Klein and Gutmann see competition as the answer to all our problems

Check out this "discussion" sponsored by the Wall Street Journal between Christopher Edley, dean of UC Berkeley School of Law, Amy Gutmann, President of the University of Pennsylvania, and Joel Klein about education reform.

Gutmann and Klein express faith that competition and the proliferation of charter schools will lead to fundamental improvements in our public schools -- which seems awfully naive, given the recent worldwide economic crash caused by unmitigated competition in our financial sector.

Indeed, by siphoning off the most motivated students (and parents), and providing them with superior conditions, including smaller classes and more resources, the expansion of charter schools is leading to widening inequities and a two-tier educational system.

In NYC in particular, because of the privileged status of charter schools, and their ability to raise trunkloads of private money and to cap enrollment and class size at any level they prefer, while being given precious space within our overcrowded public schools, there is no real level playing field. Indeed, more and more it appears that there is zero-sum game here: tails they win, heads we lose.

Only Edley expresses mild disagreement with this notion that the proliferation of charter schools will lift all boats. Gutmann agrees with Klein, arguing that the high quality of our institutions of higher education are due to competitive forces. (She doesn't mention teacher tenure, a particular bugaboo of Klein's and the other free marketeers.) Perhaps her faith in the business model has been reinforced by her annual salary, recently reported at $1,225,103, nearly twice as high as the salaries of the presidents of Harvard and Princeton.

On the first day of school, a visit to the Excellence Charter school in Bed-Stuy

Jenny Medina of the NY Times captured the following exchange during the usual dog and pony show of yesterday’s media tour of the first day of school:

“In a kindergarten classroom — its door designating the students inside as members of the Class of 2025 — Mr. Markowitz cornered Mr. Klein. “Why can’t our public schools have a place like this?” he asked a bit testily. “Do you know the resources it takes for a place like this?”

Elizabeth Green of the NY Sun also observed this conversation:

On a visit to the Excellence Charter School, which is housed in a sparkling new 90,000-square-foot school building in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the president of Brooklyn, Marty Markowitz, became visibly agitated.

"Listen to me," he said to the schools chancellor, Joel Klein, as the two toured a classroom, "we have some public schools that are starving for these kinds of resources."

Mr. Klein replied that some schools are doing as well as Excellence with more modest budgets.

Mr. Markowitz was not convinced; he said that while he supports charter schools, he is "conflicted" about the extra resources they sometimes receive from private donors.

"I really believe the jury is out on this whole thing," Mr. Markowitz said, walking out the door.

Is it all a matter of private donors? According to the school’s website,

Excellence is housed in a 90,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art facility with a 10,000-volume library, a 500-seat auditorium, music and art studios, a gymnasium, a climbing wall, a rooftop turf field, and sufficient classroom space to house Excellence as it grows into a K-8 school.

According to InsideSchools, the building was renovated from a former DOE public school (PS 70):

In the new facility, students will enjoy amenities that rival deeply-endowed private schools. Designed by Yale School of Architecture Dean Robert A.M. Stern, the renovated building includes an AstroTurfed roof garden/play yard with sweeping city and harbor views, secluded and inviting book nooks on every floor, double-sized science labs, a giant gymnasium complete with climbing wall, a spacious school library, and a state-of-the-art auditorium. Sawicki lives around the corner from the new building.

Here are some before and after photos, including this photo that looks like there are about ten kids per class. So where did all the money for this incredible facility come from?

See this 2006 article from Fortune magazine, about the Robin Hood foundation and its founder, “hedge fund maestro Paul Tudor Jones” :

“The school is the product of a pooling of dollars by the New York City Board of Education, Robin Hood, and Jones personally, plus contributions from a variety of corporations.

The school's physical plant, including a fabulous AstroTurf roof, would be the envy of any $30,000-a-year private school. Inside, groups of energized young teachers and little boys, kindergarten through second grade (and 100% minority), in white shirts and ties, ready themselves for the coming school year. Principal Jabali Sawicki tells me there is a 170-student waiting list.

Just a few years ago this building was a neighborhood eyesore, a symbol of all that had gone wrong in Bed-Stuy. Originally constructed in the 1880s as PS 70, and later used as a yeshiva, it became a home to drug dealers and prostitutes after a fire in the 1970s - even a venue for illegal cock fights.

Then, in 2004, another organization that Jones supports, Uncommon Schools, committed $30 million ($6 million from Jones personally) to buy and renovate the property. David Saltzman, the executive director of Robin Hood, persuaded Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, to design the facility, which was completed this spring. Signs throughout the school were done gratis by renowned design firm Pentagram. And Robin Hood sent a check for $150,000 for the school's operating budget. Books were donated by Scholastic and HarperCollins, which have given a collective two million volumes to Robin Hood…”

This 2006 article notes how the Robin Hood Foundation raises hundreds of millions per year; from charity concerts of the Rolling Stones (take: $11 million); benefit dinners hosted by Jon Stewart with guest star Beyonce, and the auctioning off naming rights to charter school buildings going for $1 million:

Most charity dinners in New York are considered a smash if they bring in $1 million. Here success is measured in tens of millions. "If you are on Wall Street, particularly in hedge funds, you have to be here," says one of my tablemates….The final tally? In a single night Robin Hood hauls in $48 million. Some $20 million is earmarked for the new school - which will be matched by the board, $2.25 for each $1. And New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, who at one point during the gala, at Jones's urging, stands and takes a bow, has said the city, in turn, will match the combined sum (as well as the amount of a tax credit). Overall, the $20 million for the school will grow to $180 million. The cost to put on the dinner? Around $5.6 million.

And the cost to taxpayers: $90 million.

In answer to the Fortune reporter’s question: Don't charter schools draw precious resources away from other public schools?

Jones makes no apologies: "Charter schools are the best thing that ever happened to education in New York City because they provide competition to regular public schools and raise the bar that everyone is trying to attain. They provide thought leadership for other schools, so again there's a multiplicative impact."

This is Klein’s usual response as well. Wonder why so many other schools in Brooklyn and citywide still have substandard conditions.

Can someone explain to me how that competition thing works again?

The lack of charter school accountability -- and does competition actually improve public education?

Today, the Daily News runs both an editorial and an oped, excoriating the State Comptroller for auditing charter schools, and supporting the charter schools' lawsuit in trying to block further audits. Here’s an excerpt from the editorial:

“Charter schools are more accountable than most parts of government. They answer to two layers of state regulation, and they must shut down if they don't meet educational goals within five years - a standard we'd love to see applied to the rest of the educational establishment.”

I would bet fewer charter schools have been closed down in NYC in recent years than regular public schools – and not because they’ve all been successful. In reality, they operate with very little supervision.

I recommend that if people took a look at the Comptroller’s Sept. audit, they’d realize how unaccountable many charter schools have been – and how lax both SED and DOE have been in terms of oversight. Amazing to me that any major media outlet would oppose strict accountability in the use of taxpayer funds in this way.

Despite the fact that all charter schools are required to report annually on their progress towards meeting the educational goals established when they were founded, and DOE is supposed to closely monitor their progress in achieving these goals, according to the audit, none of this has occurred.

The original goals and any information about progress made towards meeting these goals are supposed to be included on in the schools’ annual reports. Yet the DOE could provide only 10 of the 23 annual reports of the charter schools under its purview, and the Comptroller’s office obtained one more report from SED.

Of these 11, not one of them contained all the information required by state law, and more than half either omitted certain goals, misstated them, or did not discuss the progress made towards them. The audit found that the DOE had no formal process for reviewing these reports, no written records of the same, and no records of their decision-making process in approving the original applications of charter schools or calling for their renewals.

Nor were there any procedures or plans in place to call for improvements in their performance, or a corrective plan if there was failure. DOE also kept no records of the visits made to charter schools before approving the renewal of their charters. Not surprisingly, DOE recommended the renewal of all the charters in every case, for the maximum period of five years.

It sure doesn’t sound that there was real accountability here – as the Daily News editorial insists – or any evidence that any of these charter schools were “shut down if they don't meet educational goals within five years" – especially as DOE appeared to be ignorant of what their goals were.

Instead of criticizing the audit, if the editors of the Daily News really cared about accountability, they would be applauding the state Comptroller and criticizing the charter schools for suing to block them.

But there has long been a double-standard when it comes to charter schools; see the response of Chester Finn, for example, to the other recent audit which found KIPP using funds to send teachers on junkets to the Caribbean:

"I think they should be able to fly around the world in first class if administrators think that will keep up the good results."

Meanwhile, according to today's NY Sun, Sol Stern and some other conservatives are moving away from the idea that market incentives and competition (like more charter schools) will solve all the problems of public education– perhaps in part influenced by the failures here in NYC, where this administration has adopted this sort of market-driven ideology with a vengeance.

“There's a growing consensus that a market approach alone is not enough," the president of the Albany-based Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability, Tom Carroll, said. He added: "There's a need for a moment of reflection."

It was never clear to me why competition would be expected to work to improve the public school system. Here in NYC, there has always been a healthy system of competition from parochial and private schools, and rather than improving the public schools, it has been a way for the business and opinion elite and many members of the middle class to escape sending their kids to public schools, which has considerably diminished political pressure towards improving them.

If Bloomberg, Klein et al and their cronies on Wall St, as well as the editors of the NY Times and the Daily News, had children who actually attended NYC public schools, I’m convinced there would have been smaller classes years ago.