Chicago union chief shows some panic over charters

yes Adam Emerson / September 14, 2012

An op-ed that appeared in today’s Chicago Sun-Times from Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis contained a hint of panic. Not on the resolution of the teachers strike, now in its fifth day, but on Rahm Emanuel’s rumored plan to close 80 to 120 low-performing and poorly attended schools.

Lewis took aim at the city’s charter schools, and it’s not surprising. The waiting list for high-demand charters in the city has reached 19,000 names, and the mayor and his schools chief, Jean-Claude Brizard, want more charters to serve more students as they contemplate the closure of dozens of schools. The strike has accomplished two things: 1.) It has given Emanuel more political cover to enhance the charter sector, and 2.) it has given the charter movement more soldiers.

This week alone, the number of phone calls to Chicago charters from interested parents has tripled from the normal rate, said Andrew Broy, the president if the Illinois Network of Charter Schools. While most the city’s 119 charter schools can’t accommodate new families, Broy said his network is adding many of the callers to its list of active supporters and he’s touting that 5,000 parents may show up to the group’s own rally on October 3.

Lewis relies on an old canard to draw public support for her cause: The mayor and his “hedge-fund allies” want to privatize public schools. But then she turns to the absurd and writes, “As a parent, do you

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Chicago union chief shows some panic over charters

A preposterous critique of the Brookings voucher study

yes Adam Emerson / September 14, 2012

Matthew Chingos and Paul Peterson knew there would be attempts to undermine their finding that a New York City voucher program had a positive impact on the college attendance of black students. When the Brookings Institution released the Chingos/Peterson study last month, many news reports unfortunately focused on the fact that only black students seemed to benefit significantly from the small, privately funded program (the voucher was worth just $1,400 annually when it was offered to low-income kids in 1997). Still, while frustrating, the media coverage never cast aspersions on the most significant claims in the study.

While frustrating, the media coverage never cast aspersions on the most significant claims in the study.

That task has now fallen to an academic review from the National Education Policy Center, a group that could never be confused for a friend to school choice. Sara Goldrick-Rab of the University of Wisconsin-Madison makes the preposterous claim that an “unmentioned” measurement error in the dependent variables (college attendance rates) suggests that there really are no statistically significant differences between the voucher’s impact on black students than on other students. Further, Goldrick-Rab argues that Chingos and Peterson fail to account for any negative effects from the voucher program that could explain the overall impact.

At Education Next, Chingos appropriately responds:

• The “unmentioned” measurement error already appears in the standard error for the study. Indeed, Chingos writes, college attendance is imperfect as a measurement because the process used

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  Category: Charters & Choice

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  A preposterous critique of the Brookings voucher study

Repeat after me: Charters offer parents choices

yes Adam Emerson / September 12, 2012

When Andrew Broy addressed reporters in advance of the Chicago teachers’ strike to say the work stoppage would have no impact on the city’s charter schools, he was doing more than just assuring current charter families that schools would remain open (12 percent of the city’s public school population of 400,000 is enrolled at charters). The president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools was also engaged in public relations, knowing the strike would force tens of thousands of parents to alter work schedules or scramble for day care.

“I just see charter options and opportunities growing in any event [but] if there’s a strike the pace might accelerate,” Broy told the Chicago Tribune.

This puts into practice Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s famous dictum to never let a serious crisis go to waste, but it also gives the charter school movement a reason to reflect on its attributes after twenty years. 

Leaders in the movement have been focused during the past several years on charter school quality, looking to scale up the best models and proffering the standards by which all charters and their authorizers should live by. This has been necessary for the vitality of the movement, but it’s an agenda that has, at times, disregarded the idea that parents have a fundamental right to choose their child’s school.

When thousands gathered at last June’s National Alliance for Public Charter Schools conference in Minneapolis, there was lots of talk about accountability and

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Repeat after me: Charters offer parents choices

What the Democratic Party platform used to say about school choice

yes Adam Emerson / September 7, 2012

The 2012 Democratic Party platform released this week calls for the expansion of “public school options for low-income youth,” a position that has appeared in varying language in every Democratic platform since 1992. But as Marc Fisher of the Washington Post reported this week, the Democratic platform historically has been “a jagged series of experiments” that once made room for more than just public-school choice.

The Democratic Party's thinking on private-school choice has changed significantly over time. Photo by DonkeyHotey.

Today, the national party fervently rejects vouchers for private and parochial schools, but that wasn’t the case thirty years ago. In 1972, Democrats sought to “channel financial aid by a Constitutional formula to children in non-public schools,” a position that reflected not only the influence of the Catholic Church at the time but also the drive, the values and the persistence of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Moynihan, who also crafted education planks for the Democratic platforms of 1964 and 1976, followed the party’s (and his own) guidance. Soon after his election to the U.S. Senate in 1976, he proposed a tuition tax credit for families with children in private and parochial schools. That bill was co-sponsored by an almost

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What the Democratic Party platform used to say about school choice