The Corporate Man’s Burden [Updated]

Poor James Merriman. As CEO of the New York City Charter School Center, the charter management organization here in the Big Apple, Merriman woke up to some bad news Monday morning. His main publicist, Thomas Carroll of the Brighter Choice chain of charter schools, had a little credibility issue. Ever since the UFT issued its Separate and Unequal report which demonstrated that New York charter schools were not serving their share of high needs students, Carroll had been given carte blanche access to the op-ed pages of the Daily News and the Post by the tabloid powers-that-be to claim otherwise. [See here, here, and here.] But now the authorizer of Carroll’s charter schools, the SUNY Charter School Institute, was issuing a scathing report that one of Carroll’s own charter schools had an illegal policy of denying admissions to students with special needs, with the goal of inflating the school’s standardized test scores.

What to do? While the common practice of charter management is to attack the bona fides of the bearers of bad news, such an approach would not work in the case of the Charter School Institute, an institution held in high regard in the New York charter world. So on the principle that the best defense is an offense, Merriman decided to attack — who else? — the UFT, and what he calls our “present obsession with precise demographic balancing between charter schools and district schools.” That is an Aesopian rendition of our view that all public schools — charter and district — should serve all students in their communities, and especially students with the greatest needs.

When one compares students attending charter schools with students attending district schools, the differences are “minor,” Merriman declares. No support is given for this categorical conclusion, so the reader might be interested in knowing what Merriman understands to be “minor.” Let us reprise briefly some of what the UFT report found. Taking the common measure of poverty, free lunch status, district schools in the South Bronx enroll 30% more free lunch students than charter schools in the South Bronx, and district schools in central Brooklyn enroll nearly 50% more free lunch students than charter schools in Central Brooklyn. On average, district schools serve over 300% more English Language Learners than the charter schools serving the same communities. It doesn’t take a graduate degree in advanced statistics or multivariate regression tables to see those differences as something more than “minor.” A student who passed the 8th grade state math exam could provide a more accurate account.

Merriman then turns to New York City district schools. He has just discovered, it appears, what teachers and teacher unions have always known: district elementary schools reflect the socio-economic character of the neighborhoods in which they are located, such that schools in the South Bronx have a rather different student population than schools on the Upper East Side. We teach in the classrooms of New York City, where we grapple on a daily basis with the challenges faced by our students who live in poverty. For us, the existence of great economic chasms among the neighborhoods of New York City is not a debating point; it is our reality. That is why the UFT was the most forceful and powerful backer of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) and its efforts to win a fair share of education funding for all schools — district and charter — who serve high needs students living in poverty. It appears that our CFE work escaped Merriman’s notice, perhaps because many in charter school management, such as his far right friends in the leadership of the New York Charter School Association, were on the other side of the barricades, in the opposition to CFE. Indeed, as a union, our raison d’être is fighting against the growing economic inequality that has done such damage to the fabric of American society over the last two decades, and has widened the disparities between the South Bronx and the Upper East Side. Maybe that economic inequality is news to Merriman because while we were fighting for economic and educational justice, he was working for the Walton Family Foundation of Wal-Mart, without question the foremost corporate purveyor of growing economic inequality in the United States, not to mention the leading violator of American child labor laws. A life spent hobnobbing with the educational robber barons can be insular.[1]

When all the red herrings are put to the side, the issue is simple: the student populations of most New York City charter schools do not reflect the neighborhoods in which they are located. They educate many fewer students living in poverty, students with special needs and English Language Learners than district schools in those communities. The Brighter Choice scandal is a window into how much of this happens. It needs to be fixed, and Merriman’s NYC Charter School Center and New York Charter School Association are doing their damnedest to thwart that fix.

UPDATE: Looks like Merriman and the NYCSA have benched Carroll, and brought in a replacement from the farm team who is completely removed from actual charter schools to do the tabloid dirty work. If you are going to be disingenuous, it helps when you are not a living refutation of the points you make.

[1] It is interesting that Merriman would try to fault the UFT for the socio-economic differences among New York City neighborhoods and their schools. One would think that if any person was in a position to introduce greater integration among New York City public schools, it would be the man who has led them for the past eight years, the man who tirelessly repeats the motto that “education is a civil rights issue.” But that man — Joel Klein — sits on the board of Merriman’s Charter School Center, and is a fierce advocate for charter school management. Yet if you take your lead from the editorial pages of the Post and Daily News, as Merriman does, you begin to think you could blame New York City public school teachers and their union for global warming.

Tagged: NYCSA