In May 2016, a report found that only half of articles covering public charter schools in major outlets were neutral or balanced. Perhaps liberal reporters saw that report and thought they were being too objective, because two biased, anti-charter pieces have come out in major outlets in the past week.
First, it was Anya Kamenetz, NPR’s lead education blogger. On June 24, Kamenetz published a piece questioning the success at Rocketship charter schools, a network of 14 public charter schools, most in San Francisco’s Bay Area.
Kamenetz noted that Rocketship schools do well on statewide tests and that 91 percent of families choose to return each year. But the majority of her piece didn’t focus on Rocketship’s success. Instead, she focused on teachers who allegedly had students (less than one-tenth of one percent of student, mind you) retake standardized tests to boost their own pay, and regularly kept students from taking bathroom breaks.
By Monday, Rocketship Education Co-Founder and CEO Preston Smith responded in The 74. Smith explained how few of their students retook standardized tests last spring. Rocketship also believes teachers are best poised to decide bathroom break policy, and doesn’t have any kind of blanket, network-wide policy.
He said six of Kamenetz’s nine Rocketship sources told him their comments were mischaracterized. Worse, Kamenetz hadn’t visited any of Rocketship’s schools in doing her reporting.
Kamenetz closed her piece with comments from a local teachers’ union official that bashed Rocketship and said parents in the local school district were happy.
But therein lies the point of school choice: different schools work for different students, and parents should be able to choose which ones they want. The point of Rocketship schools isn’t to be a model that will work for every single student.
Thursday’s New York Times print edition features a front-page story on the lack of quality choices in Detroit’s charter schools. “Lots of choice, with no good choice,” wrote Kate Zernike, the paper’s national K-12 education correspondent. “Competition, and chaos.”
Zernike quoted a couple charter school operators, and only quoted parents that fit her narrative of lackluster charter schools in chaos. The piece lacked a balance to her negative personal view of charters.
“The article leads one to believe that the existence of charters and school choice is somehow the cause of poor academic performance in the city,” Gary Naeyaert, executive director of the Great Lakes Education Project, told the Washington Examiner. “To the contrary, charter schools serve as life rafts for parents fed up with the chronic failure of Detroit Public Schools.” Zernike took the time to attack GLEP and its founders, who are Republicans, but failed to quote anyone from the organization. Naeyaert called the piece “extremely one-sided” and said it looked like something from the editorial page. “The piece lacks objectivity and balance.”
Zernike claims that charter school authorizers in Michigan rarely close their charters for poor performance, but that’s simply not the case. “While more than 100 charter schools have been closed for poor performance, to date the state has never closed a traditional public school for academic failure,” Naeyaert said. Many charter advocates see closure of poorly performing schools as a vital feature of the charter concept, to ensure that low-quality schools don’t simply get to keep operating by default, the way failing public schools do.
Zernike also cites research from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which she accurately says is “considered the gold standard of measurement by charter school supporters across the country.” But she deceptively only displays the center’s research on one charter school company in Detroit, without giving the whole picture.
Research published by the center in January 2013 showed “Charter students in the city of Detroit … are performing even better than their peers in the rest of the state, on average gaining nearly three months achievement for each year they attend charter schools.”
Only 7 percent of Detroit’s charters perform significantly worse than the city’s traditional public schools in math, and only 1 percent are worse in reading. Yet Zernike still claims, citing this very study, that “half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit’s traditional public schools.”
One of Zernike’s bolder claims is that charters are being selective with their admissions. She cites a few instances of charters recruiting certain students, hiding their enrollment periods from the public or having burdensome application processes. Yet she fails to mention charter schools are legally prohibited from being selective in their admissions and never cites any cases of a charter getting in legal trouble, or even being investigated, for such activities.
Just like Kamenetz missed the positives of Rocketship schools, Zernike went out of her way to omit all the positives in Detroit, even as she cited the research demonstrating them. Where was the mention of Detroit Edison Public School Academy and its 100 percent graduation rate? Or University Prep Science & Math Elementary? It’s one of many charter schools that are giving new life to Detroit’s historic buildings.
“It missed the opportunity for turning around the well-known problems of Detroit education and promoting stories of excellence to be strived for,” said Dan Quisenberry, president of the Michigan Association of Public School Academies. “Instead of presenting ideas to attract more quality educators or to spark innovation in order to overcome the obstacles of teaching disadvantaged youth, it focused on a few stories to show us all what doesn’t work.”
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
