A Statement on Charter Schools

1. Charter schools are built and led by very diverse interests. We have no doubt that there has been charter schools constructed by well-intentioned teachers, families, and community members. Furthermore, there are some charter schools that produce good results according to high stakes testing. However, the dominant interests behind charter schools do not come from well-intentioned teachers, or families, or the community. Usually, they are structured and promoted by those with deep ties to corporations who profit handsomely through hidden forms of contracting, dubious practices of siphoning public funds from our schools, and real estate transactions. The reality that some charter schools are producing good results should not mean that we substitute these successes for a larger movement that is largely a fraud and a failure. By definition, an exemplar is an outlier, not a normative experience. The most famous and extensive research on charter schools, the CREDO study of 2009 from Stanford University, has shown us that they do no better than public schools and in many cases are significantly worse. Even think tanks that heavily support charter schools are not able to produce studies painting them in a positive light. That’s why we are now seeing the use of euphemisms to mystify the public, euphemisms like small autonomous schools, innovation schools, and the like. When we consider the widespread mismanagement of finances and other fraudulent practices reported widely in the media (usually the alternative media) and when we consider that the experimentation with charters has gone on for over 20 years; it’s time that we take a hard-look and see that this is not innovation at all. It’s ideology that’s at work and it’s time to resist to building of charters in our community.

2. The very existence of charter schools and our debates about them suggests an effort to normalize the power of high stakes testing in education. We are against the use of such tests since they’ve been detrimental to teacher creativity, student creativity and self-esteem, and organizational behavior. The introduction of charter schools and their comparisons to public schools is based on inauthentic standardized testing proven by countless educational researchers to a faulty measure of schools and student achievement. Rather than perpetuate our warped obsession with testing, I caution the public about the pitfalls of standardized testing and call alternative forms of assessments. This, to me, is a fight worth fighting.

3. Charter schools do little to encourage solidarity and unity among educational stakeholders; in fact many of them do the opposite, employing a divide and conquer strategy among and between teachers, parents, community and administrators while centralizing autocratic decision making power in the hands of a small elite group of ‘providers’ and their publicly funded cronies.

4. Charter schools function to re-segregate schools, either by race, gender or class. What they end up doing is siphoning off families and students that are more inclined towards academics, given that these families know how to navigate the intricacies of enrollment (even though they may not be well informed on the research on charters), while decreasing the diversity with regards to academic orientation in public schools.

5. Charter schools also restrict enrollment, due to size, preference, burdensome parental contracts and costs.  We have to ask ourselves, ‘Do we want lotteries funding our schools and then turn around and use lotteries to decide who gets access to quality public education?’ The fact of that the matter is that, not only are they selective about enrollment and routinely counsel out “undesirable” students, they are by and large unaccountable to anyone. The state accountability guidelines for charter schools are seriously lax despite what you see encoded in policy. The reality is that they have a great deal more freedom than public schools and produce results that are no better and often worse according to the largest and most comprehensive study coming out in 2009 out of Stanford University. To date, the study has not been challenged for their findings.

6. Lastly, the expansion of charter schools isn’t really about education. By and large, they’re about attacking labor. This makes little sense, since the lowest performing schools in our country are schools in right to work states where the power of unions have been greatly dismantled and it is in states where unions preserve some strength where schools seem to be producing better results – this according to current educational policy makers own fixation on tests. Teachers are facing the worst job market since the Great Depression and charter schools seem to be the only schools hiring across the country. They hire at a cost however. They work to defund the public schools and the quality of education for the majority of students (ironically they also provide a low quality of education for their own students – for the most part – since the per-pupil funds they acquire goes into real estate transactions and operations cost rather than actual teaching and learning) and they work to undermine teacher labor by paying low salaries and greater worker demands. It’s no surprise that the turnover rate of teachers in these schools is astronomically high.