DOMESTIC WARFARE: REACTIONS TO THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS ANALYSIS OF CHARTER SCHOOL DATA
Thursday, September 9, 2004
Gerald W. Bracey
George Mason University
High/Scope Educational Research Foundation

A remarkable media explosion occurred on August 18 and 19. It went unnoticed by the Washington Post . A New York Times August 17 article by Diana Jean Schemo summarizing the findings of a study by the American Federation of Teachers triggered the blast. The study found that charters scored lower on the National Assessment of Educational Progress than did similar public schools. Given the ballistic reactions that followed, the headline might as well have been, " Times to Charters: Drop Dead."

August 18 found Harvard charter advocates, Paul Peterson, William Howell and Martin West in the Wall Street Journal with "Dog Eats AFT Homework." The next day, the former president of Edison Schools, Inc.'s Charter School Division, Floyd Flake, defended charters on the Times op-ed page (the Times credit line omitted his Edison role). That day, too, found Fordham Foundation President Chester Finn fuming on the New York Post's op-ed page , "This week's firestorm over the performance of charter schools can be traced to a mischief bearing grenade hand-delivered by the charter hating American Federation of Teachers to the New York Times." Firestorm? A mere two days after the original article appeared? 

Well, yes, firestorm. Charter zealot, Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform went rabid against the AFT's Bella Rosenberg about the study on NPR's Tavis Smiley Show and Nina Rees from the U. S. Department of Education (and previously the Heritage Foundation) did the same on "The News Hour With Jim Lehrer." On CER's website, Allen declared that "The AFT has been working on their plan for months to twist NAEP data and attack the nation's unsuspecting 3,000 charter schools with a full-force media blitz." CNN planned a segment on the study with Aaron Brown, then backed out. The Times granted Secretary of Education Rod Paige space in Section A-not the op-ed-to defend charters. Editors at the Chicago Tribune, Detroit News, and Houston Chronicle all dismissed the study. 

An editorial in the New York Post, declared, "The AFT hates them [charter schools] because they threaten the union's public school monopoly." The small irony here is that the AFT is about one third the size of the other union, the National Education Association. The larger irony is, if it weren't for the AFT there might not be any charter schools.

A Massachusetts teacher, Ray Budde invented the concept of charter schools in the 1970's. His idea received little attention until publicized by AFT president, Albert Shanker at an AFT conference and then in two of Shanker's weekly New York Times columns, July 10 and July 17, 1988. Shanker again presented the idea at a conference in Minnesota in 1991 and the Minnesota legislature passed the nation's first charter law.

Charters asked for autonomy from district and state rules and promised improved achievement in return. Minnesota charter advocate, Joe Nathan, put forth an improve-or-die manifesto: "Hundreds of charter schools have been created around this nation by educators who are willing to put their jobs on the line to say, 'If we can't improve student achievement, close down our school. This is accountability-clear, specific and real."

And, alas, non-existent. The few charters that have been shut down have had their doors closed because they misspent, sometimes criminally, the money. Charters with clean books and low achievement remained open.

By 1994, Shanker had grown wary. He initially saw charters as laboratories of innovation seeking better, creative ways of teaching kids. Now, though he was concerned that "the basic premise of charter schools ensures that whatever common ground schools now share will disappear." This anticipated a shorter response from Arizona State University education dean, David Berliner, who, when asked what kind of society charters would produce replied simply, "Bosnia."

The fact of charters' low performance is undeniable independent of AFT study although it is not always presented this way. For instance, a RAND Corporation study found that students in charter schools were "keeping pace" with those in demographically similar public schools. But this means the charter kids were merely matching the scores of the lowest performing students in the country. In the NAEP 2003 reading assessment, California's fourth-graders ranked 49 th while its eighth-graders tied for 50 th . This is not what charters promised. Even worse performance has been reported in evaluations of charters in Michigan, Ohio and Texas.

The attackers all came from the Right and are people who see charters not as means to improve public education, but to destroy it. The Right has tried to demean and destroy the AFT study with a saturation bombing campaign in the media. The study is not likely to disappear.