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Wall Street Journal ‘Charter Backers Want More Action From Christie’
Washington Post 10/19/10 ‘How billionaire donors harm public education’
Wall Street Journal ‘Charter Backers Want More Action From Christie’
By LISA FLEISHER October 19 2010 WSJ.com
Charter-school advocates in New Jersey are keeping a close eye on Gov. Chris Christie this year, saying he has been a vocal cheerleader but his administration has been slow to implement changes to help their movement gain ground.
"People inside the charter-school community are a little disappointed," said Shelley Skinner, a board member of the New Jersey Charter School Association and director at a Jersey City charter school. "We like what we hear from the governor, and we're excited that he's excited about charter schools. But we have yet to hear any concrete details on the issues that are going to help us be sustainable."
Publicly, Mr. Christie has said he wants to open more charter schools and attract more organizations with records of successfully running them. Charter operators and consultants, though, say the administration needs to be more specific about funding, free access to unused facilities and regulations they say hamstring them. They also describe a Department of Education that is well-meaning but understaffed.
Recent moves have left some in the charter community scratching their heads. In a month when Mr. Christie said he wanted to vastly expand charter schools, the state quietly approved just six, out of 36 applications submitted. And while the state trumpeted a move that gave charter schools access to $30 million in low-cost federal loans for buildings, charter officials said it would come too late for them to use it before the program's end-of-year deadline.
"The administration is not going to achieve a culture change overnight," DOE spokesman Alan Guenther said. "But we have taken really significant steps to help improve the environment here. We would ask for their patience, and we think that their patience will be rewarded."
Charter schools, approved in New Jersey in 1995, are public schools formed as independent districts and are often places that test innovative methods. State funding is less generous than for traditional districts.
This year, 50 applications for charter schools were submitted by the deadline Friday—the highest number in at least 10 years, according to the state Department of Education. Yet without start-up money or help paying rent—two things the state isn't obligated to provide—it will be difficult for the new schools to make a go of it, said Brian Keenan, president of Real Estate Advisory and Development Services, a charter consultant.
"If there's no start-up money for them, I don't know how we're going to do it," Mr. Keenan said. "Where are these charter schools going to get money to open their doors, hire teachers, and put their deposit down or pay their first month's rent?"
The DOE is making is forming a team to address charter schools' concerns, and the administration intends to hire more people, Mr. Guenther said.
The biggest challenge this year will come as Mr. Christie revises the formula the state uses to dole out tax dollars to school districts. Now, charter schools receive at most 90% of the subsidy traditional districts receive. In addition, charter operators want free access to unused space in public-school buildings they say have already been paid for once by taxpayers. Mr. Guenther said the Attorney General's office is expected to finish a review of the formula this year and he could not comment further.
The governor's vocal support—he has made passionate speeches on the subject from Washington to the set of Oprah Winfrey's TV show—is something, at least, said Carlos Perez, chief executive of the state's charter association.
"I'm not saying that he has done an inadequate job," Mr. Perez said. "Cut him a little bit of slack. It's been less than a year. We want to see the best environment for charter schools, but we also recognize that changing an entire state culture around education is a big shift to move."
Write to Lisa Fleisher at lisa.fleisher@wsj.com
Washington Post 10/19/10 ‘How billionaire donors harm public education’
Valerie Strauss/Voices http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/how-billionaire-donors-are-har.html
Today the foundation set up by billionaires Eli and Edythe Broad is giving away $2 million to an urban school district that has pursued education reform that they like. On Friday a Florida teacher is running 50 miles to raise money so that he and his fellow teachers don’t have to spend their own money to buy paper and pencils, binders (1- and 2-inch), spiral notebooks, composition books and printer ink.
Together the two events show the perverted way schools are funded in 2010.
Very wealthy people are donating big private money to their own pet projects: charter schools, charter school management companies, teacher assessment systems. (The latest example is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to the Newark public schools, given with the provision that Zuckerberg, apparently an education reform expert, play a big role in determining success.)
What this means is that these philanthropists -- and not local communities -- are determining the course of the country's school reform efforts and which education research projects get funded. As Buffalo Public Schools Superintendent James A. Williams said in an interview: "They should come out and tell the truth. If they want to privatize public education, they should say so.”
That none of their projects is grounded in any research seems not to be a hindrance to these big donors. And they never try to explain why it is acceptable for them to donate to other causes -- the arts, medicine, etc. -- without telling doctors and artists what to do with the money. Only educators do they tell what to do.
Alongside this private money stream is the great inequity in the public funding of traditional schools. A new report that shows that only six states are positioned relatively well to provide equality of educational opportunity for all children.
Many traditional public schools are so starved for funds that teachers spend some of their own money for supplies; the National Education Association estimates that teachers spend $1,000 out-of-pocket annually on essential classroom supplies. To bring attention to this ugliness, Rafael Martin, a high school math and history teacher for students with disabilities, will run 50 miles on Friday from Lakeland to Orlando, Fla., to raise funds for school supplies for Tenoroc High School, where most of the children live in poverty.
He'll likely earn some thousands of dollars.
The $2 million being given to the 2010 Broad Prize winner is a mere drop in the bucket in the ocean of cash being given away by the super-rich to education.
Coincidentally, it is the same amount of money that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave away earlier this year to a company simply to market the education film “Waiting for Superman,” which portrays a distorted idea of the root causes of the problems facing urban school districts as well as the solutions. [Disclosure: Melinda French Gates is a member of the Board of Directors of The Washington Post Co.]
There are a lot of foundations out there handing out money for education initiatives -- some you’ve probably heard of, like the Walton Foundation, and some you haven’t -- but Gates is the big money man when it comes to funding education, with his tally into the billions.
A look at one of his education investments is revealing. About a decade ago, Gates decided that small schools were the answer to the high school dropout problem. >From 2000-2009 he poured in about $2 billion to help reform high schools and improve graduation rates of minority students -- with most of the money going to create small schools out of large drop-out factories. But when standardized test scores didn’t go up, Gates pulled out his money.
He wrote last year in the foundation’s annual letter (excerpts of which were published in The Washington Post ): “Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way.”
He was wrong to believe that small schools were a silver bullet, and, actually, he was wrong to say that the initiative was a total failure, as Tom Toch notes in this piece ).
(It is worth noting, too, as Richard Rothstein did here, that the Carnegie Corporation had spent big bucks four decades earlier to try to get school districts to turn small high schools into big ones. Are you detecting a pattern?)
Now Gates is investing hundreds of millions in efforts to create teacher assessment systems that are based on student standardized test scores. He’s wasting money again; several research studies have been released recently show that the results of such schemes are unreliable and unfair, and the scheme, tried periodically over decades, has never been shown to be especially effective.
Surely these philanthropists think they are helping. But they don't understand education and have been somehow led to believe that "the answer" is specific and around the corner: a longer school day; a longer school year; charter schools; technology; standardized tests in every subject; assessing teachers by standardized test scores; for-profit education; training new college graduates for five or six weeks as teachers and then sending them into the toughest schools in America.
The fact is that there is no strong research to show that any of those elements will do much to help education, and many will actually hurt. Take charter schools, the pet project of many of Wall Street’s wealthy hedge fund founders, who have ignored the largest research study on charters that shows most of them are no better or worse than traditional public schools.
The strong link, born out by research over years, between educational attainment and poverty is ignored by these donors. These financial wizards believe that the public education, the nation’s proudest civic institution, should be run like a business.
As education historian Diane Ravitch wrote in her best-seller “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” going to school isn’t like going shopping.
Parents shouldn’t have to find a school acceptable for their children. Their neighborhood public school should be staffed with effective teachers and funded properly so that their kids can have an opportunity to get a fine education.
No one can begrudge an urban school district being given $2 million for trying to help. So we’ll congratulate the 2010 Broad Prize winner.
But let’s not imagine for a minute that the millionaires and billionaires giving out all this money are doing anything other than making it harder to fix the public schools that America needs.
