Every fall, we are treated to a wave of feel-good back-to-school media coverage. Now there’s a new fall tradition—puff pieces about new charter schools.
Whether the charter is opening in Holyoke or Buffalo, Costa Mesa or Tulsa, Moultrie or Philadelphia, or all over North Carolina, these stories seem like marketing coups for the PR departments of their respective charter schools.
The pieces often begin with a picture of happy students and parents. They may tell the story of the charter’s “struggle” to get its doors open, and generally include plenty of material from interviews with key charter leaders.
What they don’t offer is a full context or a different perspective.
We might get a fluff sandwich—about one half to two thirds of the way through, an opposing viewpoint will be briefly raised. Partway through the Holyoke story, for example, this line appears:
“The move hasn’t been without bumps. When the school applied to the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education for permission to move, several legislators and local officials wrote letters in opposition, saying the charter would take money away from the city’s traditional public schools amid a budget crisis.”
At a minimum, the opening of a new charter school should be met with careful study and a close examination of the facts on the ground.
This is a huge issue. As has been demonstrated in districts across the country, charter schools can create a debilitating financial drain on public schools. In some cases that results in loss of staff and programs; in extreme cases, districts consider shuttering large numbers of schools. But the article does not offer any reflection on whether or not the criticism from legislators and officials is valid. In the next paragraph writer Jeannette DeForge simply reports that the charter operator promised to give the public school district a heads up, “so they can plan for any further loss of students.”
A piece about two new Buffalo charters quotes the charter leader saying “Charters do not have a very strong reputation in the city of Buffalo,” but the article does not explain why, nor delve into the various ways that Buffalo charter schools have become a way for developers to grab big piles of public money for private gain.
The piece highlights a leader of one of the schools who received training from Building Excellent Schools, a national nonprofit that trains leaders to open new charter schools, but the reporter doesn’t explain that Building Excellent Schools is funded by the Walton Foundation. Further down the page, the article quotes some Buffalo School Board members who criticize charters for cherry-picking students, but then the reporter quickly shifts back to the warm and fuzzy picture of the charter.
As minimal as these bits of context and criticism are, they are far more than what is provided in the rest of the stories linked above, which paint rosy pictures of the new charters without any consideration of the controversies surrounding them.
Charters do not get generally get better results than public schools, and where they do, those are the result of a selective student body and rich resources. Put another way, there are no examples of charters that get better results serving the exact same student population as the local public district. Charters stretch limited resources. There’s nothing mysterious about this; trying to run multiple school districts with the same money that was previously used to run just one district simply won’t work. The system must either take in more money or cut services.
Charter schools often disenfranchise local leadership, replacing a locally elected school board with a self-selected charter board. The tax dollars spent on charters often disappear into an untraceable, unaccountable black hole of private contractors. Staffing may or may not include actual certified teachers. In the most extreme cases, we are finding charter advocates out to deliberately crush unions or replace the entire public school system. And a recent study adds more evidence that charter schools are increasing segregation.
At a minimum—a minimum—this means that the opening of a new charter school should be met with careful study and a close examination of the facts on the ground, as well as careful consideration of all the problems that can come with a charter school. Certainly, journalists should not meet the opening of a charter school with a warm, fuzzy piece of soft marketing.