Posts by Sharon Higgins
The Politics of Venture Philanthropy in Charter School Policy
Published April 06, 2009 @ 01:09PM PT
[Note: The article Sharon discusses below is available for free if you sign up for a free trial with SAGE that expires at the end of April. Register and then download the article here. I just finished it, and found it an even-handed approach to the topic.- Clay]
Here’s a scholarly and informative article to share with you: "The Politics of Venture Philanthropy in Charter School Policy and Advocacy," by Janelle Scott (Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, formerly NYU) and published by SAGE. It will take a while to read (32 pages), but I believe it will be worth your time.
Scott explains the billionaires' strategy to push charter schools onto communities and how they are maneuvering their immense foundation-giving to achieve this result. She also describes the not-always-well-intentioned, and/or misguided, history of foundation "giving" which has targeted communities of color in the past.
The foundation-giving programs of today require an important trade-off from the local communities: namely, the relinquishment of interest and power over their own public schools to the public education notions of a few immensely wealthy oligarchs. What does it tell us that the communities where this is occurring necessitated first being placed under authoritarian rule?
Scott’s article explains how the "gifts" of these foundations are going to a broad range of charter advocacy groups, pro-charter research organizations, alternative teacher and principal training programs, charter school development organizations, etc. EdVoice, Center for Education Reform, TFA, NewSchools Venture Fund, NewLeaders for New Schools, KIPP, Green Dot, Democrats for Education Reform, and the EEP are just the teeny tiny tip of the you're-going-to-have-charter-schools-if-you-want-them-or-not iceberg.
Scott describes the flow of money to these organizations with the intent to have them work as a network in unison to further the billionaires' goal. Very few of the donations go directly to individual schools and their students, but just enough to make them look a lot better than their traditional school neighbors. The majority of the dollars go toward advocacy, propaganda, and the building of a national pro-charter school structure.
I've recently learned how Broad has bought off large, important portions of PBS, and how Ms. Gates is on the board of the Washington Post. The extent to which the media has been co-opted by this force would be a good topic for someone to track. We know how heavily they have influenced the White House.
I was especially interested to learn that one of the official techniques used to push charter schools, and described in a 2004 Philanthropy Roundtable donors guide, is "...the sponsorship of efforts that put parents of color out front instead of 'rich, white Republicans.' " The technique is exactly described here and here.
This general strategy may also explain why a deeply-in-debt-to-the-IRS Al Sharpton was persuaded to join the pro-charter force.
Another small item that may be of interest to some of you is that the Broad Foundation paid the Century Foundation $100,000 (in 2004) and $29,973 (in 2007) to "support research on the late union leader Albert Shanker." You may view The Broad Foundation 990's here.
Perhaps this is the "why" it has come about that pro-charter forces mention Albert Shanker so frequently for being responsible for the idea of charter schools. They use this statement to both justify the existence of charter schools, and to attempt to disarm the teachers' union complaints about them.
The details of these maneuvers are extensive, and won’t be easily grasped by the American public, not to mention the lesser educated parents in the communities now being targeted. The word about what is really going on desperately needs to get out more broadly.
Image by poritsky
Charters Exclude the Most Challenging Students, part 2
Published March 17, 2009 @ 02:00PM PT
By Sharon Higgins and Caroline Grannan, public school parents
Charter advocates’ usual response to this explanation is to deny that there is such a thing as families that are less motivated and stable. They claim that "all parents care enough." All we can say is that those people need to get out more.
And what about the question of whether charter schools actively pick and choose their students? Charter schools are supposed to admit everyone and choose by lottery if they have more applications than seats. However, does anyone believe that there are regulators somehow watching over the entire enrollment process, from receipt of the applications to the implementation of a lottery, if any?
If a charter school chooses to conduct itself this way, it is free as a bird to "not have space" for applicants who appear undesirable for whatever reason. It's amply documented that charter schools all over the country, overall, dramatically underserve special education students, for example.
Charter advocates will counter that traditional public schools can manage to not enroll or to "counsel out" a challenging student too. Sure, but that student is still the responsibility of the public school district, and will land in another school run by a colleague of the administrator who managed to deny/remove the student. If a charter school contrives to not enroll or get rid of a challenging student, it never has to set eyes on or give a thought to that student again.
San Francisco’s most successful charter school, a high school, requires a 9-page enrollment application -- including transcripts; teacher recommendations; an essay; and signed commitments to behavior, academic effort, volunteering and so forth by the student and parent. Then the administrators claim to put all the applicants in a "blind lottery." It strikes us as exceptionally naive to believe those applicants aren't being screened.
But even parents who give the school the benefit of the doubt in trusting that it runs a “blind lottery” agree that the application process serves to weed out those who are not highly motivated.
An interesting book, “Hard Lessons” by Jonathan Schorr, a former journalist who has since gone to work in the charter-school world, follows the founding and first year of an Oakland, Calif., charter school, the Ernestine C. Reems Academy of Technology and Arts. The book is pro-charter in tone, but it still portrays the school deliberately rejecting special-education students.
And yet, despite the advantages of serving a student population that is predisposed to be higher-functioning, charter schools overall do not show higher achievement than traditional public schools. So why do they win such acclaim, including from the Oval Office? It’s a mystery that we’ll explore in later posts.
Photo by Thomas Hawk
Sharon Higgins has been an active public school parent in Oakland, California, since 1993, and blogs at The Perimeter Primate. Caroline Grannan was an editor at the San Jose Mercury News for 12 years, and is now the education writer for the SF Examiner. She is a San Francisco public school parent, advocate, and volunteer and has followed education politics locally and nationwide.
Charters Exclude the Most Challenging Students, part 1
Published March 17, 2009 @ 06:01AM PT
By Sharon Higgins and Caroline Grannan, public school parents
President Obama admires charter schools and has called for opening more in the United States. Though we trust that he has students’ best interests at heart, we also believe he is badly misinformed.
Charter schools get overwhelmingly positive press and make a lot of claims about their success. But actually, numerous studies confirm that their achievement is indistinguishable from that of traditional public schools. Some are very successful, some are troubled and struggling, and the rest are somewhere in between – just like traditional public schools.
One of the boasts by their proponents is that charter schools enroll “the poorest of the poor.” But is that accurate? We’re urban public school parents (Caroline is in San Francisco and Sharon is in Oakland, Calif.) who see the insides of schools in our day-to-day lives, and we recognize why that claim is misleading.
The truth is that charter schools may enroll some very low-income students, but they do not enroll the very troubled, high-need, at-risk students who pose the greatest challenge to public education. (There are some specialty charter schools specifically for juvenile offenders or other defined groups; we are not referring to that type but to general education charter schools.)
Enrollment at all charter schools is, by law, entirely by request. No student is assigned to a charter school by default. That means "self-selection" occurs at all of them, inherently, by definition.
That is, parents who care about their kids' education enough to make the effort to learn about and request a school are the ones whose kids attend charter schools. Parents who don't have it together to pay attention, care, or take action to try to improve their kids' education do not choose charter schools. Thus their kids -- obviously likely to be the most challenged and challenging -- are left in the traditional public schools.
The Starvation Diet of One School
Published March 03, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT
[A Parent Perspective from Oakland's Sharon Higgins.]
I recall watching a PBS documentary several years ago, before the double nightmare of NCLB and a state-takeover further destabilized my public school district. The program was called “First to Worst” and told how California, once home to one of the best school systems in the country, had ended up as one of the worst. The decline was caused by severely reduced education funding which resulted from the 1978 passage of Prop 13.
So, after years of being slowly starved to death and then getting blamed for not accomplishing more, school districts like mine, the ones most abandoned by the middle class, were then targeted for outsider-led “school reform.” These days, staff turnover in Oakland Unified is higher than ever before, being both a consequence, and the cause, of widespread system disarray.
Once upon a time, even urban public school districts had a precious commodity called institutional memory, something which had built up for decades. When the reformers arrived, this long-term memory was quickly wiped out. And now on an ongoing basis it seems, any short-term memory is, too.
Because so many schools are opening and closing, and everything between, and because so many people are constantly new to their positions, no one remembers what happened before, or what was once tried and what might have worked, or not. Few people remember how certain things are done, or know the people to ask who might be able to help them. Sometimes people have no idea where important light switches are. These days, urban school district life is a never-ending attempt to reinvent some sort of wheel.
With so much of the memory lost, I’ve enjoyed discovering that school memorabilia, class photos, and yearbooks are valuable sources of information about the “old days.” The trick is to hope those treasures haven’t been tossed in the garbage can by one of the many short-term employees who could care less about such things.
In 2001, when I started working as a parent coordinator at my daughter’s middle school, I discovered old yearbooks, PTA documents, and photos tucked in various neglected cupboards and corners around campus. Dusty and mildewed, I quickly rescued them and provided a new home – a big locked closet in my room. The school’s first class graduated in 1930, so the items held a lot of rich history. They are also tangible evidence of things that have changed.
I was interested to learn that some of the school’s former features had strong similarities to “innovations” being tried today. From 1930 to the 1950’s, each grade level was split into two groups of 140 to 150 students. A neighbor who attended the school in the 1940’s told me that the two class groups were organized according to age. Today, “small learning communities” have become all the rage.
Another contemporary idea is to provide students with teachers and counselors who stay with a class of students from the 9th through the 12th grade. That’s funny because this school used to do something like that, too, before services were whittled away.
The school had homerooms from 1930 until the 1970’s. Students were alphabetically assigned to these classes which met for a short time each day to take care of assorted school business. The best thing about them was that students were kept together in the same group, in the same homeroom, with the same teacher – for all three years they attended the school. Think of the peer and teacher bonding!
I’ve spoken with both former teachers and students who had very fond memories of their homerooms because of the deep relationships that developed over the years. One 1933 alumna told me how her class group bonded so tightly with their teacher that they had annual reunions with her for more than 60 years afterward.
Coinciding with the effects of Prop 13, and the material presented in “First to Worst,” I noticed in the yearbooks that a definite decline occurred from the 1980’s on. Unfortunately, it has accelerated in recent years.
The 1997 yearbook shows three guidance counselors (one for each grade), a full-time librarian, two assistant principals and a dean, for about 1050 students.
During 2004-05 the school’s enrollment was about 950 kids. The librarian position had been eliminated, but a library clerk worked part-time. The school was down to one guidance counselor and two assistant principals, along with two TSA’s (“Teachers on Special Assignment”) to do other administrative things. One TSA managed testing and the school’s budget. The other managed the school’s extensive English Language Learning program. Each also taught a daily reading class.
During 2007-08, the enrollment was down to about 900 kids (150 fewer than in 1997). The school still had a library clerk, one guidance counselor and two assistant principals, but the TSA’s were gone, pressured out because they were just too expensive. One of the assistant principals, with an already full plate of duties, was placed in charge of the English Language Learning program. Somehow, a “fiscal officer” without much school budget experience had been hired to manage the school’s money. The principal was pleased because the “fiscal officer” worked reduced hours and was employed as consultant, so benefits did not have to be paid.
Despite those sad changes at the school, a few things have stayed the same. One of my favorite discoveries was an entertaining article published in a student newspaper of December 1933 which could have been published today:
“Wanted: More School Pride”
How many Bret Harte students have noticed the growing untidiness of the streets and sidewalks immediately surrounding our school? Everyone must have seen the paper bags, candy wrappers, and orange peelings that are disfiguring the entrances to Bret Harte. These things lower our school in the estimate of our visitors and disgust the people living near. It is not necessary to throw such things around for there are garbage cans conveniently placed in the school grounds. Locate these cans and use them. This disorderly condition of the streets should be changed. Let’s all pay more attention to making our school an object of pride to the district.
Of course, it came as no real surprise to me to learn that teenagers are teenagers are teenagers.
An Oakland Public School Parent's Lessons Learned
Published February 19, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT
[Note: We're pleased to feature our first parent voice on this space with this post by Sharon Higgins, whose Perimeter Primate is well worth the read. Stay tuned for more, and welcome aboard, Sharon. - Eds.]
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Lessons Learned at Public Schools in Oakland*
Ten years ago, when our older daughter finished elementary school, my husband and I deviated from our peers. At this point, most parents like us would head for private school, use a false address to get into a "better" public school, or uproot their homes and move out of Oakland. Instead, we decided to join a few other parents and "reclaim" our local middle school.
The demographics and culture of that Title 1-funded school were quite different from the more affluent elementary school we had known. The transition was an adjustment.
Today, our older daughter is in college and our younger daughter attends the local public high school. Staying with the public schools hasn't always been easy, but our daughters have thrived and we have learned a great deal.
For instance:
- Children from families with sufficient resources will do well at almost any school they attend. The kids with stable families and educated parents have an enormous advantage. Parents who "go private" could be saving their money; most of their children would do just fine in the public schools.
- Many well-intentioned parents praise diversity, but they also want to avoid it. They convince themselves that myths and rumors are true, and end up with a set of excuses which justify their avoidance of the public schools.
- Experiencing diversity has its pros and cons. We develop a deeper understanding of humanity when we are stretched to learn about, and tolerate, people outside our normal group. However, the stretching can definitely feel uncomfortable.
- It is completely unfair to call a school "good" or "bad" depending on its average test scores. Within every school, some students are more difficult to educate than others. There are large numbers of students at "bad" schools who have language, economic, social, emotional, and other barriers to learning. If we are going to expect schools to help children overcome those barriers, more resources will need to be provided.
- It is heartbreaking to witness the amount of social neglect of children in cities such as Oakland. A tremendous amount of human potential is being lost everyday. Unfortunately, most people are either oblivious or insensitive to the deep suffering of these children. The level of ignorance is extreme.
- That same ignorance causes some people to concoct unrealistic and simplistic "solutions" they believe will fix the problems. Their "solutions" which have become current reform notions and educational policies are simply ineffective, inadequate and destructive.
- Many people claim to care about the education of children, but very few will turn their words into actions. Unfortunately, this includes too many parents.
- Teachers practicing in urban public schools are especially worthy of support and understanding, rather than suspicion and criticism. Their practice is extremely challenging and complicated. Our family has learned that most of these teachers are highly skilled, dedicated and hardworking.
- Strong families who shun these public schools are contributing to the problems in those schools. The schools would immediately improve with an increased enrollment of stable children who have skilled parents with high standards.
- My school district needs to work harder on acknowledging and broadcasting the positive accomplishments of its students. Many students are succeeding, but the community is kept unaware.
As our family continues on this learning curve, our daughters are doing well. They have become hard working, successful, and savvy students. They are individuals who understand a dimension of our society which many other young people in this country never even get to see.
The public needs to stop condemning the public schools. To make them better, parents should just use the schools and join together to improve them one classroom at a time.
*This essay is an updated and slightly revised version of one which was originally published in the Oakland Tribune in March 2005.
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Sharon Higgins has been an active public school parent in Oakland, California, since 1993. For seven eye-opening years she was employed as a parent coordinator at her local - labeled by some as "failing" - public middle school. Today she spends time researching, reading, thinking and writing about certain school and social issues. She posts the product of those efforts on a blog called "The Perimeter Primate."
Oakland photo by satanslaundromat
