Against Noble Expansion: a partial list of many reasons
The Editorial Board of the Chicago Tribune, apparently, does not read its own reportage. Only one day after the newspaper reported that CPS was on the verge of running out of all of its money by June 30th, the board lamented that Noble Charter would not be allowed to open a school on the city’s north side, dubbing the charter “the best school that nobody wanted,” as though the reform school charter was the cutest puppy passed up at the pound.
There are a number of inflammatory, misleading, and naive statements within this rather short editorial--but nothing unsurprising from an editorial board that proudly proclaims it exists to ensure "minimum restriction of personal liberty, opportunity and enterprise," and that "believes in free markets, free will and freedom of expression. " Naturally, the Republicans over at the Tribune are fans of the charter movement, but with this editorial, the newspaper loses all credibility as anything other than a mouthpiece of a wealthy business class, encouraging charter expansion at a time when CPS is in dire financial straights. The Tribune supports Rauner, belt-tightening, and "balanced budgets" that lead to austerity--but at a moment when the nation's third largest school district can't pay the bills for its existing schools, the newspaper is calling for a new, privately-run, publicly-financed charter network to expand into a neighborhood that is well-served by its public neighborhood schools.
This editorial wouldn't have you know any of the reasons for opposition to Noble, however. It even refers to Noble as a "public school," which is a perversion of the terminology. Public, yes, in that Noble uses our tax dollars; public, no, in that Noble is privately operated and beholden to far fewer regulations when it comes to licensure of staff, ensuring every child has equal access to education, and using the Board of Ed discipline code, among other things. It is by now a norm for newspapers to refer to schools run by private corporations as charters and those run by the district as public--but the Tribune does otherwise to be purposefully misleading. "The North Side activists didn't want that school," the editorial says, "So they have an empty building instead of an award-winning school at 640 W. Irving Park Road." This either/or presented by the board seems so simple; why would these "north side activists" choose a lose/lose scenario such as this one?
We can find several answers to this in the Tribune's own archives of educational reporting. Noreen Ahmed-Ullah wrote last year one of the most detailed and thorough accounts available on the discipline practices of the network. In 2013, Noble suspended an average 23% of their student body, compared with CPS's 9% rate of suspension. Students at these schools are required to pay monetary fines for even small discipline infractions, such as an untucked shirt or being in possession of... cheetohs. (Fining students is illegal in public schools.) Demerits result in detentions, and a certain number of detentions results in a mandatory behavior-management class that also costs over $100. The vast majority of the student body is low-income, which has led some researchers and observers of the network to call these financial pressures on impoverished parents "predatory.” As of 2012, the Network had collected on average $150,000 in fines per year from its 89% low-income population.
"So what?" you might think--if your kid can't get with the program, she can get gone! This is precisely what happens, it appears, up to 30% of the time. The graduating 12th grade class at Noble is typically 30% smaller than it was in 9th grade. A shockingly high number of students may have been expelled officially--between 2% and 5%, which is tens of times higher than CPS averages--but a much greater number leave or are pushed out because they are unable to adapt to the punitive discipline culture of the charter network. When students are kicked out or leave, they end up in neighborhood high schools.
Michael Milkie, a former Chicago Public Schools teacher who founded and runs Noble Network, proudly noted in 2014 that he prefers the "broken-windows" approach to classroom management. This dubious 1980s criminology theory is the motivation for policing strategies around the country such as the infamously controversial "stop-and-frisk" in New York and Chicago. Others have written better take-downs of this approach in the criminal justice system; in the classroom, the unrelenting crack-down on infractions that harm no one (dress code violations, possession of food) shows a vast indifference to the individuality of each child and celebration of the arbitrariness of rule-making and authority. It also is proportionally more punitive for minority boys, who are suspended and expelled more than any other group. As of April 2014, Milkie admittedly had not heard of Restorative Justice, an alternative philosophy lately embraced in CPS for its restorative re-teaching and accountability approach to dealing with harms done in school buildings; unlike fining students for misbehaviors, restorative justice is a philosophy, one that seeks to teach emotional skills to students by showing them how to be accountable for harm they’ve caused to a person or community. The rote behaviorism encouraged by fining students may help in the short-term in the same way spraying my dog with a water bottle so she gets off my bed is helpful; the system highlights behavior that is unacceptable without offering any meaningful rationale.
Another, more general critique of charter expansion that is not simply Noble’s problem, but has been largely neglected in the conversation about why privatizing schools can be detrimental and not beneficial to neighborhoods, is that expansion of non-union schools destabilizes the micro-economies of neighborhoods. As many of us know in the schools, CPS funds schools on a per-student basis; a new charter inevitably sucks up kids from the nearby neighborhood schools, also siphoning off the funds that follow them, which leaves the public schools with fewer funds to work with. The public schools depopulate dramatically. Teachers are laid off. The students left in the buildings are more likely to have special needs or uninvolved parents, because those students aren't well-served by the demand for 100% compliance most charters require as a cornerstone to their school culture. In a few years, the public school's test scores plummet, Rahm or Arne or someone can declare it a failing school, and it gets closed. Union people, minority people, women people, middle class people (and combinations of all 4) lose their jobs in neighborhoods where they are the lynchpins of the community, while 22-year-olds who are overwhelmingly non-minority work toil for 12 hours a day at a nearby charter, all for half the price of a unionized public school teacher. These young white folk may only stay for a few years and probably are not from the community they are serving. The bottom line: charters destabilize communities of both students and the school's workers. This is why the north side didn't want them.
Instead of looking to boost charter enrollment and expand, Noble needs to re-examine its discipline policies to be more inclusive. If its goal is not to be inclusive of the student population--as Milkie hints in an editorial from last year, when he treats expulsion as a sad but inevitable outcome for unmanageable students who disrupt the learning environment--then his schools simply should not receive public tax dollars. Charters can do whatever they want, and I'll stop banging the drum about the many ways in which they destabilize a school district--if their coffers begin to reflect what they truly are: niche schools for a certain sub-set of the public. They are not public. And as such, they should not receive public dollars, especially at a time when the scarcity of those dollars means a doomsday scenario for many of Chicago's already existing schools
