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Charter Schools on the Rise
Joel Shatzky
October 20, 2014
“School Choice” versus Public Education
by Joel Shatzky From the Autumn, 2014 issue of Jewish Currents
National Heritage Academies charged its Brooklyn Dreams Charter School $2.3 million a year to rent space in a Catholic church that the management company leased from the church for much less. The going rate for rental of this kind was between $14.25 and $25.50 per square foot, but National Heritage Academies charged the school $46.99...Singer has come to regard charters as part of what he calls the “Education-Foundation-Industrial Complex,” which aims “to shape state and federal educational policy in a way that maximizes private corporate profits at the expense of public education.” Among the leaders he identifies are Pearson Education and the Pearson Foundation. “Pearson is one of the largest and most aggressive private companies seeking to profit” from educational reform throughout the school system, both public and private, “through the sale of staff development, curriculum, texts, and substandard remedial education programs seamlessly aligned with the high stakes standardized tests for students and teacher assessments...”

We know that choice programs can either offer quality educational options with racially and economically diverse schooling to children who otherwise have few opportunities, or... can actually increase stratification and inequality depending on how they are designed. The charter effort, which has largely ignored the segregation issue, has been justified by claims about superior educational performance, which simply are not sustained by the research. Though there are some remarkable and diverse charter schools, most are neither. The lessons of what is needed to make choice work have usually been ignored in charter school policy. Magnet schools [for example]... offer a great deal of experience in how to create educationally successful and integrated choice options.“How do we transform public school parent hopelessness into parent power?” asks Sam Anderson, a radical African-American educator. Finding “a good response to this growing anger and feeling of helplessness within the parent communities is difficult,” he admits, but to “allow the New York City public school system to be replaced by corporate-controlled private charter schools would mean the end of a democratic system and the beginning of a system where we turn our children over to the charters mainly owned by the hedge funds and Walmart types of megacorporations.” Joanne Barkan, in Dissent (Winter, 2011), substantiates Anderson’s assertion about the influence of hedge funds on public education. “The cost of K-12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year,” Barkan writes. “So how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum?” Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy — where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision — investing in education yields great bang for the buck.

A whole five days of training is what I received before I was assigned to teach my first high school algebra class during Teach for America’s summer training. Though I had only taken one calculus course in college and did not consider myself to be a “math person,” TFA did not find it relevant to provide in-depth training on math content or pedagogy.... Since I had been slated to teach at the Texas-Mexico border, I was looking forward to conversations during training about institutionalized racism, income inequity and inhumane immigration policies. Instead, I found myself with nine hundred other corps members assigned to teach in various parts of the country participating in standardized sessions on “backwards planning” (that is, teaching to the test) rather than critically examining our roles in local communities. TFA emphasized tracking test scores and basing learning solely on high-stakes exams, some of which determined whether or not students would be able to move on to the next grade.As originally proposed by former United Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker, charter schools were a promising experiment in educational reform. Today they have become an instrument for “teaching on the cheap.” They are helping rightwing politicians undermine teachers’ unions and push down the living standards of public school teachers — and in doing so, they are damaging the public education system and driving veteran teachers from the profession. This is most harmful for young learners who are most oppressed by poverty and most in need of a quality education that could help them escape it. A ruling in June by a California judge who declared tenure protection for teachers to be “unconstitutional” bodes ill for the future of the teaching profession — and of our country. Joel Shatzky writes frequently for Jewish Currents on education. He is the author of Option Three: A Novel about the University, published last year by our magazine’s imprint, Blue Thread. Shatzky taught at SUNY Cortland for thirty-seven years. His books include The Thinking Crisis (with Ellen Hill), Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists, and Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets (with Michael Taub).