Charter school proliferation hurts everyone
By Chris Baehrend
Betsy DeVos does not speak for charter schools. Her push for charter proliferation and vouchers is a threat to public education, including a threat to charter schools like mine.
I am proud of my school, Latino Youth High School, which happens to be a charter school in Chicago. But my school and other charter schools like mine, as well as district schools and the teaching profession, face serious harm if the number of charter schools in Chicago continues to increase, particularly in the manner that DeVos has spent years and millions lobbying for.
When it comes to reckless expansion of charter schools, the problem is twofold. First, our experience in Chicago shows that charter proliferation introduces a glut of schools. This surplus is now driving declining enrollment, budget cuts, layoffs and school closings at charter schools, just as it has been doing at district schools. Charter schools in our union local have seen declining enrollment from last year to this year — at UNO Charter School Network (UCSN), Urban Prep, Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy (IJLA) and others. The problem now encompasses a majority of the 32 charter schools we represent.
Budget cuts also have been made in the last year — at UCSN, Instituto Health Sciences Careers Academy, IJLA and probably others. We have had three rounds of layoffs at IJLA alone in the past year; ChicagoQuest was threatened with closure last year because of declining enrollment and budget deficits, but the students, parents and teachers rallied bravely before the board to save it. However, Galapagos Charter School, which is not in our union, recently closed because it couldn’t sustain the 5 percent budget cut that Chicago Public Schools inflicted last year on all schools — district and charter.
These problems are by no means exclusive to one school system. The conservative business analyst Moody’s has concluded that charter school concentration in urban school districts poses a credit risk to those school districts. When the school chiefs prioritize opening and closing schools above investing in them all to succeed, students are damaged. Many of our students live with trauma and the many insecurities born of poverty. They deserve stable schools. A student whose school is labeled “failing” feels like a failure. I have seen the damage done to students’ self-esteem and mental health when they have been obliged to change schools often, changes necessitated by education “reforms” such as those propounded by DeVos. No wealthy district would ever consider such a policy.
I have seen the damage done to students’ self-esteem and mental health when they have been obliged to change schools often, changes necessitated by education “reforms” such as those propounded by DeVos
The teaching profession also suffers when charters proliferate. Teacher turnover increases. Teachers are more likely to have to look for new jobs; and those jobs will have substantially fewer benefits, less compensation and more insecurity. Even when we manage to form a union in charter schools, the benefits and compensation we win are far below the community standard, which is the district teacher contract.
There is a second, perhaps more important, problem with charter proliferation. It stifles the voices of those who know students best — parents and teachers.
Charter school boards are unelected and almost never include parents. Typically, there is no elected community board with oversight like the local school councils in Chicago, for which parents can run, then approve budgets and decide on principal retention. And, with few exceptions, charter schools are founded without unions and kept that way through a hostile, anti-union environment. And if teachers in the new charter schools wish to have a protected voice to advocate for their students and their schools, they risk getting fired.
In a 2015 speech, Betsy DeVos claimed that “we don’t fire teachers enough”; and I have known many brave charter teachers who were fired for speaking up for students. Do you want to send your child to a school where teachers are afraid to speak up for your child when the administration does its job wrong?
Nobody knows the youth in our education system better than the teachers. No group knows better what students need in order to achieve academically, socially and emotionally. Sure, everybody cares about kids, but we work with them every day, for a thousand hours every year. We know the pain of seeing their budgets slashed, their curriculum narrowed, and their joy of learning exhausted through over-testing.
The collective voice of the teachers is the collective voice of our schools. Our union, in solidarity with students and parents, speaks for our schools, a claim that Betsy DeVos cannot truthfully make.
Charter school proliferation is an excuse for politicians to appear to be doing something about education, without actually spending more money. Proliferation also ingratiates politicians with business people who extract financial gain from monies budgeted to educate our students and then use their gains to make contributions to political campaigns. It turns our most vulnerable youth into profit centers.
We need a secretary of education who sees and appreciates the student, the entire student, a leader who knows that “access to high-quality educational options” is not an acceptable alternative to “a great school in every neighborhood.”
Chris Baehrend has taught for seven years at Latino Youth High School in Chicago and this school year is on release to serve as president of his union local, Chicago ACTS, the Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff.
