Charter School Enrollment Rising Rapidly

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Between the 2010-11 and 2011-12 school years, the number of students enrolled in charter schools rose by nearly 13%, to just over two million students nationwide, according to a new report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. 110 school districts across the nation have at least 10% of their students enrolled in charter schools, 16 more than last year.

New Orleans leads the nation with 70% of its students enrolled in charter schools, the New York Times reported last week. Detroit, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis, each have more than 30% of their public school students attending charter schools. New York City saw a 24% jump in charter school enrollment over the past year. California currently has the highest total number of charter schools, according to the WSWS.

The rise of charter schools has come primarily as a result of a highly effective and well-funded PR campaign financed by billionaires like Bill Gates, the Waltons, Eli Broad and others, that has painted the entire traditional public school system as a complete failure and charter schools as their best salvation. They have spent millions of dollars propping up fledgling charters that could not possibly have survived or thrived without private donations. They have bought politicians and initiatives in many states, resulting in laws that facilitate the creation of new charter schools and that defund traditional schools (like NCLB and Parent Trigger laws, which have been used to foist charter schools upon communities). Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers have also jumped into the charter school circus, recognizing the large profits to be made in public education (see here and here).

Proponents have even created their own reality with bogus studies that “prove” that charter schools are far more effective than they actually are. In reality, charter schools are no better than traditional public schools. A national study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford found that while 17% of charter schools produced better results than neighborhood public schools, 37% were significantly worse, and the rest were no different. Also, many of the studies that have found superior outcomes at charter schools were based on dubious or misinterpreted data.

Furthermore, charter schools are far more segregated than traditional public schools. 70% of black charter school students attend schools with 90-100% minority students, 75% of whom are also black, yet black students make up only one-third of all charter school students. Half of Latino charter students also attend racially isolated minority schools. Charter schools are also segregated by class. While, poor students make up 40% of public school students, they make up only 17% of private religious and 10% of private secular school students. (For more on charter school segregation (see here, here and here.) Additionally, many push out or block special education students and English Language Learners from enrolling. In contrast, traditional public schools must accept all students, regardless of socioeconomic status, ethnicity or physical or mental ability.

Cutting Services Okay, Except for Special Ed

"Education, It's Your Time to Go." (Image from Flickr by dullhunk)

As school districts across the country grapple with dwindling revenues and growing budget deficits, they are cutting more and more programs and services. So far, there has been a lot of whining and complaining by teachers and parents, but not much action.

Now, the California Department of Education is planning to investigate whether San Francisco Unified School District violated federal law by denying summer school services to students with special needs in order to save money. According to a report by The Bay Citizen,  the district’s head of middle school special education, Lisa Miller, told teachers and staff to check with her before authorizing summer school for special needs students because it was too expensive.

The directive, sent to teachers via an email obtained the Bay Citizen, may have violated the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which prohibits school officials from denying special education services based on cost (though it does not provide sufficient revenue for districts to comply). The state Department of Education has been investigating SFUSD’s education plans for roughly 80 of its 6,000 special needs students for the past year, and has found that the district had violated more than 100 state and federal regulations.

A district representative denied the allegations, saying that some staff were offering summer school to all special education students. While this may have been true, it should not be a problem. Anyone who wants to go to summer school should be able to go. Of course all schools should also have sufficient classrooms, teachers, librarians, counselors, nurses, textbooks and lab equipment, which they do not.

The only reason to triage summer school students is when there is a shortage of classrooms and teachers, something that is essentially a byproduct of state budget cuts and dwindling property tax revenues. SFUSD may indeed be guilty of violating state and federal laws designed to protect the educational rights of special needs students. However, the state is really to blame for slashing education spending by over $20 billion over the past four years, thus forcing school districts to cut services and triage students, as are the feds, for providing only a one-time pittance to help bail out school districts during the recession.

Parsing the Black-White School Suspension Gap

Discipline is Victory or Arbeit Mach du Frei? (Image from Flickr, by Adam Jones)

The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights recently released data on suspension rates in the U.S. After surveying 72,000 schools that served roughly 85% of the nation’s students they found that black children represent 35% of all suspensions and 39% of all expulsions, though they comprise only 18% of the student population.

Many are calling this proof that the education system discriminates against children of color (Latino suspension and expulsion rates were also high). Considering how much prejudice and discrimination occur in our society at large, it would be surprising if some of it didn’t trickle down to our schools, as well. One would expect some outright racism to be at play, as well as some less overt racial profiling. Indeed, there are studies indicating that black students are disciplined more severely than white students for similar or lesser infractions.

Yet the problem is more complex and pervasive than simple racism or prejudice by some teachers. For example, if suspension and expulsion rates were broken down by socioeconomic status, one would likely find much higher rates of suspensions, expulsions and other disciplinary actions against lower income children than affluent children. Since higher percentages of black and Latino children are poor, it might be that poverty plays a role in discipline, too, possibly even the primary role.

The Wealth-Behavior Connection

Schools are essentially middle class institutions, run by people who either have middle class backgrounds or who have learned to thrive in a middle class environment through their educational and professional experiences. The expectations, norms and mores of the classroom are consequently the product of middle class culture. Students who come from affluent backgrounds, therefore, generally have these expectations, norms and mores internalized and are more likely to behave in the way expected by their teachers, while working class and poor children sometimes have to learn a disciplinary system and expectations that are substantially different from what they are used to.

Children who grow up in a more authoritarian disciplinary culture, for example, might respond more positively to the demand that they “clean up now!” than to the request, “Would you please clean up?” or the announcement that “it is clean up time.” These last two statements, like “Would you mind closing the door?” are actually middle class commands disguised as friendly requests. Someone who is not used to this roundabout way of speaking might believe they actually have a choice. Noncompliance would therefore not only be reasonable, but within the range of acceptable behaviors. Yet a teacher might see this as defiance or disrespect, leading to disciplinary action against the child.

There are also school policies that disproportionately target youth of color without any racist intent. Sagging pants, for example, is a typical dress code violation, yet it is more common among lower income youth of color than among middle class white boys. The question is, are black boys busted for this while white girls with exposed midriffs and white boys with inappropriate t-shirts are allowed to walk?

It is not just that lower income children have different cultural backgrounds than their teachers. They are also more likely to be behind their affluent peers in academic skills, which makes it harder for them to do the classwork and increases the likelihood of off-task or disruptive behavior. Imagine having to sit still for 30-45 minutes with a book or lecture you cannot comprehend.

While the CRDC data indicates that black children are more likely to be labeled as special needs, it is not clear that this is due to the racism of schools and teachers. It might be due to their socioeconomic status. Poverty increases the chances of that a child will have a learning disability. Poor children, for example, are more likely to suffer low birth weights and malnutrition, which can lead to disabilities. Iron-deficiency anemia, which impairs cognitive ability, is twice as common among poor children. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 10% of poor students have dangerous levels of lead in their blood, which can lead to decreased intelligence. Smoking, which is also significantly higher among poor and working class people, can lead to premature births and low birth weights, which both contribute to poor long-term health, cognitive impairment and learning disabilities.

Schools and teachers should obviously look at their policies and how they are enforced to reduce any institutionalized, deliberate or unintended racist inequities. They also need to do a better job of understanding the cultural backgrounds of their students so that they can better support them. However, as long as our society continues to have large socioeconomic disparities, we will continue to see not only a class-based learning gap, but a class-based discipline gap, as well.

Helping SPED Students by Increasing Their Class Sizes?

Full Inclusion or Full Immersion? (Image from Flickr, by Gui Seiz)

One of the latest trends in Special Education is “Full Inclusion.” The idea is that all students benefit from being in the “least restrictive” environment. Special day classes (SDC)—where many special needs students were traditionally exposed to much of their curriculum—segregated them from the general student population and relied on special education (SPED) teachers who were not necessarily credentialed in the subjects which they were teaching.

Many schools are now placing these same students in regular education classes (e.g., science, English, social studies, math). In California, this means they are sometimes in classes with 35-38 students. In the past, most SDC students would have been in small classes of 7-14 students, with a SPED teacher and another 1-3 paraprofessional aides to assist them. Thus, SDC students had very low student to adult ratios ranging from 2:1 to 15:1.

While I don’t wish to argue the merits of full inclusion in this piece, I think it should be obvious to most observers that this is a bastardization of the spirit and goals of the program. Throwing 3-5 SDC students into a class of this size, especially without any aids to assist them, is like throwing a beginning swimmer out of a boat without a life jacket. These are students who generally require additional support. They are often reading far below grade level and may have a range of disabilities that challenge their abilities to access the content.

With budget cuts plaguing school districts throughout the nation, schools are looking for any sort of trick that saves them money. Increasing student to teacher ratios is one way of doing this. More students per teacher means fewer teachers need to be on the payroll. Mainstreaming SPED students without providing paraprofessionals or other aides to assist them also saves districts money.

State Sanctioned Child Abuse: CA Youth Inmates Attend School in Closets

A new audit of the California juvenile justice system found 249 instances of children being locked in their cells for 24-hour during the period of January through April of this year, the Bay Citizen reported today. This is in violation of the system’s own guidelines, which state that juvenile prisoners cannot be confined to their rooms for more than 21 hours per day. Inmates were also forced to attend school in closets, showers and storerooms as a result of staffing shortages and violence among prisoners.

There has been a decade-long movement to shut down the Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) and transfer all remaining prisoners to county facilities. There are only four state juvenile detention centers still open in California (down from 11 just a few years ago). Governor Brown had been a strong backer of this plan until he caved in to pressure by the Chief Probation Officers of California, a county probation officers’ association that didn’t want the state’s problem foisted upon them.

According to the Bay Citizen article, special-education students were not receiving the required four hours of instruction per day. At the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility, nearly 12% of all classes were cancelled due to staff shortages and insufficient space. Even more disturbing, children were not receiving medical treatment because staff members were sent to deal with emergencies instead of transporting them to the doctor and their medical appointments were routinely not rescheduled for months.

Interns Are Highly Qualified?

Get out your dictionaries. Here is the first new word for 2011: Highly Qualified

--a person who is breathing and also willing to work for very low wages in the poorest and lowest performing schools, without any training or support, and without any job protections.

Thousands of intern teachers in California will now be considered “Highly Qualified” under NCLB, despite their lack of experience and minimal training, thanks to a bill passed in the waning minutes of the lame duck Congress. The legislation was buried in an unrelated spending bill and was passed with little public awareness and no hearings. Curiously, special education teachers, who must undergo even more training than regular education instructors, will be considered “Not Highly Qualified” if they are teaching math or science without a special math or science credential, as many do in self-contained resource classes.

The bill was supported by Bay Area Representative George Miller (who has also supported NLCB). He said that current measures of teacher quality are inadequate and should be assessed by Congress, and not the courts. Which begs the question, “What the hell do Congress or the courts know about teacher quality?”

California currently has between 5000 and 8000 intern teachers teaching in its public schools. 62% of these are working in the poorest schools and 25% of them are in schools that are over 98% minority students.

In another related bit of newspeak, Teach For America (TFA) has claimed that refusing to call their teachers “Highly Qualified” denies schools the opportunity to implement reform measures. What they mean is that schools trying to implement idiotic “reform” measures that are untested or unlikely to work, and that force teachers to work harder and longer without compensation, are much more likely to be adopted by young, energetic and inexperienced teachers who are eager to please their bosses. Ironically (and not surprisingly), TFA teachers have a horrible track record. 69% quit after their second year and 88% quit by the end of their 3^rd year, perhaps due to the stress of all that extra work they heap upon themselves.

10 Things Charter Schools Don't Want You To Know (About How lousy they really Are)

Here is an amazing reposting from Chaz' School Daze, of an article originally published yesterday, in the Wall Street Journal, by Sarah Morgan.

The Things That Charter Schools And Their Supporters Don't Want The General Public To Know.

Now that the unqualified Cathie Black is expected to become Chancellor on January 3rd we can expect her to follow in the footsteps of Joel Klein and be a strong supporter of the ever increasing Charter Schools as an alternative to the local public schools. This means more neighborhood schools will have reduced funding as Tweed allocates more of their scarce resources to the Charter Schools at the Public school's expense. What is very interesting are that Charter Schools have very serious problems that they hide from the general public. Some quite serious and are ignored by the pro-Charter School education reformers. Let's look at some of these issues closeup. A must read is what Smart Money published, an Article called "10 Things Charter Schools Won't Tell You". Many of the statistics come from the article.

1.Many Teachers Are Inexperienced And Not Certified:

Believe it or not, many teachers who are offered teaching positions in Charter Schools are not certified. Furthermore, once they achieve certification they leave for the local school district teaching positions.

According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, charter school teachers are, on average, younger and less likely to hold state certification than teachers in traditional public schools. In a 2000 survey, 92% of public school teachers held state certification, compared to 79% of charter school teachers. A 2008 survey found that 32% of charter school teachers were under the age of 30, compared to 17% of traditional public school teachers. Charter schools often recruit from organizations like Teach for America that provide non-traditional paths into the profession and are known as the "two year wonders" because they do their two year obligation and leave., More-experienced teachers who already have jobs in traditional public schools may have little incentive to give up the protection of tenure, pension, and health benefits to work in a Charter School.

Relying on relatively untrained, inexperienced staff may have a real impact in the classroom. “A lot of them don’t have classroom management skills,” says May Taliaferrow, a charter-school parent.

2. Large And Constant Teacher Turnover:

Another fact deliberately ignored by the pro-Charter School reformers is the high teacher turnover in most Charter Schools. In some cases the entire teaching staff could turnover within a five year period!

As many as one in four charter school teachers leave every year, according to a 2007 study by Gary Miron, a professor of education at Western Michigan University, and other researchers at the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. That’s about double the typical teacher turnover rate in traditional public schools. Charter schools typically pay teachers less than traditional public schools do, and require longer hours, Miron says. Meanwhile, charter school administrators earn more than their school-district counterparts, which can also make teachers feel underpaid, he says. The odds of a teacher leaving the profession altogether are 130% higher at charter schools than traditional public schools, according to a 2010 study by the National Center on School Choice at Vanderbilt University. That study also found that much of this teacher attrition was related to dissatisfaction with working conditions.

3. Charter Schools Are Always Trying To Skim The Best Students And Will Advertise For These Students:

The Charter Schools will do just about anything to get "good students" to go to their school and will send out flyers to the parents of these students to get them to attend their school.

Walking around New York City, it’s impossible to miss the ads on buses and subways for the Harlem Success academies, Haimson says. The school is legally required to reach out to at-risk students, and it has been opening new schools over the past couple of years. However, some schools elsewhere have gone beyond marketing. A charter school in Colorado gave out gift cards to families that recruited new students, and another school in Louisiana gave out cash.

4. Charter Schools Discourage Students With Disabilities & English Language Learners From Applying:

Another well-kept secret is that the Charter Schools don't want students with disabilities, discipline problems, attendance issues, or English language learners.

Six-year-old Makala was throwing regular tantrums in school, so her mother, Latrina Miley, took her for a psychiatric evaluation, eventually ending up with a district-mandated plan that stated the girl should be taught in a smaller class where half the students have special needs. The charter school’s response, Miley says, was to tell her she could either change her daughter’s educational plan, or change schools. She moved Makala to a nearby public school – where, she says, teachers have been more effective at managing her daughter’s behavior issues. The school says it can’t talk about specific cases.

Critics say charter schools commonly “counsel out” children with disabilities. While a few charter schools are specifically designed to serve students with special needs, the rest tend to have lower proportions of students with special needs than nearby public schools, according to a review of multiple studies conducted by the University of Colorado’s Education and the Public Interest Center. Charter schools also appear to end up with students whose disabilities are less expensive to manage than those of public school students. A Boston study, conducted by the Massachusetts Teachers Association, found that 91% of students with disabilities in the city’s charter schools were able to be fully included in standard classrooms, compared to only 33% of students with disabilities in the traditional public schools.

5. The Charter Schools counsel out students who struggle Academically:

To keep up with the propaganda that Charter Schools have a greater percentage of graduates than the local public school, the Charter Schools counsel out low-preforming students so that they do not count in the percentages.

For all the hype about a few standout schools, charter schools in general are not producing better results than traditional public schools. A national study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford found that while 17% of charter schools produced better results than neighborhood public schools, 37% were significantly worse, and the rest were no different. (Not that public schools are perfect, as many parents know.

A host of other studies on charter school outcomes have come up with sometimes contradictory results. As with traditional public schools, there are great charters – and some that are not so great. “There’s a lot of variation within charter schools,” points out Katrina Bulkley, an associate professor of education at Montclair State University who studies issues related to school governance. “In fairness to organizations that are running high-performing schools, many of them are very frustrated with the range of quality, because they feel that it taints charter schools as a whole,” Bulkley says.

6. Charter Schools Do Not Preform Any Better Than Public Schools:
Despite the propaganda by the pro-Charter School supporters that the Charter Schools provides better educational opportunities, the reality is quite different.
For all the hype about a few standout schools, charter schools in general are not producing better results than traditional public schools. A national study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford found that while 17% of charter schools produced better results than neighborhood public schools, 37% were significantly worse, and the rest were no different. (Not that public schools are perfect, as many parents know.

A host of other studies on charter school outcomes have come up with sometimes contradictory results. As with traditional public schools, there are great charters – and some that are not so great. “There’s a lot of variation within charter schools,” points out Katrina Bulkley, an associate professor of education at Montclair State University who studies issues related to school governance. “In fairness to organizations that are running high-performing schools, many of them are very frustrated with the range of quality, because they feel that it taints charter schools as a whole,” Bulkley says.

7. Where Does The Money Come & Go?:

Unlike public schools where all the money has to be accounted for, the Charter School funding can be a mystery.

An investigation by Philadelphia’s City Controller earlier this year uncovered widespread financial mismanagement among the city’s charter schools, including undisclosed “related party” transactions where friends and family of school management were paid for various services, people listed as working full time at more than one school, individuals writing checks to themselves, and even a $30,000 bill from a beach resort charged to a school.

Financial scandals have come to light in schools around the country, but what’s more troubling, says advocate Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters in New York City, is that charter schools have opposed state audits of their finances. The New York Charter School Association won a lawsuit against the state comptroller last year, with the court ruling that the legislature had violated the state constitution when it directed the comptroller to audit charter schools. Charter schools in the state are already overseen and audited by at least two other agencies, Murphy says. “We have never objected to being audited, being overseen, and being held accountable. In fact, this organization has come out in favor of closing low-performing charter schools,” he says.

Walking around New York City, it’s impossible to miss the ads on buses and subways for the Harlem Success academies, Haimson says. The school is legally required to reach out to at-risk students, and it has been opening new schools over the past couple of years. However, some schools elsewhere have gone beyond marketing. A charter school in Colorado gave out gift cards to families that recruited new students, and another school in Louisiana gave out cash. Talking about bribing?

Are Charter Schools really better than the neighborhood public schools? No they are not.

Feds Rip Off Special Needs Kids

Feds Rip Off Special Needs Kids

Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the Feds have avoided paying their obligation to states to provide supplemental services for students with special needs. In 2008, for example, the federal government owed states $19 billion, but only paid out $10 billion.

In these challenging economic times, with so many districts facing budget and service cuts, and the federal government handing out trillions to Wall Street bankers and defense contractors, it is particularly disgusting to be short changing kids with disabilities. IDEA serves millions of children nationally. In California, districts are being asked to “push in” special needs students to regular ed classes to the fullest extent possible, creating an even greater need for funding to hire paraprofessionals and support staff. Under NCLB, special education teachers are being asked to become “highly qualified” in all subjects they teach which, at the high school level, may require some teachers to get credentialed in math, English, social studies and at least one science discipline. This also will require additional funding.

“Each year they ask us to do more, while providing us with less. Eventually they will ask us to do everything, and give us nothing. I think this might be that time.”—quote by a former colleague.