Whose children have been left behind?

NATIONAL OPPORTUNITY TO LEARN SUMMIT
December 9, 2011
Diane Ravitch
My theme for today: Whose children have been left behind?
Let me tell you a little bit about myself. For many years, I was a strong advocate of testing, accountability, and choice. I worked in three conservative think tanks where these ideas were held sacred. In 1998, I went to Albany, New York, to testify on behalf of charter legislation. At the time I was connected to the conservative Manhattan Institute. I thought that testing would help diagnose the problems that children had and enable teachers to identify their needs. I thought that charters would enroll the kids who had failed in regular public schools or who were not well served by regular public schools. I thought that charters would collaborate with the public schools.

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Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools - New York Times

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

By STEPHANIE SAUL

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing.

Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll.

Pennsylvania Online Schools

Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll.

By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

Agora is one of the largest in a portfolio of similar public schools across the country run by K12. Eight other for-profit companies also run online public elementary and high schools, enrolling a large chunk of the more than 200,000 full-time cyberpupils in the United States.

The pupils work from their homes, in some cases hundreds of miles from their teachers. There is no cafeteria, no gym and no playground. Teachers communicate with students by phone or in simulated classrooms on the Web. But while the notion of an online school evokes cutting-edge methods, much of the work is completed the old-fashioned way, with a pencil and paper while seated at a desk.

To access the complete article, click here.

Corporate Style Schooling: Marketing for Private Gain Rather than the Public Good

by Sarah Butler Jessen & Catherine DiMartino — October 04, 2011

In response to a recent article in the New York Daily News regarding the marketing expenditures of the Success Charter Network, this commentary discusses the growing push for public schools (particularly charters) to engage in marketing. The authors argue that this trend is a result of the new educational policy context of merged private- and public-sector worlds. Concerns are raised about the effects of embracing corporate models for educational reform.

In recent years, there has been a push to implement private sector strategies in the public education system. Some have argued to treat education “like a business,” and discussions of “return on investment” in education have become more common (Boser, 2011; Colvin & Snider, 2010). School systems throughout the country have implemented market-based reforms, and private companies have begun not only to invest in, but also to partner with (and even create) schools in the name of generating systemic change. This trend receives ample support from the federal government through its Investing in Innovation Fund and, more recently, though the federal “re-start” intervention model. Many schools in New York City, New Orleans and Philadelphia have corporate partners—EMOs, CMOs, and intermediary organizations — that shape the daily practices of public educational institutions. These partners’ influence ranges from providing technical support to the wholesale management of schools.

It should come as little surprise, then, when schools respond to operating within this new policy context of a “business-like” environment with “business-like” strategies aimed at helping them succeed in the marketplace. For example, the expansion of market-based reforms into public education has introduced the world of marketing to a new arena. A recent article published in the New York Daily News revealed that the Success Charter Networks spent $1.6 million dollars on marketing efforts alone in 2009-2010, amounting to $1,300 per incoming student (Gonzalez, 2011). This report incensed many public school advocates, and received targeted criticism at the recent “Save Our Schools” march in Washington, D.C. (Decker, 2011). But how unexpected or outlandish is this financial investment given this current policy context modeled after the private sector?

Marketing, of course, is a central component of private industry. The average retail company spends 4 to 6% of their sales revenue on marketing, while consumer package goods (CPG) companies spend 8 to 10% annually (U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2011; Moorman, 2011). In the “brand-building” stage of product development, companies spend a great deal more on marketing efforts (U.S. Department of Commerce, 2011; Moorman, 2011). Think: the original rolling out of the Apple iPhone or the latest McDonalds’ 99 cent offering.

According to Annual Reports available on through Success Charter Networks, each of the seven Success charter schools in New York City spent, on average, $13,727 per pupil in 2010-2011 (Success Charter Network, 2011a). That means that, if the marketing budget remained roughly the same, 9.5% of the per pupil budget went to marketing and recruiting efforts—a number which is on par with spending of big CPG companies nationally.

Although charter schools are public institutions, many have embraced (and been embraced by) the private sector. Commonly viewed by the corporate world as “innovative” or “entrepreneurial” educational agents that break free of traditional bureaucracies found in public school systems, many charter schools have particularly drawn on financial and organizational support of private industries. Success Charter Network, for example, draws heavily on investments from large corporations, and their Board of Directors is largely made up of representatives from private corporations or investment firms (Success Charter Network, 2011b).

In the world of charter school marketing, Success Charter Network, of course, is not alone in drawing on the private sector. KIPP schools founders partnered with the founders of Gap, Inc. after Gap’s $15 million gift to launch the KIPP Foundation, which “was established help set up KIPP-style schools” (Kennedy School of Government, 2011, p. 2). Among other things, the KIPP Foundation spearheaded the trademark licensing of the KIPP name—a branding technique. Marketing efforts employed by others include sending monthly mailings of full color brochures to perspective students and their families, hiring part-time workers to target specific pools of applicants, transmitting personalized text messages to parents and advertising on bus stops (CellsTrust, 2010; Gonzalez, 2011; Medina, 2010).

Despite the recent merging of the education and business worlds, there are significant differences between the marketing of a CPG company and a public school. First, private companies have oversight systems in place to prevent the spread of misinformation or deception through their marketing materials. The Federal Trade Commission has governmental jurisdiction over advertising. Legal teams at major CPG companies work to ensure that wording of each marketing publication is not inaccurate or overstated. Companies can challenge claims made by competitors through the Better Business Bureau. Ads run on major television networks are additionally run through the network’s legal reviews.

At the present time, no such oversight exists for public schools. Principals, who are often charged with marketing and recruiting, are given little training on how to effectively, or accurately, portray their school in informational literature. Some research has shown that, in fact, schools have “glossified” their marketing literature to portray an image of the school (which may or may not be accurate) in order to attract certain populations (Gewirtz, Ball, & Bowe, 1995). Little research has examined the accuracy of the claims made in school marketing literature or the impact of such claims on the consumer – student and parent - experience, especially if hyperbole trumps precision.

Secondly, marketing practices from the private sector do not convert fluidly into the public arena of the educational system. At a very basic level, the purpose of a public school is to contribute to a public good whereas the purpose of a private company is to build revenue. In the private sector demand can be met by increasing product and industries can expand by enlarging the consumer base. In public schools, the market is simply restricted. There are a set number of school-age children, all of whom are going to school, and each school only has a given number of seats. This creates incrementally increasing competition for specific schools, resulting in unintended complications.

Competition spurs innovation and improves practice, so school choice advocates claim. In the private sector, investing in marketing provides returns on investment through increases in sales and revenue. Research has shown that schools often begin to invest in marketing strategies, as school choice competition increases (Lubienski, 2005). However, unlike in private industries, transferring portions of an institution’s educational budget to marketing can, in fact, detract from academic programming. Because public schools do not generally increase their income through marketing techniques, they do not see the same financial return on investment.

Where schools stand to profit from intensive marketing campaigns is through student enrollment. While distributing information about schools in a choice system is intended to contribute to creating a cohesive school community through student buy-in, or simply maintaining enrollment, research has shown that parents and students respond to marketing cues from schools, which can result in sorting by a variety of factors, such as socioeconomic status, race, or educational background (Ancess & Allen, 2006). Particularly with the intense pressure to meet accountability standards, there is an underlying danger that instead of focusing on improving educational practice, schools will compete for the most “desirable” applicants through increased marketing campaigns (DiMartino & Jessen, 2011).

It is possible that the quality of Success schools is superior to the public institutions from which they draw their students, and, at the very least, as a newer charter network they face hurdles of “getting the word out” about their schools. Yet, the marketing expenditures of Success Charter Network come as local public schools are facing extensive budget cuts. Extra ability to invest in marketing puts them at an advantage, whatever the quality of their product, raising questions not only about this inequitable distribution of funds, but also about the potential negative impact on neighboring public schools.

The underlying concern, however, for many is that Success’ intensely focused financial investment in marketing is reflective of their priorities lying with private goals rather than public aims. After all, it can be argued that the money spent by Success on marketing could, alternatively, have been devoted to educational objectives or support. In fact, on the donation section of the Success Charter Network website, the organization opens by stating, “You can tell a lot about an organization’s priorities by how they spend their money” (Success Charter Network, 2011b). This may likely be very true.

References

Ancess, J., & Allen, D. (2006). Implementing small theme high schools in New York City: Great intensions and great tensions. Harvard Educational Review, 76(3).

Boser, U., (2011). Return on educational investment: A district-by-district evaluation of U.S. educational productivity. Washington D.C.: Center for American Progress.

CellsTrust. (2010). Harlem success academy case study. Retrieved August, 16, 2011, from http://www.celltrust.com/products/sms-gateway/celltrust-harlem.html

Colvin, R.L, & Snider, R. (2010). Business leaders and the new education agenda: Investment in our littlest learners (A Hechinger Brief). Teachers College, Columbia University: The Hechniger Institute on Education and the Media.

Decker, G. (2011). Matt Damon criticizes Eva Moskowitz’s charters at D.C. rally. Retrieved August 14, 2011 from GothamSchools.org,

DiMartino, C., & Jessen, S. (2011). School brand management: The policies, practices and perceptions of branding and marketing in New York City's public schools. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, Louisianna.

Gewirtz, S., Ball, S., & Bowe, R. (1995). Markets, choice, and equity in education. Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Gonzalez, J. (2011). Success Charter Network has been just that for Eva Moskowitz but not for public schools, New York Daily News. Retrieved from http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-07-27/local/29836796_1_success-charter-network-charter-schools-icahn-charter

Kennedy School of Government (2011). The KIPP schools: Deciding how to go to scale. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Lubienski, C. (2005). Public schools in marketized environments: Shifting incentives and unintended consequences of competition-based educational reforms. American Journal of Education, 111, 464-486.

Medina, J. (2010, March 10). Pressed by charters, public schools try marketing.The New York Times, pp. 1, 3.

Moorman, C. (2011). The CMO survey: Highlights and insights, February 2011. Duke University Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association.

Success Charter Network (2011a). Annual Reports. Retrieved August 13, 2011 from successcharters.org.

Success Charter Network (2011b). Ways of Giving. Retrieved August 13, 2011 from successcharters.org.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce (2011). Setting a marketing budget. Retrieved on August 13, 2011 from uschamberssmallbusinessnnation.com.

Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record, Date Published: October 04, 2011 http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 16556, Date Accessed: 12/13/2011 12:38:30 PM

What Bullet Holes in Airplanes Can Teach You About Making Better Decisions

Filed in archive NEUROSCIENCE by ROB MAY on JULY 5, 2007 

During World War II, statistician Abraham Wald tried to determine where to add extra armor to airplanes. Based on the patterns of bullet holes in returning airplanes, he suggested that the parts not hit should be protected with extra armor. Why?

Wald was looking at what is sometimes called "dead evidence." He reasoned like this… if these planes are returning, we know that if they are hit in the spots they have been hit, they can still fly. The planes that did not return must have been hit in different places. So put the extra armor wherever the returning planes were not hit.

I think most people would have a natural inclination to put the armor where the returning planes had been hit. The real answer is simple, but counterintuitive. It's called "dead evidence" because it is what people ignore when they make these judgments. For instance, you may see a story on tv about how to survive a plane crash. The producers will interview 10 plane crash survivors, and figure out what they did in common, then recommend that you do that too. What they don't think about is how many people did those same things, but still died in the crash. The dead can't be interviewed, so we will never know.

How can you use this in your business? Think about the dead evidence. Don't look just at winners, look at losers to see if they did the same things as the winners. Don't just look at what the top companies in your industry are doing, look at what all kinds of different companies are doing. Sometimes you can learn more by looking at failures than at successes.

Choosing Choice

by Douglas B. Reeves. in the American School Board Journal, www.asbj.com  December 2011

"Parents are demanding more educational choices and more say in their children’s schooling. How can you offer choice in your district so you don’t lose parents to charters and vouchers?"

"Parents love choices. Proliferating brands, color palettes, communication media, and electronic options are only a few of the manifestations of our collective desire to be in charge of our choices. Not surprisingly, board members now face a significant increase in demands for school choice. Some of this increase in demand is fueled by federal funding incentives for charter schools; the recent $4 billion Race to the Top program gave preference to states with the least restrictive charter school legislation. A growing number of states permit parents to choose schools outside traditional attendance boundaries, and a few are permitting vouchers."


"Educational debates can sometimes be framed in terms of extremes—you are either for choice or against choice. Board members can, however, offer a more nuanced approach that provides fair choice --alternatives in structure, governance, and curriculum—without inflicting unnecessary financial damage on the public school system."


Link to the complete article, copy and paste the following:

http://www.asbj.com/MainMenuCategory/Archive/2011/December/1211pdfs/Choosing-Choice.aspx?Site=nsba

How to Rescue Education Reform

Gracía Lam

By FREDERICK M. HESS and LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND

Published: December 5, 2011 New York Times Opinion Page

THE debate over renewing No Child Left Behind, the education reform act that will be 10 years old in January, has fallen along partisan lines even though school improvement is one of the few examples of bipartisan cooperation over the last decade.

Though the law was initiated and signed by a Republican president, presidential candidates like Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, who once supported it, now talk about getting the federal government out of education, echoing Tea Party members who deem federal involvement a constitutional travesty. Democratic reformers, meanwhile, insist that the federal government has a role in telling states how to identify, punish and fix low-performing schools — despite little evidence that Washington has been good at any of these tasks. To existing mandates, they would add heavy-handed, unproven teacher-evaluation requirements that could stifle innovative teaching and school design. 

We sorely need a smarter, more coherent vision of the federal role in K-12 education. Yet both parties find themselves hemmed in. Republicans are stuck debating whether, rather than how, the federal government ought to be involved in education, while Democrats are squeezed between superintendents, school boards and teachers’ unions that want money with no strings, and activists with little patience for concerns about federal overreach.

When it comes to education policy, the two of us represent different schools of thought. One of us, Linda Darling-Hammond, is an education school professor who advised the Obama administration’s transition team; the other, Rick Hess, has been a critic of school districts and schools of education. We disagree on much, including big issues like merit pay for teachers and the best strategies for school choice.

We agree, though, on what the federal government can do well. It should not micromanage schools, but should focus on the four functions it alone can perform.

First is encouraging transparency for school performance and spending. For all its flaws, No Child Left Behind’s main contribution is that it pushed states to measure and report achievement for all students annually. Without transparency, it’s tough for parents, voters and taxpayers to hold schools and public officials accountable. However, No Child Left Behind also let states use statistical gimmicks to report performance. Instead of the vague mandate of “adequate yearly progress,” federal financing should be conditioned on truth in advertising — on reliably describing achievement (or lack thereof) and spending. To track achievement, states should be required to link their assessments to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (or to adopt a similar multistate assessment). To shed light on equity and cost-effectiveness, states should be required to report school- and district-level spending; the resources students receive should be disclosed, not only their achievement.

Second is ensuring that basic constitutional protections are respected.  No Child Left Behind required states to “disaggregate” assessment results to illuminate how disadvantaged or vulnerable populations — like black and Hispanic students and children from poor families — were doing.  Enforcing civil rights laws and ensuring that dollars intended for low-income students and students with disabilities are spent accordingly have been parts of the Education Department’s mandate since its creation in 1979. But efforts to reduce inequities have too often led to onerous and counterproductive micromanagement.

Third is supporting basic research. While the private market can produce applied research that can be put to profitable use, it tends to underinvest in research that asks fundamental questions. When it comes to brain science, language acquisition or the impact of computer-assisted tutoring, federal financing for reliable research is essential. 

Finally, there is value in voluntary, competitive federal grants that support innovation while providing political cover for school boards, union leaders and others to throw off anachronistic routines. The Obama administration’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition tried to do some of this, but it ended up demanding that winning states hire consultants to comply with a 19-point federal agenda, rather than truly innovate.

Beyond this list, the federal government is simply not well situated to make schools and teachers improve — no matter how much ambitious reformers wish it were otherwise. Under our system, dictates from Congress turn into gobbledygook as they travel from the Education Department to state education agencies and then to local school districts. Educators end up caught in a morass of prescriptions and prohibitions, bled of the initiative and energy that characterize effective schools.

The federal government can make states, localities and schools do things — but not necessarily do them well. Since decades of research make it clear that what matters for evaluating employees or turning around schools is how well you do it — rather than whether you do it a certain way — it’s not surprising that well-intentioned demands for “bold” federal action on school improvement have a history of misfiring. They stifle problem-solving, encourage bureaucratic blame avoidance and often do more harm than good.

Perhaps No Child Left Behind’s most enduring lesson is the value of humility — a virtue that must be taken to heart in crafting a smarter, more coherent federal role in schooling.

Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Linda Darling-Hammond is a professor of education at Stanford
.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 6, 2011, on page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: How to Rescue Education Reform.

Charter Schools: Making Public Schools Private

Glass, Gene V (2008-06-01). Fertilizers, Pills & Magnetic Strips The Fate of Public Education in America

From Chapter 8: Eight Reforming the Schools: Making Some Cheap and Others Private

Historically, elite private schools were the refuge for the privileged classes seeking special treatment or escape from the public schools. Religious private schools have been a prominent feature of the American education landscape for well over a century. For many decades private school enrollments held steady, somewhere between 10% and 15% of all K-12 students. From 1900 to about 1920, roughly one tenth of children attending school in Grades K through 12 were enrolled in private schools. By mid-20th century, Catholic religious schools accounted for as high as 90% of the parochial school attendance in the U.S. But largely Catholic parochial schools waned as Protestant parochial and nonreligious private schools grew in size and number in the latter half of the 20th century. In very recent years, the private school share of the student population has begun to drop.

Noteworthy in the 10-year trend in private school enrollments is that the private school share has dropped in three regions of the country but not in the South where post-1954 private schools sprang up as a means of avoiding court ordered segregation.

What is significant in contemporary U.S. education is that private school enrollments are declining slightly as a percentage of enrolled students. The White middle class is seeking to fund a disguised form of private (quasi-private) education within the public school system by means of vouchers, charter schools, tuition tax credits, open enrollment, homeschooling and the like. Although homeschooling is the fastest growing alternative to traditional public schools because of its smaller share of the population, charter school enrollments represent the largest alternative to the traditional public schools. At the beginning of the 2004-2005 school year, approximately 3,000 charter schools were in operation in 37 states. Approximately 1.5% (or more than 800,000) of public school students nationwide are enrolled in charter schools. The District of Columbia has the highest percentage of students enrolled in charter schools (11.35%), followed by Arizona (6.04%) and Delaware (4.35%).

Wherever charter school programs have been analyzed, the troubling specter of racial segregation has risen its ugly head. There is little question that to the person on the street, state funded charter schools are seen as “private” in spite of the fact that they are indeed public, that is, they are required to admit all students for whom there is space, adhere to federal laws governing special education and the like, and receive their funding from state revenues. “Charter school students across all racial groups in most of the sixteen states are more likely to attend intensely segregated minority schools than are public school students”19 There is evidence that in such states as Arizona, charter schools are being used for “white flight” from high minority public schools.20

In California, the same is true to a lesser extent, and some homeschoolers will cooperate to form a “charter school” in name only. Where “choice” is prominent, the resegregation of the American public school system is not far behind.21 In 1996-97, Arizona had nearly one in four of all charter schools in the U.S.

My colleague Casey Cobb and I undertook an analysis that involved a series of comparisons between the ethnic compositions of adjacent charter and public schools in Arizona’s most populated region and its rural towns. This method differed from the approach of many researchers studying ethnic segregation in charter schools in that it incorporated the use of maps to compare schools’ ethnic make-ups.

The ethnic compositions of 55 urban and 57 rural charter schools were inspected in relation to their traditional public school neighbors. Nearly half of the charter schools exhibited evidence of substantial ethnic separation. Arizona charter schools not only contained a greater proportion of White students, but when comparable nearby traditional public schools were used for comparison, the charters were typically 20 percentage points higher in White enrollment than the other publics.

Fees Middle School in southern Tempe, Arizona (a suburb in the metropolitan Phoenix area) enrolled 50% minority pupils in 1996, while the Tempe Prep Academy, a charter school two blocks distant, enrolled only 17% ethnic minority students. Moreover, the charter schools that had a majority of ethnic minority students enrolled in them tended to be either vocational secondary schools that did not lead to college or “schools of last resort” for students being expelled from the traditional public schools. The degree of ethnic separation in Arizona schools was large and consistent; it has grown in succeeding years; and it is ignored by politicians and policymakers in the state. In Exhibit 8.2 appears a map of charter and traditional public schools located in west Mesa, Arizona, with the proportions of White pupils enrolled in each school. Charter schools are indicated by triangles and traditional public schools by circles. For example, Holmes, a traditional public school in the lower right hand corner of the map, had 813 students enrolled, of which 46% were White. The adjacent Sequoia School, a K-12 charter school with 752 students, was 90% White. Two traditional public schools in Exhibit 8.2, Franklin West and Franklin 7&8, show very high percentages of White enrollment: 89% and 81%, respectively. The census tract which encompasses Franklin West, Franklin 7&8, and Mesa Arts Academy was 37% White in 1995. How could the Franklin traditional public schools be so White in an area that was predominantly ethnic minority? For one, the Mesa School District open enrollment policy allows parents to choose among public schools, and the prestigious Franklin schools are an especially popular choice. There is a distinctly lofty status attached to these schools, making them similar to private schools. At least in part, this explains how a public school that is 80-90% White is located in a neighborhood that is principally ethnic minority. In essence, the Franklin schools appear to contribute to separating students along ethnic lines. They are an aberration among the traditional public schools in that area, but as will be seen later, they illustrate still another form of quasi-privatizing public education—open enrollment.

In the most extensive and objective study of a state-wide charter school system published to date, Gary Miron and his colleagues at the Evaluation Center of Western Michigan University found convincing evidence that the charter schools of the state of Delaware were contributing to racial segregation.22 The aggregate of charter schools does not differ greatly from the traditional public schools in the state. However, when we look at the data by schools, we find substantial differences in student demographics. Some charter schools primarily serve minority students, and others cater primarily to white students.

• This pattern of segregated charter schools based on race is also repeated in segregation by class and ability. 
• On the whole, traditional public schools have higher percentages of low income students, students with special education needs, and students who have limited English proficiency. 
• Some reasons that explain why the charter schools have become so segregated include the following:    
• The school may be located in a highly segregated housing market.
• Parents choose these highly segregated environments for their child(ren) because of their desire for a homogeneous learning environment. 
• Targeted marketing and recruitment efforts by charter schools. For example, particular cultural profiles may attract a particular ethnic group; and specific offerings such as full day kindergarten may be more attractive to low-income families (Miron et al., 2007, p. 2).

Because individual charter schools enroll students that differ greatly from sending districts, one can argue that charter schools may be accelerating the resegregation of public schools by leaving them more fragmented based on race, class, and ability.23

Like advocates for vouchers, researchers backing the charter school movement search for evidence of the superior academic performance of students in charter schools. None that stands up against the critique of neutral methodologists has been found.24 Again, the best study addressing the question was that of Miron and his colleagues. They looked at the academic performance of charter school pupils in Delaware and compared it with the performance of students in the traditional public schools. The Evaluation Center’s work on this topic benefited from one of the best data sets ever available to study the issue (compiled by the Delaware Department of Education) and from a level of sophistication in experimental design and analysis generally missing from other studies. Fifth grade reading and mathematics comparisons showed that: the 5th grade average math scale score for charter school students was significantly lower than the mean results for matched noncharter students. There is some indication of improvement in math scaled score since 2003-04. [For Grade 5 reading] the results suggest that, overall, charter school students are not performing at levels comparable to their noncharter peers in reading; and the gap appears to be widening.25

Test score comparisons in Grades 8 and 10 showed mixed results with the differences attributed to charter schools’ selectivity in choice of students—“creaming” in some lexicons—in ways that could not be adequately controlled for in the statistical analyses. Although Miron and his colleagues took a rather benign view of the charter school situation in Delaware,26 my own view is considerably less sanguine. It is true that Delaware, running a small and relatively tightly regulated charter school system, may have avoided many of the disasters that have plagues charter schools in other states; nonetheless, it is hard to credit the state with a success when the new system has contributed to racial segregation and done nothing to promote greater academic progress. Charter schools appear to be adopting one of four different characters: White academies run by individual experienced teachers; “drop-out” drill and kill factories run by large companies calling themselves Educational Management Organizations (EMOs); ethnic academies appealing to racial or ethnic loyalties for their clientele; and private/Montessori conversion schools.2728

Super Bowl XXX was played January 28, 1996, in Tempe, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. The National Football League donated $1 million to a newly opened charter school, Espiritu Charter School located in a poor section of Phoenix.


Enrolling primarily Hispanic youngsters, Espiritu spent the money acquiring land, constructing a football field, a parking lot, and a classroom building. In 2007, Espiritu had an enrollment of 800 students. Its test scores had begun to slip. Fewer than one in five students passed the state’s AIMS (Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards) reading test. The school expects a second windfall from the 2008 Super Bowl that will also be played in the Phoenix area. Espiritu Charter School is owned by brothers Armando and Fernando Ruiz. Armando theorizes that charter schools have evolved into two groups: those that take in kids who are behind in their academics and put them through weak courses to accumulate credits to graduate, and those that act as private, elite schools by taking only the brightest.29

The brief history of charter schools in America is replete with stories of theft, corruption, and ethical failure. The with-drawal of strict government oversight of charter schools was supposed to unleash powers of creative innovation. It seems to have unleashed instead a torrent of greed and duplicity. Regulations governing charter schools in Arizona were egregiously lax. The lifting of bureaucratic burdens was an invitation to exploitation that some charter school organizers could not resist. It was possible within the letter of the enabling legislation to spend charter school funds to acquire property and then hold personal title to the property in the event the school failed, as many did. Raymond Jackson founded ATOP Academy with two campuses—one in Phoenix and the other in Tempe—in 1997 as a K-8 charter school that was reported to have a combined enrollment in 1997-98 of more than 350 mostly poor African American students. Disinterested visitors to the school described a rigid, almost military style of “drill and kill” teaching. Textbooks were actually authored by Dr. Jackson himself and bought by the school. Within 5 years the ATOP Academy found itself at the center of a scandal over falsified reports and the school’s charter was revoked. Jackson—who listed himself as Dr. Raymond Jackson, but even a Google search could find no evidence of his having earned a doctorate—later surfaced as principal of a K-8 school on the Hopi Indian Reservation in Northern Arizona for 1 year. In the late 1990s, one of the earliest and largest charter schools in the nation, Citizen 2000 in Phoenix, Arizona, grew to more than 800 students in its second year of operation, largely by playing on the sympathies of its African American clientele. The school was closed suddenly in the spring semester of its second year. Students and teachers were abandoned by the school’s founder without notice. It was later learned that the founder and principal, whose salary far exceeded that of any other principal in the state, had hired her sister as assistant principal, had used school funds to pay her divorce lawyer and her mother’s mortgage on a condominium in the most exclusive area of town, and had left the state to relocate in Chicago. The Arizona Attorney General’s office chose not to prosecute. In 2004, auditors for the state of Arizona uncovered attendance counting problems at more than half of the 345 charter-school companies operating charter schools in the state. Attendance counts are the basis of state reimbursements to the charter schools. One company, Renaissance Educational Consortium operating several charter schools in the state, was discovered during the 2005-2006 school year, to be misreporting its enrollments by nearly 50%. Almost half of their student count was either not enrolled, regularly absent, or had dropped out of school altogether. The company received more than $100,000 from the state to which it was not entitled betwee June and October.30 The Franklin Arts Academies, operator of three charter schools in the Phoenix suburbs, were notified in Match 2007 that their charter was about to be revoked for misreporting of student enrollment figures. Actual enrollment was fewer than 130 students, while 170 was the number reported to the Arizona Department of Education. Fraudulent reimbursements amounted to nearly a quarter million dollars a year. Morningstar Academy principal Carolyn Kennedy managed to keep her job as principal of the Apache Junction Arizona charter school even though she failed to report an incident of a teacher molesting a girl in his class. The teacher, Bobby Kennedy, 28, was the principal’s son. The decision to keep Ms. Kennedy in her position as principal was made by the charter school owner, C. Steven Cox. A reporter for the Arizona Republic discovered that Mr. Cox was under indictment on 112 counts of theft and misuse of charter school funds in California.31 Charter school graft is not confined to the state of Arizona. Anne Lesley Kane was arrested on November 12, 2007, by the Boulder (CO) City Police. Ms Kane, founder and former lead teacher of the Horizons K-8 Charter School in Boulder, Colorado, was charged with four separate felonies: theft, attempting to influence a public servant, forgery, and embezzlement of public property. Approximately 90% of the students attending Horizons Charter School are White and from middle class families. Kane was alleged to have misrepresented her salary, allowing her to collect unwarranted retirement money from the state retirement fund.32 Ironically, when these schools collapse amid scandal and malfeasance, charter school proponents trumpet the failures as successes of the market at work. Jeanne Allen, head of the conservative Center for Education Reform, hailed the collapse of the ATOP Academy as a triumph of the free market: While Ray Jackson and ATOP have been a savior for hundreds of families, at no time should poor management be tolerated in any school. This case shows the power of the charter concept. If there are problems, these schools can be shut down. Such accountability is rarely seen in traditional Arizona public schools.33 The implication is that incompetence and duplicity exist in the traditional public schools but are never uncovered because of the public school monopoly. When a charter school fails, it is hailed as a triumph of the market place and presented as evidence of the superiority of those that remain open. When a public school runs into difficulties, it is cited as evidence of the failure of the entire public education “semimonopoly.”

Poor performance and illegal behavior exist in the traditional public school sector, and they are frequently dealt with.34 But they are usually dealt with in subtle ways that protect the dignity of the individuals involved while protecting the integrity of the school. Accurate figures do not exist on felonious and unethical behavior in the schools; however, the rate of felonious and unethical behavior certainly appears to greatly favor the charter school movement. It is difficult to see that anything other than the White voting public’s desire to simultaneously cheapen public education and create quasi-private schooling for their children is driving, in its larger part, the charter school movement. Private schools being increasingly outside the financial reach of all but the most well-to-do Americans, something akin to private schools but funded by public tax monies become the preferred alternative. Charter schools are evolving into the public version of the nonparochial private academies. That they symbolize to those parents who choose them a sanctuary from the menacing poly-cultural environments of the traditional public schools is an added attraction.

Glass, Gene V (2008-06-01). Fertilizers, Pills & Magnetic Strips The Fate of Public Education in America (Kindle Locations 3053-3054). IAP - Information Age Publishing, Inc.. Kindle Edition.