President's Perspective
The not-so-simple question of charter schools
Jan 11, 2010 4:24 PM
In an age of sound bites and text messaging, brevity is at a premium and KISS* is the rule.
But UFT members know that any issue important enough to arouse passion and controversy deserves more thought than a 10-second response can convey. The truth is, despite their appeal, the simple answers are not always the right answers.
Take the UFT’s position on charter schools. Are we for them or against them? The not-so-simple answer is, “It depends.”
Certainly, the record shows that, from the beginning, the UFT supported the idea of charter schools. Some still remember that it was Al Shanker, as AFT president, who first brought the idea of independent, publicly funded charter schools to the Unites States and when some tried to tout charter schools as an end run around the union, the UFT stepped up to run its own charters, in part to demonstrate that unions and reform can and do go together.
Disappointingly, many charter schools have not lived up to the charter promise. Last week, after analyzing the data, the UFT issued a report on New York City charter schools. Instead of pioneering innovative instructional approaches for the most challenging students who have fared most poorly in the regular public schools, we found that, as a group, the city’s charter schools have neglected those students. Overall, city charter school students are not as poor and have fewer special needs than the citywide averages. Worse yet, when compared to the schools in their immediate districts, the disparities are even greater.
That’s disturbing on many levels.
First and most importantly, charter schools are violating the first rule of public schools: to provide equal opportunity for all children. Whether or not the exclusions are purposeful is beyond the scope of our report, but clearly charter schools have a responsibility to take more affirmative action to attract and admit more needy children.
Second, the superior performance charter schools crow about, if it exists at all, may be because they started out with students who present fewer educational challenges.
Third, since their per-pupil funding is based on citywide averages, charter schools receive a higher level of per-pupil funding than they are entitled to, as they educate proportionately fewer high-cost students.
This selectivity is not the only problem we cited, though it’s the most serious. We also found questionable uses of public funds in exorbitant management salaries and fees for profit-making companies, encroachment on district schools’ space and resources (in many cases preventing them from reducing class sizes) and diminished opportunities for educators to be represented by a collective bargaining agent.
(You can read about our specific recommendations in the article on page 3.)
Charter schools, by design, were given a lot of freedom, so they could experiment and maybe find some better strategies for educating children. We’re all for that.
But when that purpose is perverted, when schools are not trying to help all children, but aim to game the system in order to beat the “competition,” we have to call them out on it.
Does that mean that our support for charter schools was really only “lip service,” as some have charged?
And by asking for a law that would prevent abuses, are we, as some say, trying to kill charter schools with “poison pills”?
I wonder if the editorial writers and neo-conservatives who make those charges would claim that those who criticized Bernie Madoff showed that their support of investment banking had been only lip service. Or that those who responded to the Madoff revelations by calling for tighter SEC regulation were proposing poison pills to kill the stock market.
It seems to me that charter schools have to be part of a serious, honest and open discussion about improving public education. But in making charter schools the prize in an ideological battle, the zealots have allowed the focus of that discussion to shift from the end to the means. The continuation (or demise) of charter schools should not be the goal. The goal is more and better opportunities for our students to succeed. If charter schools are the means to get there, we should all applaud their growth.
But if poorly regulated, selective, cash-cow charter schools continue to proliferate, it will be a bitter victory for the “winners” because the losers will be our most vulnerable children.
