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.

Incompetent Administrators, Not Unions, Keep Molesters in the Classroom

“The standard here is low—reasonable suspicion. The obligation is mandatory reporting, not mandatory investigation on your own.”—Alison Filo, Deputy District Attorney in San Jose, California, quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Filo’s comments were in reference to the recent filing of charges against Lyn Vijayendran, principal of O.B. Whaley Elementary School in Santa Clara County, for failing to report allegations of sexual abuse by one of her teachers. If convicted, Vijayendran faces up to six months in jail.

The situation at Whaley is not unusual or unique. One of my first blog postings on Modern School, “Adults Behaving Badly,” recounted an experience I had during my first year of teaching. When I reported sexual harassment allegations two of my students had made against a colleague, my principal’s response was to ask what I had against this fellow teachers and what I thought he should do about it. In the end, the teacher continued to teach at this school and was ultimately promoted to dean.

Recently LAUSD was rocked by several molestation scandals. Superintendent Deasey’s response was to fire the entire staff at one of the schools, casting the impression that all the teachers were suspect. Meanwhile, pundits and politicians increased their vitriolic claims that teachers’ unions protected molesters and criminals. Indeed, a letter to the editor in today’s SF Chron repeated the absurd charges that the unions are more concerned with protecting perverts than children. Yet in many cases, including the recent ones in San Jose and Los Angeles, numerous allegations had been made against the accused teachers and then either ignored or downplayed by their administrators, allowing them to continue the abuse. It was the administrators, not the unions, who kept the accused teachers in the classrooms.

In May, parents of 20 students at Miramonte Elementary sued Los Angeles Unified School District, and several of its administrators, for failing to act on allegations of molestation and sexual abuse at that school. This week, according to the Los Angeles Times, several of the parents filed an additional suit, claiming they have suffered emotional distress from the abuse scandal at that school. One of the two accused molesters, former teacher Mark Berndt, was arrested January 30, 2012, despite the fact that accusations against him date back for more than a decade.

It should be pointed out (since much of the public seems to forget or is simply ignorant of the fact) that principals are teachers’ supervisors and are ultimately responsible for all that happens at a school. When credible allegations of abuse are made, it is the principals’ responsibility (not the unions’) to follow up and report them to the appropriate authorities. And when disciplinary actions are initiated against a teacher, it is the union’s responsibility to defend the teacher’s due process rights, since not all abuse allegations are credible or valid. Yet when it is clear that a teacher is guilty of gross abuse (e.g., molestation, violence), there is little the union can do to protect that teacher’s job, nor is there any reason why it should want to.