Teachers by nature - almost by definition - are idealists. We have wonderful goals for the children in our classrooms, and we work tirelessly to help the kids succeed. So it is no surprise that we are sometimes - make that often! - irritated and frustrated by the plethora of rules and regulations, the various dicta and testing, that cascade out of every district office, and that lie in wait for us in laws that pour forth from the Legislature.
Thus, it is natural that charter schools, when first proposed, seemed a very appealing concept: They meant freedom from all the pesky rules and presumably allowed a school to be unhampered and creative. But like many ideas that sound good at their inception, charter schools have not lived up to their advance billing.
The highly respected UC-Berkeley professor Bruce Fuller and the university's think tank, Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), recently released their study of charter schools. Their findings:
- Nearly 50 percent of charter school teachers lacked a teaching credential, compared to 9 percent in traditional public schools.
- Charter school classrooms are 20 percent more crowded than traditional schools - and we know that California schools are already virtually the most crowded in the country.
- Forty-three percent of charter school students qualify for federal programs to help low income students, but only 5 percent of these students are actually receiving the help.
- Charter schools had a higher "racial isolation factor" for African American students than did traditional schools.
- Sixty percent of teachers in predominantly African American charter schools lack teaching credentials.
Professor Fuller also points out that for-profit charters take administrative fees and then pay their teachers less than traditional public school teachers earn. In addition, he notes that the California Legislature had to step in to prevent shady charter school operators from taking heavy administrative fees and to stop charter schools that opened dozens of satellite campuses.
At a recent meeting of the Advisory Commission on Charter Schools, which reviews charter school funding, it was revealed that John Hall, operator of Options for Youth, collected $37 million in public funds in 2001-02 for his charter schools. So little of that money went to pay for classroom instruction that the commission recommended cutting the funding for Mr. Hall's charter schools by a whopping 40 percent.
Many other studies show that charter school students do no better and often do worse on standardized tests than do students in traditional schools, where the teachers are credentialed and professional. Put simply, charter schools, especially for-profit charters, since they are not bound to standards and may be operated by charlatans, are open to corrupt practices where operators can divert money from children's education into their own pockets and deny students a proper education from skilled teachers.
Yet, President Bush has asked Congress to approve $753 million in new funding to expand charter schools and voucher experiments. Note that last fact: Experts in the field recognize that charter schools are the legal back door to vouchers.
Despite all this bad news, charter schools are being supported and encouraged by no less an "authority" than the president of the State Board of Education, Reed Hastings. His enthusiasm for charters leads him to say, as he did at a panel discussion on public education when someone mentioned a problem with a school, "Maybe you should start your own charter school."
Mr. Hastings also strongly supports the SAT-9 and CAT-6 tests; he and I had words on that topic. I believe that if I know the ZIP code, I can predict the test scores - those tests are of minimal education value but do reflect students' socioeconomic status and their English language abilities.
Mr. Hastings' opinions would be, and ought to be, of little consequence - certainly not important enough to merit my even calling your attention to him. But in his official position, he cannot be ignored. He is a likable, well-intentioned man who made hundreds of millions of dollars in the dot-com industry. He did help fight Proposition 38 and support Prop. 39, and he has supported bargaining rights for charter school teachers.
Yet, he advocates charter schools at every opportunity.
Reed Hastings is a good-hearted man, but his educational philosophies and theories are naive. His missionary zeal for charter schools can have disastrous effects on the kids in our state, at a time in our history when public education is in dire need of financial support - a time when we desperately need more credentialed, professional teachers.
This is the time for protecting and improving the free public schools of our state and nation. They are the cornerstone of democracy, and we dare not turn them over to a movement like for-profit charter schools, open to corrupt practice and leading to vouchers. The idea is better on paper than in reality; until it can be proven safe for our kids, it must be stopped.
Make no mistake about it. We must fight to keep the for-profit charter school movement in check and kill the voucher school movement once and for all. We must not let anything prevent us from bringing quality public education to every child in California and America. We can do it, and political appointees with deep pockets will never be able to stop us.
