Can't anybody here play this game?
For the record, The New York Times is still killing us. In its efforts to charm the gentry and grease the money machine, it filters everything through the lens of privilege and it comes out here:
The Fucking New York Times
I want to thank everyone who made their way through the previous post on that previous article. I promise this one will be more... contained. At any rate, we've already laid the foundation, so this should be smooth sailing.
May 13, 2022
I went into this latest embarrassment with extremely low expectations and I wasn't disappointed. It starts, as these things frequently do, with the headline. Now I don't necessarily blame the reporter for the headline--I've read some Times headlines that appear to contradict the substance of the article, as if the headlines had been written in advance and stored in the agenda hopper until the right--or sufficiently right--article came along to deliver it.
I read the headline again and, sure enough, it deftly checks several of the requisite boxes. First, instead of focusing on the DOE or charter schools or even the actual rules, we get the Biden in right up front so there's no doubt about the point of the article or who's to blame for the "Backlash."
And in that backlash we find what we knew we would: the perennial winner of America's got tropes, "Dems in Disarray!" And finally the headline scratches that ever-present bipartisan itch. If you haven't been following along, in order to avoid alienating the gentry, the Times and her weird sisters worship at the altar of Gemini, the twins of bipartisanship. Everything is both-sidesed into meaninglessness. If it's bad, it's because both sides are bad. If it's good, it's because both sides are on board.
See? Bipartisan backlash. It's right there in the title. The corollary is the imperative that everything must be bad for Biden. No side can be allowed to be good while the other one is so terrible. That wouldn't be balanced.
It doesn't matter that one side may be working to save your rights and your health and--you know--the planet, while the other side is bent on the destruction of all those things along with democracy. Nevertheless, both sides have a point. It's this kind of brain-dead navigation of the day's issues that assures smooth sailing on the seas of rising stock and real estate prices. Right off the edge of the earth.
Why? Because if the Big Bosses can only keep government frozen, perched on the razor's edge between fascist authoritarianism and OH-MY-GOD PROGRESSIVES! then markets and marketeers can flourish and the nation can carry on. Business as usual. That's why.
Now for the subhead. See if you can spot the hocus-pocus:
Critics of the proposal say the rules are overly restrictive and would stymie the growth of charter schools, whose 3.6 million students are largely Black and Hispanic.
By forwarding the viewpoint of those opposed to the new rules and offering the 3.6 million number without context to magnify the impact (there are about 50 million kids in school k-12) the article puts forward a specific framing and reveals its rooting interests. And that's before the coded callout to kids of color.
Now the article.
I would describe the basic premise of this article, which this time is pretty clear, as follows:
The new rules for awarding federal grants to charter schools are too tough and that pisses off charter boosters, parents who are charter boosters, and Democrats who are charter boosters.
If you just cocked one eyebrow and had the words "The federal government gives federal grants to charter schools?" run through your brain, buckle up. If you are wondering why the government is taking cash for public education and giving it away to support and even start up a bunch of schools that are public in the same way watches bought on the street in Times Square are Rolexes, give yourself a gold star. Stay tuned for the release of our limited series What the fuck is up with school choice? Coming soon.
This article makes its point using many of the same tricks as the previous article: omitted context, loaded language, unsupported assertions, and selective quotation.
1. omitted context
In the previous article, we didn't find out until thirteen paragraphs in that the money being shifted to private schools was unchanged from the previous big bill.
Here, in making the case that the new rules are too tough, the article fails to discuss the history of this program and reasons stricter rules might be appropriate. Instead, the Times opts for pitting one side against the other in a battle of opinions even as it works to validate one of them. As with the previous article, the choice to omit important context advantages one point of view and marginalizes the other.
Let me provide some context that the article does not. The Public Charter Schools Program, came into being during the Clinton Administration as part of "the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1994."
Bill Clinton at the time was keen on distancing himself from traditional constituencies like organized labor and burnishing his credentials as a New Democrat, and the thought of pissing off teachers unions while pumping oodles of money into quasi-public schools and thereby pleasing donors and privileged white Dems who were not quite privileged enough to afford private schools must have seemed too juicy to pass up. The fact that teachers were the ones looking beyond the next election cycle and warning of the eventual destruction of public schooling was easy to chalk up to dogmatic self-interest.
So inside the evolving Department of Education a child was born and its name was the federal Charter Schools Program. In its first year it had 6 million dollars to distribute through federal grants to states and by 2000 that number had grown to 145 million and to 440 million by fiscal year 2023*.
*reduced under the new rules**
**now being pressured to increase to 500 million
Predictably, as the money got bigger so did the temptation to get into the business of getting a bunch of it. Some operators actually looked a bit like Albert Shanker's ideal teacher-driven laboratories of innovation. But lots and lots of them looked more like Payday Loan storefronts propped up by shiny infomercials. And they had some really clever ideas for how to cut themselves a slice of that education pie. Not that they had to be that clever, because the Department of Education wasn't even checking on the money for the first ten years. After that came Arne Duncan, who never met a charter choice he didn't want to give our money to, and Betsy DeVos for whom the destruction and grifting was deliberate. A feature, not a bug.
The Network for Public Education, a public school advocacy group founded in 2013 by Diane Ravitch and and Anthony Cody published a report in May of 2019 titled Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride. Authored by Executive Director Carol Burris along with journalist Jeff Bryant, Asleep at the Wheel takes a detailed look into the waste, fraud and abuse endemic to the school choice industry and in this case to charter school operation in particular as it relates to the federal grant program. NPE's follow-up Still Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Results in a Pile Up of Fraud and Waste provides an even more robust examination with additional detail.
NPE also keeps a running record that includes more recent examples of charter school "scandals" in a searchable database here.
The report estimates that the federal Charter Schools Program had at that time distributed around four billion bucks and calculates something north of a billion-with-a-b dollars of what we used to call waste, fraud and abuse (different abuse). Which is a lot even before you get to the rivers of cash flowing from state education agencies which are often even less well-regulated than the federal program. That is a topic for another time.
So with all those dollars chasing all those schools and a bunch of people being who they are which is to say a bunch of crooks, you'd think it would be a good idea to, you know, make some rules and at least attempt to impede the flow of tax money directly into the pockets of the shysters, con artists and fraudulent edupreneurs. But in that case you would not be the New York Times.
2. loaded language
"Backlash" is a loaded term, which is to say it carries a connotation meant to touch an emotional nerve in the reader. It's akin to the "riled" language in the previous article and designed to emphasize conflict, which is the heart of drama but deceptive when artificially amplified in journalism.
In the first paragraph of this article we get more of the kind of unsourced but emotional assertion that plagued the previous article. Here the "backlash" is caused by "onerous" rules imposed by a Biden Administration "seeking to stymie" the proliferation of charter schools that have "fallen out of favor with many Democrats." All this is buried in a "parents say" quote and I defy anyone but the author to sort out what parents actually said from the cascade of editorializing.
Right at the top of the article we are told that the "Biden Administration is seeking to stymie schools..." But is that true? That might be how "critics of the proposal" describe it, but is it the reporter's job to simply transcribe one side's framing and deliver it uncritically?
Even so, the third paragraph introduces the "most controversial" part of the plan. And it's a doozy. Imagine that, in exchange for a big pile of public money, you have to actually show that you have community support for your school and you have to take into account "the effect [it] would have on neighboring district-run schools" including showing your school doesn't segregate.
Why the New York Times reports what looks like responsible administration as "controversial" is a puzzlement. Controversial according to whom? The Times? The "critics"? What's controversial about it? one might ask. I guess if you are a charter management organization that wants a free hand to find real estate arrangements in communities starved of resources so you can establish opaque schools or pretend to so you can grab lots of public money without any accountability, these commonsense rather tepid rules are scary.
Did anybody even ask those opposed to the new rules why they shouldn't have to show their commitment both to the families in their new neighborhoods and to the larger project of education in a multicultural, multiracial democracy? Whose money is it, anyway?
Most of the time we don't even get a clear picture of the rules themselves--just vague descriptions of "requirements" that critics complain are "out of touch" and "not practical" without ever hearing much about what they are.
There's lots of other sketchy language legerdemain from calling one side "Leaders across the charter school community" followed by seven paragraphs of griping and sniping. Then there's the requisite shifty Democrats "who have cooled to charter schools" even though they "had long embraced them."
By the time we hear from an actual supporter of the new rules, Carol Burris, from the advocacy group Network for Public Education, she's reduced to "an ardent critic of charters." Opponents of the rules are leaders and parents (even though the big quotes come from Nina Rees), proponents of the accountability (see what I did there?) are lobbyists and familiar targets teachers unions, including American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.
Once again there is a single bizarre paragraph (I still wake up thinking about that one last time) that seems to be eating itself from the tail up as it describes House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro, a strong supporter of the rules, as among "congressional Democrats" who "have seized on loopholes that allowed for-profit management companies to tap federal funding..." (emphasis mine) Democrats may have focused on the loopholes, but it's the charter management companies who have seized on them. The use of this language is inaccurate and signals--once again-- that the Democrats are up to something underhanded.
I'm not going to do a lot more of this, but this paragraph represents a repeat of the worst kind of okey-doke we saw in the previous article. Ms. Burris argues that the new rules are an attempt to "clean up a lot of the mess [see above!] that's been associated with the program." And the next paragraph (emphasis mine):
But to many, the rest of the rule -- particularly a requirement that charters seeking the grants conduct a "community impact analysis" -- reads like an attempt to cement into policy the wish list of critics like Ms. Burris and teachers' unions to stop charter school growth.
I'm tired of this crap, but not too tired to point out that "to many" is bullshit. It's an example of what I last time referred to as a generic attribution (h/t @airbagmoments). It's a dodge, a method of slipping in a point of view that the writer finds useful. And where in the hell does "wish list" come from? The structure of the paragraph allows the inflammatory language to be attributed "to many," but the authority of the article is squarely behind the sentiment.
We'll turn to selective quotation in a minute, but I want to make a stop at
"largely Black and Hispanic"
"strong support among Black and Latino families"
"communities hit hardest by the pandemic"
"69 percent of them students of color"
"and two-thirds from low-income households"
"particularly people of color"
"More than 90 percent of them are African-American."
"the department’s definition of demand was clearly different than the parents’ in the city’s Latino neighborhoods."
and finally a quote used to end the article from Naomi N. Shelton, identified in the article as "the chief executive of the National Charter Collaborative, which supports charter school leaders of color," who chides supporters of the new rules this way:
The people who are fighting for this don’t even look like the folks who would be impacted,” Ms. Shelton said. “And the students who come to us are not students they’re even engaging with.
I wanted to say something about the last article but the post was already ten thousand words long, so I'll say it now. I think it's problematic to connect Democrats' education policy, whether it's public money for private schools or stricter rules for charter schools, to race and, by implication, to racism. It's true that in the previous article the connection was convoluted, but here it is an explicit attempt to justify the article's advocacy.
The split along racial lines of Democratic support for charter schools is something we will return to in the near future, but starving urban schools of resources coupled with an incessant media campaign promoting the "failing schools" narrative certainly nurtures dissatisfaction among people of color with their local public schools. Now prevent those schools from teaching a curriculum responsive to their concerns and lived experience and it's not surprising parents seek alternatives.
The entire project of school privatization--of which charter schools is an important element--is built on destabilizing and degrading neighborhood public schools, and nowhere is this more acutely observed than in schools serving communities of color, particularly schools that qualify for Title 1 funds.
It is not surprising, therefore, to find the proliferation of charter schools in precisely these communities. Take a look at these two interactive maps to view the overlap. This first map shows concentrations of charter schools in and around large metropolitan areas. Just hit the drop-down menu and filter for charters. The second map uses 2020 census information to track demographic data, including by race.
The bottom line is that charter schools are located in traditionally underserved communities such as those with high concentrations of people of color because public schools in those communities have been degraded through a decades-long focused effort to shift students from traditional public schools to charter schools.
Given the success of that project, I understand the support for charter schools among communities of color, and I am mindful that privilege often means the privilege to refuse certain options on political grounds, an option that millions of families do not enjoy. But there is nothing here about the thousands of students who have been trapped in crooked charters or had them close up or be shut down mid-year. To report credulously the claims of opponents that these rules pose a threat is to certify that they make their arguments in good faith. That is a benefit of the doubt denied to supporters of the new rules.
Who gets quoted and how shapes a story in ways that are very powerful and often obscured by charged language and the narrative of conflict. Here, as in the previous article, we get lots of "proponents say" this and "critics say" that," but let's take a look at who gets their name in the paper. For fun, we'll put them in order and put proponents in blue, opponents in orange. (h/t Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec for the format, which I have modified here)
1. Nina Rees, the president and chief executive of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
2. Malachi Armstrong, the father of a kindergartner who attends a charter school in Philadelphia (ask me about this one)
3. Michael R. Bloomberg, philanthropist billionaire and former New York mayor (opinion piece available through link)
4. Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, (opinion piece available through link)
5. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California who we're told wrote a letter
6. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey who we're told wrote a letter
7. Michael Bennet of Colorado who we're told wrote a letter
8. President Biden
9. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the chairwoman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee who wrote a letter available through a link.
10. Carol Corbett Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education and an ardent critic of charters
11. the National Education Association, which joined a NPE letter
12. the Southern Poverty Law Center, which joined the NPE letter
13. Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute
14. Fred A. Jones Jr., the senior director of public policy and advocacy at the Southern Education Foundation (generally neutral)
15. Amanda Johnson, the executive director of Clarksdale Collegiate Public Charter School in Clarksdale, Miss.
16. Joe Cantu, an executive director of MindShiftED, a parent advocacy group in San Antonio
17. Education Department via twitter
18. Naomi N. Shelton, the chief executive of the National Charter Collaborative
At a glance, this looks bad. Eleven to seven. But it's even worse because of the imbalance of people whose voices are actually heard. The people actually quoted for this article--that is, the voices we actually hear speaking directly to the issues raised in the article--are the yellow numbers, and you can see it's six to two, with placement (beginning and ending) favoring opponents of the new rules. This is bad and is reminiscent of the same deficiency in the previous article where voices aligned with the sentiments of the article were favored.
This article suffers from the same affliction as so many others: it has an opinion. From there, it proceeds to "twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” It's not unlike the faulty term papers I used as examples when I taught ninth graders. It mostly avoids what seems to me the foundational question: Why are these rules necessary?
Despite extensive evidence, hundreds of examples, and successful prosecutions, the article reduces complaints against the charter school industry to one brief paragraph and some "advocates say" quotes. The closest we get to the billion dollars of wasted federal charter school program money is "a series of scandals including a self-dealing scheme and other fraud."
There's almost nothing about what the rules are meant to address, and which are extensively documented in both "Asleep at the Wheel" and "Still Asleep at the Wheel" from the Network for Public Education, as well as in the ACLU's 2017 report, "Schools Choosing Students," and about a million other places.
There's nothing about the charter schools that received funding but never opened, or closed down in the middle of the year. Nothing about charter schools that pay their for-profit operators millions on top of other millions. Nothing about the charter schools that discriminate against kids with disabilities, or special needs, or kids who've had discipline incidents, or kids who don't perform well on tests. Nothing about charter schools that charge fees or require parents to volunteer services.
We're talking about decades of wrongdoing, some of which is illegal and much of which has simply been waved through by sympathetic supervisory bodies. Wrongdoing that has hurt kids and their families and all kinds of communities, and that has done damage far beyond the federal budget.
Instead of focusing on these new rules and the problems they are designed to address, the article settles for the usual suspects as it amplifies the conflict between "two sides" and comes down in favor of one of them. As a result, the article reads like a press release from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
The federal Charter Schools Program is broken and has been since it was born. The only people who don't want it fixed are those who profit from the brokenness.
Thieves and grifters are afraid of sunlight. Decades of preferential treatment and looking the other way have allowed the corruption to grow under cover provided by choice boosters. Now the Biden Administration is proposing a measure of transparency and accountability and the choicers--including apparently the New York Times-- are pissed for reasons both commercial and philosophical. Sucks when a profitably rigged game gets closed down.
Is Erica Green waiting for Superman? Or just another New York Timesian reporter toeing the company line? I don't know.
What I do know is that she has tremendous influence on the way education is reported and thought about in this country.
We have a right to expect more from the Times, and from her.
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