The New York Post is looking at what causes some schools in New York City to be good, while other schools — often just blocks away — are cesspools.

I offer some thoughts on the matter here [archived copy]:

The rich in New York City already have school choice. Parents with means can choose where they live based on the quality of the local public schools.They can choose to send their children to local private schools.

Heck, they can even send their children to any boarding school in the world, if they so choose.

And because these parents are educated consumers with lots of options, the schools that compete for their education dollars know they have to perform.

It’s called the free market, and we know it works - for cars, for clothes, for computers, for practically anything we buy or consume.

When companies have to compete, consumers win.

Yet when it comes to one of the most important products any of us will ever purchase - a child’s education - we treat parents (at least the nonrich) as prisoners instead of as consumers.

The culprit? Longtime readers won’t be surprised that teachers unions bear much (most) of the blame. But school administrators and a political class unwilling to break up the educational monopoly place a strong second.

Out in California, Gov. Ahnold has signed a bill attempting to end the “pass the lemons” game that bad teachers play, by moving from school to school. In heavily union-controlled districts (like NYC), schools are forced to take these teachers. What should happen, clearly, is that these failures should be forced out of the system — where they can go work at the DMV or something, instead of ruining the education of the next generation.

Bravo, Ahnold. Now, will a governor Spitzer do low-income kids a similar courtesy in New York?

The Chicago Teachers Union makes it explicit what the fight over charter schools is really all about.

Of course, that charter schools consistently out-perform traditional public schools when it comes to the toughest kids doesn’t stop CTU from calling a fact a "lie."

(via Antonucci)

Public education: where even the idealists are in it for the wrong reasons.

From Eduwonk guest blogger Alice in Eduland:

"I don’t teach because I love
to do it or because I think I am especially good at it. I teach because
I believe in social justice and I believe that education is the most
effective form of social justice work that there is."

God help us all.

The teachers unions have absolutely, positively lost their Goddamned minds.

(via Eduwonk)

When Eva Moskowitz did her hearings in late 2003 on the teachers contract (and the principals and custodians contracts) and how labor agreements destroy our public schools, her staff prepared a CliffsNotes-like series on the topic.

For copyright reasons, presumably, the name had to be changed to "Council Notes," which is lamer, but less litigation-inducing.

Anyway, here are the Council Notes for each contract:

Teachers

Principals

Custodians

This should be illuminating to New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers as to just how poisonous organized labor is in the context of public education. It’s hard enough for the government to get anything right. But when the guiding principle is to not run afoul of a bunch of Teamster-minded teachers and their War-and-Peace-sized rulebook…

Well, you get NYC’s public schools.

Just whom could the UFT be referring to when it sneers at “barely post-adolescent editorial writers” at The Post?

C’mon guys, that hurts.

I know it was painful admitting that you’d been lying for three years about the problems with the teachers contract and accepting most of the recommendations from the fact-finding panel.

But really, my age?

Call me when you have an argument.

As the United Federation of Teachers gets ready to open a charter school this fall, we at The Post want to make sure New Yorkers know just what it’s all about:

Now, students in Brooklyn will be pawns as the union uses the school to try to demonstrate that its restrictive contract — which prevents principals from doing their jobs — is not a problem in the public-school system.

The school has been set up to benefit teachers, not kids:

* It has no extra class time for kids, but plenty of (paid) professional-development time (i.e., overtime) for teachers.

* It has a weak curriculum.

* And there is no principal, only a “school leader” whose every move will be subject to approval by a UFT-stacked board of directors.

No one, of course, wishes the kids badly. For their sake, it can only be hoped that the UFT school will succeed.

But New Yorkers must be leery of what passes for “success,” for the UFT has seriously stacked the deck relative to the city’s public-school system.

To cite just one example, the union has already circumvented its own contract with the Department of Education by setting it up as a new charter school — as opposed to converting an existing school to a charter, which would have mandated keeping the original school staff in place.

So, from the outset, the UFT will have more flexibility than almost any principal in the city in selecting its own staff.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the union were to depart from the 250-page labor contract it clings to so tenaciously, and cut the kids a break in the same way it serves its own narrow interests?

Not likely — now, or ever.

Kids don’t count; contracts do.

We’ll be watching.

Eduwonk picks out an old post of mine on vouchers and issues a response.

The question here is whether Rotherham’s opposition to vouchers is ideological or pragmatic. Here’s what he has to say:

Issues of program efficacy aside, a big concern with a lot of voucher proposals is that they sever the link between democratic accountability and decision making and publicly funded education. That’s ideology, sure, and a debatable concern. But it’s not a trivial issue in terms of thinking about how to deliver education in a democratic society.

So, we have an answer: ideological.

Frankly — and here my own ideology comes into play — I don’t give a plague rat’s ass about “democratic accountability.” If you want democratic accountability, well, we’ve already got it. It’s called the public school system. It’s a sewer, at least for poor kids, and that’s why we’re even having this debate.

So, spare me the usual talk about how voucher schools are somehow less accountable than traditional public schools — it would be an impossibility.

Now, as for charter schools — which Rotherham calls a way “to square that circle and provide parents with more options while protecting the public interest” — my thinking has always been a bit mixed. I support them, and I’ve seen some amazing schools, but the movement seems a very fragile thing to me. It could become overregulated and unionized — and thus essentially worthless — in the blink of an eye. But if tended properly, it could remake public education. I support strong accountability measures within the charter-school movement, but only because it’s so fragile. It can’t afford any failures, politically.

Ideally, I’d like to see a healthy mixture of charters, vouchers and as few traditional public schools as possible (and, of course, private schools). In that context, choice would serve as its own accountability. It’s not democratic accountability. But we don’t have nice cars, refrigerators, computers and cheeseburgers because of democracy. We have them because of the market.

P.S.: The point from Eduwonk that perplexed me the most, and that moved me to write, was the idea that the Catholic schools’ trouble was an argument against vouchers. That these schools are having financial trouble, if anything, is an argument for why we need vouchers sooner rather than later (before the schools have all closed). It says nothing about the quality of the schools.

Eduwonk says that this Samuel Freedman column in The New York Times — which discusses the financial problems Catholic schools are having and the fact that they haven’t learned to be good fundraisers — raises questions about the efficacy of vouchers as a way to keep Catholic schools open.

The only sentence in the article that deals with vouchers is this:

And one can only speculate about whether the prospect of tuition vouchers, a cause championed by former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, contributed to a lassitude in Catholic education circles, a belief that soon enough tax dollars would bail schools out.

Huh.

Yes, that does raise some questions. Mainly: Why does Andrew Rotherham find it necessary to spit on the idea of vouchers every chance he gets? For someone who claims to be led by the facts and the outcomes in education, he’s awfully opposed to any significant experiment with vouchers for what can only be ideological reasons.

Anyway, the Freedman column raises no questions whatsoever about the efficacy of vouchers as a means of propping up the Catholic schools. Quite simply, if Catholic schools in New York City haven’t gotten their fundraising act together, it’s probably not because they think vouchers are right around the corner — unless they’re idiots who have never heard of the United Federation of Teachers.

Nor would vouchers or tax credits for Catholic schools obviate the need for those schools to raise money. Charter schools get government funding, but the good ones still have well-organized fundraising campaigns.

Show me Catholic schools shutting down in a city with school vouchers, and I’ll reconsider my wild guess that directing more money to Catholic schools is likely to help with their financial problems.

I’ve recently come across an interesting e-mail, from a reliable source, giving a bit of extra insight into The New York Times’ hit piece on charter schools last summer.

It’s just one data point, but it does tell something important about the credulousness of Times reporters when it comes to their favored sources — in this case, the teachers unions on the education beat.

For those who don’t remember (how embarrassed are you???), here’s what happened last summer: On August 17, 2004, the Times ran a lead story by education reporter Diana Jean Schemo under the headline “CHARTER SCHOOLS TRAIL IN RESULTS, U.S. DATA REVEALS.” The story was about an analysis of federal education data conducted by the American Federation of Teachers and fed to the Times by said group. One thing the Times didn’t disclose to its readers, however, was that the AFT, along with the NEA, is the major opponent of charter schools nationwide.

Now, there were other problems with the story — mainly that it claimed charter school students are underperforming other public school students, when that’s a gross misrepresentation of the facts.

But let’s focus on the narrow point here: The Times pretended in its story that the AFT is neutral toward charter schools. In the story, the group was described as such: “The organization has historically supported charter schools but has produced research in recent years raising doubts about the expansion of charter schools.”

A charter school group challenged this and contacted Times assistant managing editor Allan Siegal for a response. Siegal contacted education editor Suzanne Daley, who, in turn, got this e-mailed response from Schemo:

Hi Suzanne,

I’ve gone back over the AFT’s history and positions on charters, which I’d first looked into in reporting the original story on the NAEP results.

As we discussed, there is no AFT resolution against charters as an institution, and the union’s taken no formal position condemning or praising charters. In New York City, the local affiliate recently hired Jonathan Gyurko, from Joel Klein’s office, to see about opening one or two charters there. In Texas, the state AFT affiliate lobbied for and helped open two charters, the Prairie Creek Academy in Dallas and the Raul Yzaguerre School in Houston. The NEA, the larger teacher’s union, has also co-sponsored with local affiliates the opening of charters in three states, Connecticut, Colorado and Hawaii. AFT members work in charter schools in New York, Michigan, Texas, Philadelphia and Boston (where they are in quasi-charters known as pilot schools). The AFT and the NEA also represent more than a third of all teachers working in California charters, particularly those formed as conversions from existing public schools.

Historically, Al Shanker was an early advocate of charter schools. His NYT column, “Where We Stand,” first pushed for them in July 1988, saying, “American education and business face the same problem–how to change their institutions so that they are more effective.” His essay was proposing charters as a way to free up teachers and administrators to try innovative approaches to instruction, based on resolutions adopted by more than 3,000 delegates at the AFT’s convention that year. Shanker predicted politically stormy seas ahead, and wished “safe passage to charters.” Through the 1990s, he wrote more columns in our paper supporting charters.

In 2002, the AFT produced an evaluation called “Do Charter Schools Measure Up?,” that essentially concluded that they had so far fallen short of their promise, and advised caution on the part of states to opening new charters, and better oversight.

In fairness, it should also be said that the AFT, from Shanker’s day on, has produced a load of studies regularly decrying the poor performance of regular public schools, not just charters, on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In other reports, the AFT has sometimes criticized, and sometimes praised, charters run by Edison Schools, the nation’s largest charter school operator.

So in short, I think it would have been inaccurate and misleading to describe the AFT as ideological opponents of charter schools, as the charter school supporters contended in the aftermath of our story. Our description of the group’s position was brief but accurate: “The organization has historically supported charter schools but has produced research in recent years raising doubts about the expansion of charter schools.”

It’s not more black and white than that, as far as I can tell.

Best,

-Diana.

Now, Schemo’s assertions here are not factually inaccurate, but they are selective to a fault. No one who covers education could possibly be unaware that the teachers unions are not just the major, but perhaps the only, institutional opponents of charter schools (public school administrators would perhaps come in second). In every state where charter schools have been established, it has been over the objections and fierce lobbying of the AFT and the NEA.

To claim that the AFT is neutral because once upon a time Al Shanker was in charge, or because they’ve supported the opening of a few specific schools in states that already have charter school laws, well — it’s just laughable.

I know this sounds like splitting hairs, but it is not a minor point. The AFT is the group that conducted the flawed analysis and it is the group that placed the story with the Times, looking for just the hit-piece that it got — on the front page, in the lead space, during a presidential election.

That the Times tried to obscure the motives of its source is undeniable and inexcusable. Schemo’s justification sounds plausible to a layman (perhaps), but it doesn’t pass the smell test to anyone in the know.