The Myth of Charter Schools

[Better Believe It]

The Myth of Charter Schools
By Diane Ravitch
The New York Review of Books
November 11, 2010

Ordinarily, documentaries about education attract little attention, and seldom, if ever, reach neighborhood movie theaters. Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for “Superman” is different. It arrived in late September with the biggest publicity splash I have ever seen for a documentary. Not only was it the subject of major stories in Time and New York, but it was featured twice on The Oprah Winfrey Show and was the centerpiece of several days of programming by NBC, including an interview with President Obama.

Two other films expounding the same arguments—The Lottery and The Cartel—were released in the late spring, but they received far less attention than Guggenheim’s film. His reputation as the director of the Academy Award–winning An Inconvenient Truth, about global warming, contributed to the anticipation surrounding Waiting for “Superman,” but the media frenzy suggested something more. Guggenheim presents the popularized version of an account of American public education that is promoted by some of the nation’s most powerful figures and institutions.

The message of these films has become alarmingly familiar: American public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them, but they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools, especially to charter schools, which are mostly funded by the government but controlled by private organizations, many of them operating to make a profit.

Waiting for “Superman” and the other films appeal to a broad apprehension that the nation is falling behind in global competition. If the economy is a shambles, if poverty persists for significant segments of the population, if American kids are not as serious about their studies as their peers in other nations, the schools must be to blame. At last we have the culprit on which we can pin our anger, our palpable sense that something is very wrong with our society, that we are on the wrong track, and that America is losing the race for global dominance. It is not globalization or deindustrialization or poverty or our coarse popular culture or predatory financial practices that bear responsibility: it’s the public schools, their teachers, and their unions.

Please read the full article at:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/

[BrklynLiberal]

1. The repukes have perfected scapegoating.

[Tansy_Gold]

2. I read the whole thing. It's very very very good.

I'm sure it will meet with the usual responses, but I thought it was excellent.


Tansy Gold, who gave a bunch of freebies to a public school science teacher today.

[Smarmie Doofus]

3. She's GOT to be making this part up:

>>>>Yet there is currently a vogue to recruit and train principals who have little or no education experience. (The George W. Bush Institute just announced its intention to train 50,000 new principals in the next decade and to recruit noneducators for this sensitive post.)>>>>>>>


No one is *that* stupid.

Not even school "reformers".

They are overwhelmingly ignorant and foolish but it just isn't possible that they are THAT stupid.


Shame on you, Professor Ravitch.

[AdHocSolver]

4. It is corporate practice to hire executives who have no expertise in the business to run companies.

The executives hired have business degrees to ensure that they will pay sole attention to the core purpose of the business which is to make profit.

Having technical knowledge of a business would interfere with maximizing profit, as such executives might be sidetracked by unimportant concerns such as providing a quality product or service if they knew what comprised a quality product or service.

Similarly, hiring educators to be principals would interfere with the core purpose of privatizing education. This is not stupid. Egregious maybe, but not stupid.

[WizardLeft62]

5. Diane Ravitch is Spot-On

and very intelligent.