« The Said Factor | Main | I Don't Care if I Ever Get Back » The Most Exciting Week of the Year06 May 2008 03:22 pm Did you know that this week is National Charter Schools Week. I know I'll be celebrating! Seriously, though, charter schools are great. Parents ought to have some diversity of options when considering where to send their kids to school, but the public money shouldn't be spent without a measure of public accountability and the charter school framework is a good way in which to accomplish that. Comments (61)
"charter schools are great" Not based on their results, I think. 
Charter schools are great? Maybe they are in general. But in the two large school districts where I've worked (one very liberal, the other very conservative), the charter schools were frauds - no one knew where any of the money went.
David in NY, perhaps you'd like to provide a citation on that. All the studies I've seen show very similar results for charter and non-charter schools, with charter schools outperforming traditional schools among some specialized student populations (poor inner-city kids, for example).
Of course the need for schools would eventually cease if people just quit having damned kids. Sometimes the solution to a problem is so obvious you can't see it.
Steve Sailer had a great metaphor about discussions of education that don't take into account the broad differences in student potential, he called this The Alchemy Age of Education.
Matt's become a Republican.
Charter schools are a good first step towards what should be the ultimate goal: replacing our decrepit public schools with a a private, for-profit, free-market system
Hey, can we get a Sara-link or something on this? Does she think that charter schools have awesome results?
Charter schools CAN be great, but they are not always great, and sometimes are a disaster. In that sense I agree that the IDEA of charter schools is a very good one, but like so many good ideas, the tricky bit is in the implementation. But all that said, one nice thing about charter schools is that they provide an opportunity to test various theories about education on a more limited basis, and hence are generating a wealth of useful data. Interestingly, I think one of the big takeaways from the charter school data so far is that the standard public school model is not actually all that easy to beat.
Steve Sailer had a great metaphor about discussions of education that don't take into account the broad differences in student potential, he called this The Alchemy Age of Education. Thanks for that link, Fred. What I admire most about this blog is its willingness to engage brilliant but controversial thinkers like Sailer.
_Some_ charter schools are great. I worked at one for a while, in a major East Coast city, that was nationally recognized for the progress that it made with its students (almost all of whom were from inner city neighborhoods). There are also of course charter schools which aren't so good. We should probbaly think about them on a case by case basis.
You're welcome DougJ, and you're right that Yglesias deserves credit for engaging with Sailer on some issues (though he has avoided others, e.g., the James Watson affair).
I don't know much about how charter schools compare to traditional public schools when it comes to aggregate statistical results (which raises the very interesting and not easily answered question of how you actually compare very different schools), but I know of at least one example of a charter school that made a very real difference. Whether you think the difference in this case is positive or negative is somewhat open to interpretation, but I tend to think the result was an unvarnished good. The Grant Park neighborhood in Atlanta (where I once lived) experienced a tremendous boom (you might say gentrification) in the mid 90s. This is an old urban neighborhood (formerly a street-car suburb, actually). Many of the new residents were young middle class couples. By the late 90s many of these couples were having babies and by the turn of the century there was a fairly large population of middle-class children about to enter school. Now, as you might guess, this urban Atlanta neighborhood had very poor public schools that most of these middle class parents would have been deathly afraid to send their children to. But instead of abandoning the neighborhood completely or sending their kids off to private schools, these parents banded together and worked with the city to save a turn of the 19th century school building from demolition and have this converted into a new charter school. The result was that all of the young middle class families stayed in the neighborhood, the school system got a big influx of middle class students, and, essentially, the neighborhood was saved from what had been a long boom/bust cycle. Obviously there are a lot of issues at play in a situation like this, not the least of which is race. The school was by no means exclusive to the local, mostly white middle-class population, but it did largely serve their needs. Many, many poor kids go to this school as well, however, and I think saving the neighborhood from another round of white flight was well worth the cost of opening a dreaded charter school.
[T]he public money shouldn't be spent without a measure of public accountability and the charter school framework is a good way in which to accomplish that. Well, it's a good idea for a framework to accomplish that, but as with many good ideas, implementation details make all the difference in the world.
Matt's become a Republican.
Wow. Do you know anything about charter schools? Compared to what? The petroleum that is the rest of public education? Good suburban public schools might be clean burning natural gas, but most city schools might as well be bituminous coal.
I don't know enough to really say whether MY is right or not here (though things like charter schools and vouchers are where I'm most sympathetic to conservative thought in places where it clashes with liberal thought these days), part of me wonders if he wrote this post just to see how the comment section turns out.
DTM is right: charter schools can be great, and they can be awful. And while they can be held accountable for results in theory, in practice, it has rarely worked out that way. It's been very difficult to close even atrociously performing charter schools.
Sailer's writings are not only a joke, but rooted heavily in the same racist discourse that was peddled by the author's of "The Bell Curve." The implied central argument, when all of the soft science and logical fallacies are boiled away, is that black and Latino children (as well as low-income white children) do not have the intelligence of their peers in affluent areas. Take the dividing line between Westchester County and the Bronx in New York City, for example, where vastly divergent test scores appear on either side of the geographic border - one that is accentuated by both race and income. Charter schools, such as KIPP and Achievement First, are far beyond "ethanol of the education world" - they, alongside educational reform movements such as Teach for America - have proven time and time again that the potential of a student is directly tied to the expectations and quality of their teachers. The fact that many (and certainly not all) of charter schools, Teach for America corps members, and other stalwarts in the educational reform movement are proving this on a daily basis is more than enough cause to celebrate.
Not a thing wrong with the idea or intended implementation of charter schools. There will be failures and the accountability/oversight built into the charter should help weed them out -- same for public schools that are failing. Oversight is key and is something that governments fail to do adequately. Maybe we should have a discussion on why government fails to provide adequate oversight? Certainly a lot of material out there.
Rob Mac, That certainly isn't an uncommon reason for people to form charter schools (liking a neighborhood, but not liking the local public school), and it probably counts as a valid rationale for their existence. Indeed, in many such cases what happens is that the parents end up sending their kids to a charter school with a lot of the same kids who would have been in the schools they were trying to avoid, but who also shifted over to the charter school instead. And to the extent the mix seems different, it is often just because private schools are drawing away fewer kids in the area. Thus what charter schools end up being in such cases is a mechanism to quickly locate new public schools where parents feel a sense of community. And that does indeed serve the purpose of keeping more people in the public school system.
DTM - I'll only speak for New York City here, and thus my perspective is limited, but it isn't nearly as simple as you make it out to be. Many charter schools have waiting lists long enough that they require a lottery system (one which is blind to past student achievement) for admission, because there simply aren't enough seats to fill the demand. This is much more an effect of the strong academic gains these schools make with students who would otherwise not have the opportunity, than it is one of parents wanting their students to belong to the same community of kids.
Sailer's writings are not only a joke, but rooted heavily in the same racist discourse that was peddled by the author's of "The Bell Curve." We mock what we do not understand. Charges of racism are the last refuge of scoundrels.
"DTM is right: charter schools can be great, and they can be awful. And while they can be held accountable for results in theory, in practice, it has rarely worked out that way. It's been very difficult to close even atrociously performing charter schools." OK, now try that paragraph again, but substitute "traditional public schools" for "charter schools."
In my town, the charter high school almost immediately became the de facto continuation school, last chance for parents whom couldn't get their kids to perform at the other public or private schools on island. The grads are for the most part not college bound, but they do have a diploma. In defense of the student body, non-military transplants to Hawaii tend towards the fruit loop demographic, so their kids start off with a handicap.
DougJ, We understand Sailor quite well thank you. And mockery is all his brand of racism dressed up as pseudo science is worthy of.
"Seriously, though, charter schools are great." ? How many of your classmates at Harvard were educated at charter schools, Matt? There are a ton of problems with education in this country, specifically inequities in educational opportunities--and lack of access to charter schools is waaaaaaaaayyy down on the list.
Oh, and an accountable charter school is an oxymoron.
Vouchers are the ethanol of education. Let's get these things straight.
And mockery is all his brand of racism dressed up as pseudo science is worthy of. And you call yourselves tolerant and open-minded. For shame.
it's also National Composting week, by the way.
DougJ, We understand Sailor quite well thank you. And mockery is all his brand of racism dressed up as pseudo science is worthy of.
DougJ, We don't give David Irving the time of day either. Being Open Minded doesn't mean you waste yoru time debunking crank scholarship.
DougJ, We don't give David Irving the time of day either. Being Open Minded doesn't mean you waste yoru time debunking crank scholarship.
Neil, check this out: http://www.educationsector.org/research/research_show.htm?doc_id=521913 Basic gist is that on the whole charter schools are performing about on par with other schools serving similar students, but results vary tremendously from state to state, depending on the state policy context and other factors. In California, for example, charters are outperforming comparable district-operated schools, while the results in North Carolina for charters are really negative. Some charter schools are really, really high-performing, and others are terrible--but performance is improving in many places (such as D.C.) as authorizers shut crappy schools down (that's where the accountability comes in).
Edward, As an aside, I would caution against generalizing from New York City for the purposes of a discussion like this. If nothing else, scale effects very often make New York City events nonrepresentative of what is going on in smaller cities and towns. But regardless, I was not claiming that the only purpose--or, for that matter, the primary purpose--of charter schools is to be "a mechanism to quickly locate new public schools where parents feel a sense of community." Indeed, I think many school districts are trying to keep that from happening, such as by having a rule that a charter school must provide some sort of unique curriculum or methodology, as opposed to just having a lot of support in a particular community. But I think in practice some parents are indeed motivated just by wanting to get a new school for their community, and sometimes they find a way to get what they want. And it seems to me it could work out that way in the situation Rob Mac described, although of course that is a very tentative suggestion on my part, since I know nothing about that particular situation other than what Rob Mac posted.
Charter school suck money from the public schools in my town. They benefit the few at the expense of the many.
I think I have a worthwhile perspective on this issue as I have worked as an educator in both Chicago Public Schools (one of the largest, most disfunctional districts with a very strong teacher's union) and now work in an inner city charter school in Kansas City. Though I feel called to be an urban educator, there were many things about CPS that I simply could not be a part of. It is really, really bad. Desks bolted to floors, no toilet paper or doors on the stalls bad. There is a lot that I certainly appreciate about my position in a charter school: the resources, the small environment, the self selected parents who cared enough to fill out an application, a Superintendent who knows me personally... But many of the problems that frustrated me in the monolithic district are still present: incompetent people that have job protection for some reason or other, barriers to getting students with special needs the services they need, lack of value and appreciation for my input or concerns, lack of common sense, trying every hair-brained, "research based," "best practice" under the sun at the same time without following through with any of them... Ultimately though, I can't stay. The school year and day are so much longer, the expectations and pressure are so much higher, and the pay is lower. If I don't make AYP, my job is jeopardy. If we don't make AYP, our charter is in jeopardy. I just purchased a home. I'm about to start a family. The responsible thing to do is find a job that offers me stability. This uncertainty will keep charter schools from reaching their potential as an agent of reform. Without stability, they will never attain the teacher quality or continuity they need to be truly successful.
"charter schools are great" Not based on their results, I think. Posted by David in NY | May 6, 2008 3:34 PMPoint 1, correct. In DC, there is no correlation between Charter Schools and results however they are measured, either in academic achievement, test scores or graduation rates. If you look at the data from the reports in DC, 27 out of 31 schools did not make Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind. http://www.dcpubliccharter.com/publications/docs/SPR2006Book.pdf
Franny, Charter schools ARE public schools. But it is true they can cause distortions in funding, although that is just another implementation issue. Of course the REAL funding issue in this country is the heavy reliance on local taxes to fund public schools, something that makes very little sense given our modern society and economy. But I digress.
DougJ, You said "Charges of racism are the last refuge of scoundrels." Actually, the quote is "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel". Now can we mock you for being stupid and a racist? Sailer is blatantly racist. This has been demonstrated in more than one post. Check the archives. No need to whine and cry like a little girl about it. If you can't take the name calling, maybe the internet is not for you.
By the way, I once tried to engage Sailer in a meaningful conversation here. He proved to me, as he has proved to many others, that he isn't interested in meaningful conversations. Rather, he just wants a soapbox, and he also appears to be something of a troll (meaning he appears to actually get a thrill from causing the negative reactions). So that once was enough for me. In short, I am all for being open-minded, but only if the other person is willing to be open-minded as well.
"Charter school suck money from the public schools in my town. They benefit the few at the expense of the many." Oops. Charter schools *are* public schools! The money comes from the state. The traditional schools don't have any greater right to it than the charter schools do. Charter schools in my state (California) can't chose which kids to accept - they take whoever applies, and they have to run a lottery if there are more applicants than slots. If they have long waiting lists, as my kid's school does, that says they're doing something right and maybe the traditional schools could learn a few good ideas from them. Our school district could have decided to claim the charter school as one of many good options available to the local students. Instead they decided to take a jealous and divisive approach - among other things, they made the charter school sign an agreement that they would never publicly show how their test scores compare with those of the traditional schools in the district.
Lots of FUD on this thread. First of all it is useless to lump all charter schools together. Each state has its own rules about how charters can be obtained, who can sponsor them and what the guidelines are for their operation, reporting and review. I'll speak about California charters which I have a good understanding of (a founding parent of CA charter school #1). First of all, charters are not all the same within a state. That's the idea. When a group applies for a charter they state what they are trying to achieve and why, and they have to get an approved sponsor to go along. Charter schools range from the one I was involved with (emphasizing constructivism, use of technology, parent participation contracts, integration of after school care with in school activities, and a personalized learning plan for each child) to back-to-basics schools. So making blanket statements about charter schools as to the details of the lesson they teach about desirable changes in schools is brainless. It does make sense to comment on the effect they may have on parental choice, parental satisfaction, and change in the surrounding public schools. Second, California requires imposing basic academic progress on charter schools to keep operating, and has requirements for fiscal oversight on an annual basis. Charters in CA are time limited -- you get a charter for 5 years and your charter submission has to include metrics against which you will be measured when you reapply. So Client #11 is quite wrong when he says that charters are not accountable for their performance. As to charter school graduates attending high achieving universities, well, my two children ended up in an Ivy and a prestigious UC campus (and they weren't the only ones in our charter to do so.) Of course as I stated above, different charter schools serve different populations of students and have different goals, including rescuing at risk kids on the verge of being kicked out of other public schools. Not surprising if there is a wide diversity of outcomes. Admission is by lottery at our school as well, due to oversubscription.
The argument about charter schools vs regular public schools vs private schools depends on the particulars of each school. For instance, the Bronx School of Science is, beyond any doubt, the best secondary school in the world, having graduated 6 Nobel Prize winners in Physics. Name another secondary school anywhere in the world with a pedigree like that. And it's a public school.
Edward, KIPP schools have indeed posted impressive results, and one reason I am in favor of vouchers is because it could lead to more KIPP schools being opened. That said, all students aren't above average, and to borrow Sailer's metaphor, the best schools can't turn lead into gold. KIPP schools would be a great opportunity and would increase the achievements of the talented tenth in many inner-city schools, but they aren't going to make every student college material. Which is OK: there are good jobs available for non-college grads, and intelligent economic policies could create more of these. The smart thing to do would be to have separate academic and vocational educational tracks as many European countries do. Part of the reason this is frowned upon in America is because education is seen as almost an economic panacea by many of the elites and also because of the reason that Sailer mentioned in his column, that a disproportionate percentage of non-Asian minorities would end up in the vocational track. Far better to keep the current status quo, with 50% of NAMs dropout of high school, than to consider a rational approach. Hence, the Alchemy versus Chemistry metaphor.
I love the idea that schools are expected to be profit producing. Profitable, inexpensive, and well-educated students. All by sprinkling the pixie dust of Magic Capitalism over them. Go, baby, go!
What bugs me is the "competition" point that Conservatives always bring out in the charter school debate. Trouble is, there's no reason to compete because schools are a public service ... we should be giving failing schools money, not draining the system to fund a totally different system.
Just a little dose of reality here: Charter schools are rarely able to help students with special needs, leaving them in regular public schools and increasing the density of special education students (who are more expensve to educate) in the traditional school system. School choice in general, in whatever form (charters, vouchers) leaves out special needs kids.
"Trouble is, there's no reason to compete because schools are a public service ..." If you find the word "competition" scary think of it as offering different choices for different students. That's already what we have for high school graduates: you can go to Princeton (if you get in), or you can go to Apex Tech, or you can go to XYZ Community College, etc. "we should be giving failing schools money, not draining the system to fund a totally different system." Money isn't the problem: the worst-performing schools in America (e.g., some of the public schools in D.C.) often spend more per student than better-performing schools elsewhere. And if a voucher is set at an amount slightly less than the current per-student funding of the local public school, every student that leaves for a private school will raise the per-student funding at the public school he leaves behind. "School choice in general, in whatever form (charters, vouchers) leaves out special needs kids." If every parent in a school district got a voucher for, say, 90% of the current per-student funding at the local public schools, entrepreneurial special needs teachers could create a small school just for special needs kids.
"Fred: If every parent in a school district got a voucher for, say, 90% of the current per-student funding at the local public schools, entrepreneurial special needs teachers could create a small school just for special needs kids."
Kipp schools are dog and pony shows where teachers and students are required to committ to work days that far exceed what people in America think of as a normal or fair work day.
"There's a body of law around this that says students should be educated in the "least restrictive environment" and is based on the principle that seperate is not equal in education. So what you are proposing not only would be unlikely because the teachers wouldn't want to do it (they tend not to believe in warehousing special needs kids), it would be illegal." How would a school for special needs students be illegal if attendance there were completely by choice? "Warehousing" is also a spurious characterization in this context. Remember again that parents would have to choose to send their children to this school; why would they do so if they thought their kids were just being "warehoused"? They would only do so if they were convinced that their kids would have a better opportunity to learn at the new school. "Kipp schools are dog and pony shows where teachers and students are required to committ to work days that far exceed what people in America think of as a normal or fair work day." KIPP schools work. That's not dog and pony, that's results. "The results of any model like this is meaningless if it depends on unsustainable work demands on students and teachers." Since KIPP teachers and students have been willing to put in this level of work, it is, by definition, not "unsustainable" for them. But relax: no one will expect or demand that every failing public school teacher and student do this. As I pointed out above, KIPP would probably only help the talented 10th in these schools, and in any case, the model requires that the students and their parents choose it voluntarily. "When your favorite solutions demand effort that you yourself would never allow for those nearest or dearest to you (teacher or student) then it's not a viable or honest solution: it's bull." What's bull is assuming that just because you aren't wiling to bust your ass at your job, others shouldn't be allowed to do so; that enforcement of mediocrity may be common in unions, but it can be pernicious.
Re: How many of your classmates at Harvard were educated at charter schools, Matt? For what it's worth the charter school where I worked sent some of its graduates to very good schools including Brown, Duke, and Boston College.
Fred- don't be a bully, fred. I am a 4th grade teacher in one of the most disadvantaged urban districts in the country. I love my job. I love working with students. I go home hapy and exhausted everyday. I have great classes. For you to suggest that the issue is teachers and work hours or kids and work hours is stupid and short sighted.
Saying that some of these young teachers who go work at kipps really want to work insane hours at lower pay with less protection is very sloppy and convenient thinking. There is generally a shortage of teaching jobs for regular classroom elementary teachers in many parts of America. these are the jobs that entry level teachers can get and they pretend to drink the kool-aid to be a teacher anywhere and to get paid. it is wishful thinking on your part that 14 hour days produce thoughtful teachers, thoughtful students or thoughtful (reflective) thinking. its also silly to think that rapping the times tables is some miracle cure but it sure is seductive on the promotional videos.
Michael C., you sound like a wimp. It's perfectly understandable that you wouldn't want to work as hard as KIPP teacher; as I said above, no one is asking you too -- KIPP isn't a solution for every kid. You shouldn't feel so threatened by it. I realize that you probably went into elementary ed because you couldn't handle the pressure of being a high school teacher, let alone of working in the private sector. That's OK -- America can use more male elementary school teachers. But that's no reason for you to denigrate the efforts of teachers who work harder and produce better results.
I have observed charter schools in another state that can't serve special needs kids, however our California charter school had a higher per centage of kids with IEPs than other schools in our district. This was apparently because our focus on a personalized learning plan for all students made sense to parents with special needs kids. Again, it is dangerous to generalize about charter schools.
Fred, try to make your argument without being a prick.
Fred- I work in elementary ed because I have the heart and brains for it. I have the character and ethics for it. I am worth trusting children with. Your total ass backwards assumption that I think charter schools and to be more specific the Kipps model are really bad models because I am threatened or that I don't want to work harder shows how piss poor your thinking skills are. Your idiotic assumption that someone teaches at the elementary level because they don't want to work hard or can't handle high school similarly ignores the fact that high school teachers have a shorter day, teach fewer subjects and spend fewer actual time in a classroom per day than an elementary teacher. As intense as the relationships are at the high school level, remember that I have 20 -27 kids for the whole day all year: I spend more time with these two dozen kids this year than any other single adult in thier lives.
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Heads in the Sand
Wow. Do you know anything about charter schools?
They are the ethanol of the education world.
Talking to chester finn or reading one of his heavy handed studies is not the same as informing yourself on an issue.
This is a remarkably glib and dumb post.
Posted by Michael C. | May 6, 2008 3:31 PM