Q: And how many charter schools are there in the country about?

SECRETARY DUNCAN: I don’t have a hard number for you. We can get you that number.

Q: Thousands?

SECRETARY DUNCAN: Yes, thousands, thousands. Yes.

(Press gaggle aboard Air Force One en route to Madison, WI - 11/4)

4,578.

That’s the answer you were looking for aboard Air Force One yesterday, Mr. Secretary. We’ve counted it, reported it, documented it. Sorry it wasn’t at your fingertips.

4,578 charter schools.

Thanks for supporting good charters. We actually support great charter schools, and we know that most are great, through scores of studies and reports over recent years. We also know by seeing who attends them, who waits to attend them, who escapes bad alternatives when they are available.

But we also support great charter laws, because without great laws, you can’t have great schools.

The small percentage of schools that some data suggest aren’t working are compromised by two things - first, bad charter laws that leave the same bureaucracies in control of the schools that are in control of the other bad public schools, and second, political opposition that sucks the energy and resources of the average charter school leader working on a shoestring budget with no PR department to fight the lies that are often spread about them.

Yes, good charter schools are right. There are boatloads of them.

And bad charter schools get closed.

657 of them have been closed over the course of the movement’s history.

How many bad public schools have closed? Not many.

Help us make all charter schools great, Mr. Secretary. Push for more than lifting caps and start talking about how most of them are really good. We can give you that data, too…

“There are too many lousy charters out there.”

While one bad school is one too many in any sector, some who suggest lousy charters exist do so with the purest of intentions but often the faultiest of data. They believe that by standing up for quality and against poor performance, they are demonstrating a commitment to accountability and avoiding a kind of “double standard” criticism by the establishment who get offended when reformers say too many conventional public schools are failing. If they admit publicly that their own movement has flaws and undertake what they believe are corrections, then policymakers and opponents will take the charter concept seriously, see them as serious reformers and good policies as well as eventually only good schools will exist.

But saying there are bad charter schools without an intensive look at data – below the surface of even what publicly released AYP scores say and do – ignores their real progress and achievement. And isolating the purpose of charter schools to only one of their three intended effects – quality schooling – ignores the other major two, and equally important effects charters were created to address: parent choice and competition.

More “Charter School Mythbusters #1″

More of the Same at Twice the Price

The National Education Association has prepared a vital tool for anyone interested in assessing the potential impact of the economic stimulus bill on education in the U.S. As major media figures have pointed out in the last several days, the stimulus bill is nothing more than additional funding for the education programs and structures that already exist, regardless of efficacy. And the NEA’s drawn up the charts to prove it. (Notice that reform efforts currently implemented at national and state levels, like charter schools and No Child Left Behind, are completely bypassed.)

Both Senate and House versions nearly double funding of all major programs, such as Title 1 – funding which flows to school districts, where it subsidizes existing staffs and programs. While this may help state and local administrators avoid laying off teachers, it is not tied to student achievement, ensuring that all monies spent simply prop up schools that exist, rather than boosting schools that succeed (NCLB links funding to results, but this pay out comes before the next meaningful achievement assessment, and thus is not tied to accountability). The same is true for the multi-billion dollar school modernization program, for special education and for myriad other program increases.

Also not lost on the status quo supporters of this bill is the fact that there are administrative set-asides at the federal, state and local level. What’s 1 percent of $100 billion? That’s right — government will grow by $1 billion, at the minimum, thanks to this effort. That doesn’t even take into account higher education stimulus funds, another $40 billion or so of which is included in this bill.

There’s also LOTS of money for researchers – the National Science Foundation gets several million more, as does the Institute for Education Sciences. Some discretionary funds (we call it play money) – about $340 million – are also in place for the Secretary to spend as he sees fit on “innovative” programs. But shouldn’t innovative or successful new programs simply draw funds equitably and directly from all federal appropriations (rather than being shunted through the federal-state-local system, with a little – or a lot - being siphoned off at each bureaucratic stop)? Why must “innovation” be separately accounted for in a slush fund, when such reforms are mainly responsible for all the achievement gains of the last decade? And as a result of a decade of reforms, the nation already knows how to succeed in educating children – we simply lack the political resolve to make the hard choices. So why more research in this time of economic crisis? Oh, that’s right. It’s about the jobs of adults, not the education of children.

Consideration of whether or not our current education programs work is missing from the creation of this bill altogether – when it should be the central concern. For years Washington’s representatives fought accountability. NCLB began to shed light in that dark corner. Subsequently ignoring the vetting of programs’ effectiveness before shelling out hard-earned taxpayer dollars is not the way to bring about change and fix failing schools. Which, not incidentally, is the long-haul, big-picture solution to getting – and keeping - our economy back on track for good.

Check out the NEA analysis yourself. We’re glad to finally make use of the taxpayer dollars we give them through mandatory dues payments to see where it’s all going – if the status quo has its way.

(In light of the impending stimulus package making the rounds on Capitol Hill, the following is a riff on remarks made by President Barack Obama following a meeting with his education economic team. The original can be read in its entirety on the official White House blog.)

One point I want to make is that all of us are going to have responsibilities to get this economy education moving again. And when I saw an article today indicating that Wall Street bankers Congress had given themselves the education system $20 billion $100 billion worth of bonuses in new spending — the same amount of bonuses as they gave themselves in 2004 effectively doubling federal funding of education — at a time when most of these institutions were are teetering on collapse and they are asking for taxpayers to help sustain them, and when taxpayers find themselves in the difficult position that if they don’t provide help that where they don’t have any other choices for educating their children, the entire system could come down on top of our heads if the next generation - indeed, this generation - can’t compete in a global economy — that is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful.

And part of what we’re going to need is for folks on Wall Street in the education BLOB who are asking for help to show some restraint accountability and show some discipline transparency and show some sense of responsibility. The American people understand that we’ve got a big hole that we’ve got to dig ourselves out of — but they don’t like the idea that people are digging a bigger hole even as they’re being asked to fill it up.

And so we’re going to be having conversations as this process moves forward directly with these folks on Wall Street the BLOB to underscore that they have to start acting in a more responsible accountable and transparent fashion if we are to together get this economy rolling again. There will be time for them to make profits an opportunity for those with rigorous programs to put them in play in the classroom, as is already seen in charter schools across the country, and there will be time for them to get bonuses quality teachers to excel and be compensated on their merits rather than their seniority — now is not that time. And that’s a message that I intend to send directly to them, I expect Secretary Geithner Duncan to send to them — and Secretary Geithner Duncan already had to pull back one institution that had gone forward with a multimillion dollar jet plane purchase tenure protection contract at the same time as they’re receiving TARP ARRA money. We shouldn’t have to do that because they should know better. And we will continue to send that message loud and clear.

Having said that, I am confident that with the recovery package moving through the House and through the Senate, with the excellent work that’s already been done by Secretary Geithner in consultation with Larry Summers and Paul Volcker and other individuals education reformers in the trenches, that we are going to be able to set up a regulatory framework that allows accountability, transparency and choice to rights the ship and that gets us moving again. And I know the American people are eager to get moving again — they want to work be able to choose the best education for their children, be it in a conventional, charter or private school. They are serious about their responsibilities; I am, too, in this White House and I hope that the folks on Wall Street in the BLOB are going to be thinking in the same way.

(brought to you as a public service by M.O.M.S. - Mothers Opposed to Misappropriated Stimulus)