniforms, have their own teachers, and operate by their own rules. The body of Senn was saved through the activism of its community—but one of its limbs has been infected by the viral creep of the charter movement working in conjunction with the military.
In a similar vein, teachers and parents in Los Angeles mounted a fight against charter takeover of school space in 2008. In California, Proposition 39 states that charter schools should be given access to space in public education buildings that is not being utilized. This seems like a strange concept in a city where tens of thousands of students go to “year-round” schools due to overcrowding, and trailer-like bungalows have taken over the recreation areas of most schools to create extra space. Nevertheless, forty charters completed applications to co-locate on Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD) campuses in the fall of 2008. They had receptive friends on the school board. However, in some notable cases, they were stymied. A group of more than seventy parents as well as teachers from Wadsworth Elementary spoke at and protested an LAUSD board meeting to keep Celerity Charter School off their campus—and won. Similar organizing happened at Logan Elementary, where a proposal to house middle-school children on an elementary school campus was being considered. In fact, according to an estimate by Crenshaw High School UTLA Chapter Chair Alex Caputo-Pearl, parents, students, and teachers at fifteen of the forty schools facing co-location with charters organized against them. At the time of writing, only sixteen of the forty applications for co-location had been accepted by LAUSD. The protests are widely seen as the reason why more charters were not accepted onto LAUSD campuses.
It appears that the charter school movement can be opposed, but it has to be fought school by school. In schools where there are parents, teachers, and students who understand the issues and can oppose charter takeover, charters can be stopped. These small struggles will not, however, stem the national tide until they are strong and viable enough to cohere into a powerful movement for a different vision of public education. The only way to challenge charter schools is to show that they are a stepping stone to privatization, that is, to the denial of publicly funded education as a basic right for all. Also, in their current status, in most instances, charters offer opportunities for private interests to profit by siphoning state funds. We must show that public education suffers not because it is public, but because it is poorly funded by states with other priorities, such as funding corporate handouts.
Here are some ideas for what we can do to begin to win the battle for public education:
1. Fight for resources
We cannot accept the logic that the amount of money available to schools is fixed, even in the current economic meltdown. At the state level, corporate tax rates are criminally low, and at the federal level, a tiny fraction of the money going to the war in Iraq would make giant strides toward fixing our schools. In every case the charter schools that do the best are the ones that receive extra money (usually from private foundations who want to see public schools replaced by charters). There is nothing complicated about the fact that more resources make better schools. If politicians didn’t believe this, they wouldn’t send their students to private schools that spend ten thousand or twenty thousand dollars more per student per year than our public schools do. Granted, only a massive struggle on the scale of the civil rights movement will force them to give us what we want for all children, not just their own. Students should not have to compete to get into the best schools while others are abandoned to horrible conditions in schools festering like wounds in already devastated neighborhoods. All schools need to be made better.
2. Wage an educational campaign against charters.
To date, none of the large teachers’ unions has launched a public relations battle against the charter takeover. Often the objection is that this is too politically difficult, since “the public supports charters.” This is not surprising, though, given that no national force has ever made the case against them. No doubt we’ll lose a battle that we choose not to fight.
3. Welcome charter schoolteachers into our unions but demand that they have all the key provisions of our contracts.
Charter schoolteachers aren’t the enemy. We welcome them into our unions, but must demand that they have all the key contract provisions that larger locals have. We should try to group them into larger bargaining units to avoid the fracturing of our power that happens when we are balkanized. We also can’t allow organizing to try to improve and democratize these charter schools to rob resources from our large public schools. If we wage these fights, charters can’t gain the traction that they need to continue their expansion. Teachers’ unions need to resist the temptation to fall into an organizing model that values representation at whatever cost—a model to which much of the rest of the labor movement has resorted. If we don’t have strong contracts that help to win better conditions for students and teachers and democratize the decision-making process in the schools, unions aren’t worth much.
4. Fight all mandates and corporate incursions into our schools.
Charter schools are just the extreme end of the whole spectrum of the corporate takeover of our schools. Already, schools that are wholly public are being forced into serving the military and business interests of this country. The tendrils of Corporate America reach deep into our schools via nepotistic contracts—from the $3 billion testing industry accelerated under No Child Left Behind, to McGraw-Hill and its Reading First program pushed through by the Bush administration. And as Jonathan Kozol chronicles in Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, teaching children obedience and corporate values (such as kindergartners being asked to role-play workplace managers) is, along with drill-and-kill methodologies, increasingly erasing all the best practices that came out of the educational reforms of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. We need to oppose mandates and all incursions of the private sector into the running of our schools.
New visions for the kind of schools that we want for our children will rise out of the struggles against the attacks that we are facing. This is fundamentally about fighting for democracy in the schools.
At Woodland Hills Academy, the parents and teachers at the school have appealed for (and won) a degree of autonomy from Los Angeles Unified School District, even though the school is not a charter. They have set up a Humanities Academy that makes financial and curricular decisions democratically. The school is known as a college- prep middle school, and has very good performance by all measures. The example of Woodland Hills Academy suggests that the things that are most tempting about some of the better charters—control over what is taught, escape from drill-and-kill mentality, and democratic decision-making—can be achieved inside the public school system as well, by teachers, parents, and students organizing.
In other areas, too, teachers’ unions have partnered with others to try to create innovative schools that attempt to wriggle out from under the grasp of mandates and bureacratic decisions. In Boston, the Pilot School project has done this, and in Los Angeles, Innovation Division schools are experimenting with more collaborative and autonomous decision-making within the schools.57
Teachers who are committed to social justice should put themselves in the camp of those who have fought through direct action for equal access to quality public education. Our role models should reach from the former slaves who forced the Freedmen’s Bureau to create the first public schools in the South and the students who pushed for integration of the public school system during the civil rights movement, to the undocumented students fighting for access to public universities in the United States today.
As long as we have a system built on inequality, the policy makers will attempt to use schools to institutionally and ideologically buttress the division between the haves and have-nots. They will mostly succeed. But in the struggles to come for genuine equality, access to schools to meet the needs of every single child, not a select few among those who live in poverty, will be a call and a slogan of our movements. For the vast majority, this means quality education in public schools. Those who join that fight will determine what the word “quality” means, and will have an opportunity to force these concessions from policy makers until people decide that concessions are not enough.
Sarah Knopp is a teacher in Los Angeles.
1 Jonathan Kozol, “The big enchilada,” Harper’s Magazine, August 2007.
2 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 721.
3 Term coined by Steven Miller and Jack Gerson. Their article “The corporate surge against public schools” can be found at www.educatorroundtable.net/showDiary.do?diaryId=718.
4 See Milton Friedman, “The promise of vouchers,” Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2005.
5 Michael Klonsky and Susan Klonsky, Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society (New York: Routledge, 2008), 93.
6 Ibid.
7 Leigh Dingerson, Barbara Miner, Bob Peterson, and Stephanie Walters, eds. Keeping the Promise? The Debate Over Charter Schools (Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, 2008), xv.
8 Teach for America’s alumni magazine, One Day, allowed alumni to submit questions for Obama and McCain, www.teachforamerica.org/alumni/one_day/summer2008_electionwatch.htm.
9 “Separate and unequal: America’s apartheid schools,” interview in ISR 45, Jan–Feb 2006.
10 American Federation of Teachers, “Charter schools,” www.aft.org/topics/charters.
11 Howard Blume, “Ask a reporter,” Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2008.
12 “Charter schools indicators: A report from the Center on Educational Governance, University of Southern California,” www.usc.edu/dept/education/cegov/CSI_08_v6.pdf, 3.
13 One has to wonder whether this is because he recently received the $1 million Eli Broad Excellence in Education award.
14 Bill Quigley, “A special report on Katrina and education: experimenting on someone else’s children; fighting for the right to learn in New Orleans,” CounterPunch, August 6, 2007, www.counterpunch.org/quigley08062007.html.
15 Klonsky and Klonsky, Small Schools, 118; and Zein El-Amine and Lee Glazer, “‘Evolution’ or destruction? A look at Washington, D.C.,” in Keeping the Promise?, 53.
16 Leigh Dingerson, “Unlovely: How the market is failing the children of New Orleans,” Keeping the Promise?, 17.
17 Bill Quigley, “Fighting for the right to learn: the public education experiment in New Orleans two years after Katrina,” Black Agenda Report, August 8, 2007, www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?Itemid=33&id=307&option=com_content&task=view.
18 “No experience necessary: How the New Orleans school experiment devalues experienced teachers.” A joint report of the United Teachers New Orleans, Louisiana Federation of Teachers, and the American Federation of Teachers, June 2007. Available online at www.aft.org/presscenter/releases/downloads/NoExperReport_07.pdf.
19 “Privatization and the Katrina Solution,” Michael Molina interviewed by Gillian Russom and Sarah Knopp, Socialist Worker, May 28, 2008.
20 U.S. Census Bureau, “School expenditures, by type of control and level of instruction in constant (2003-2004) dollars, 1970-2004,” www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2007/tables/07s0205.xls.
21 Klonsky and Klonsky, Small Schools, 115.
22 Brian C. Hassell and Thomas Toch, “Big box: how the heirs of the Wal-Mart fortune have fueled the charter school movement,” November 7, 2006, Education Sector Connecting the Dots series, www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?doc_id=422193. John Walton died in a plane crash in 2005.
23 Quoted in Bill Berkowitz, “Philanthropy the Wal-Mart way,” Media Transparency, October 12, 2005, www.mediatransparency.com/story.php?storyID=88.
24 Joe Allen, “The horrible house of Walton,” Socialist Worker, December 2, 2005. See “Shopping for subsidies: how Wal-Mart uses taxpayer money to finance its never-ending growth,” Good Jobs First, May 2004; Amy Joyce, “Labor deal with Wal-Mart criticized,” Washington Post, November 1, 2005.
25 Steve Miller and Jack Gerson, “The corporate surge against public schools,” www.educatorroundtable.net/showDiary.do?diaryId=718.
26 See the Ed in ’08 site at www.edin08.com.
27 “Strong American schools: mission possible: Greensboro, North Carolina,” Ed in ’08, www.edin08.com/uploadedFiles/FAQs/SAS.MissionPossible.Nov14.2007.pdf.
28 Green Dot’s Board of Directors includes SEIU Local 1877’s president, Mike Garcia. SEIU has a very cozy relationship with those sections of Corporate America who have government contract services, and has a plan to “organize” charter schools, but they intend to do so by making deals with charter operators who will undermine some of the key elements of teachers’ power in collective bargaining.
29 Howard Blume, “Mayor pushes school bonds,” Los Angeles Times, June 19, 2008.
30 Howard Fine, “Unsentimental education,” Los Angeles Business Journal, June 4, 2007.
31 Mary Compton and Lois Weiner, eds., The Global Assault on Teachers and Their Unions: Stories for Resistance, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
32 “The politics of education reform: Bolstering supply and demand; Overcoming institutional blocks.” World Bank documents and reports. http://www-wds.worldbank.org:80/servlet/main?menuPK=64187510&pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=
523679&entityID=000094946_01082504044865.
33 Helen Huntley, “Legislators, teachers balk at deal for Edison Schools,” St. Petersburg Times, September 26, 2003, www.sptimes.com/2003/09/26/Businness/Legislators__?teachers.shtml.
34 Quoted in Klonsky and Klonsky, Small Schools, 108.
35 Miller and Gerson, “Corporate surge against public schools.”
36 Editorial, New York Times, August 27, 2006.
37 Martin Conroy, Rebecca Jacobsen, Lawrence Mishel, and Richard Rothstein. The Charter School Dustup: Examining Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement (Washington: Economic Policy Institute, 2005).
38 See “Charter schools indicators: a report,” 10.
39 Quoted in Klonsky and Klonsky, Small Schools, 145.
40 Sarah Carr, “Getting into New Orleans schools can be a tough task,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 17, 2008.
41 See “Charter schools indicators: a report,” 15.
42 Ibid., 16.
43 Ibid., 8.
44 See www.greendot.org/school_model.
45 Sam Dillon, “Maverick leads charge for charter schools,” New York Times, July 24, 2004.
46 Larry Abramson, “For charter schools, New Orleans is a citywide lab,” NPR, July 16, 2008.
47 Leo Casey, “Who’s afraid of teacher voice? Charter schools and union organizing,” November 17, 2005, Edwise, http://edwize.org/whos-afraid-of-teacher-voice-charter-schools-and-union-organizing.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Personal communication.
51 See “Agreement between Green Dot Public Schools, a California not-for-profit corporation and the Asociacion de Maestros Unidos/CTA/NEA effective through June 30, 2010.” An earlier version of the contract is available online at http://amunidos.org/pdf_docs/AMUContractFinal%20FY2006.pdf.
52 Ibid.
53 Marazan, Cesar Rosado. “SEIU to Raid Union Representing 40,000 Teachers in Puerto Rico.” Labor Notes Online, www.?labornotes.org/node/1517.
54 Greg Toppo, “Sharpton, education plan may tear union ties,” USA Today June 11, 2008.
55 Therese Quinn, Erica Meiners, Bill Ayers, “Child soldiers,” ?January 8, 2008, http://billayers.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/child-soldiersby-therese-quinn-erica-meiners-bill-ayers/.
56 Jesse Sharkey, “Get the military out of our schools,” Socialist Worker, October 14, 2008.
57 See Dan French, “Boston’s pilot schools: an alternative to charter schools” in Keeping the Promise?, 67.
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