August 17, 2004
Learndeding
The New York Times covers a rather buried section of a Department of Education report that shows charter schools actually lag behind public schools in terms of test scores, in this case for poor inner-city students.
The interesting thing is the uniformity of it. In terms of race (with the exception of Hispanics for reading), charter schools are reliably 3-4 percent below public schools every time. In terms of income, 6-9 percent. It's only in location that there's any wide variance, but even then, with the exception of rural kids in math, it's still consistently lower than in public schools.
The most problematic portion of the charter school movement isn't the lower test scores, though. It's this bit:
Charter schools may be taking in lower-performing students and helping improve them. They may be taking in great students and failing at educating them. It's a part of a nebulously defined movement, of which charter schools are the first part, to move education from public hands to private ones. Charter schools introduce the idea of alternative, public-funded-but-not-quite-public schools, which become one of the major gateways to privatizing education (a misnomer, to be sure - privatization advocates tend to actually support partial or whole public financing of private enterprise).
But one of the major problems with privatizing education is that it becomes a for-profit business. And when a for-profit business starts losing money, it either reshapes its business practices, or it closes. Edison Schools, formerly the Great White Hope of voucher and privatization advocates, keeps running into severe financial problems, and keeps running pretty shitty schools with pretty questionable academic standards. Edison isn't necessarily the model for all future charter/privatized schools (at least I hope to God not), but you run into many of the same problems with the voucher standard - schools with questionably designed curricula that, because education is a low-profit venture even with investments, don't attract a wide range of credible alternatives; schools that exist as surrogates of public sector money without even the same accountability or standards that public schools have to face.
I'm a bit wary of the charter school claims - they simply aren't widespread enough to be culling all the underperforming students from public schools, and at least in Dayton, the kids they're drawing aren't necessarily lower-performing students, but instead kids from across the spectrum of performance. They're higher-performing kids whose parents wanted them in smaller, more personalized classrooms, kids whose performance is standard but whose parents wanted an environment that might push them more, and lower-performing kids whose parents felt they were getting overlooked in public schools. (Disclaimer: Dayton has godawful public schools, which might skew the student base, but I'm not sure.)
Do charter schools work? From this data, they aren't really succeeding above public schools in any measurable way, which is kind of the point - that they'll do better than public schools, not just in the same rough realm, if a little bit worse. I'm hoping that this takes the magic off the movement and that people get serious about analyzing all schools rather than simply assuming any alternative to public education is a good one.
Posted by Jesse Taylor at August 17, 2004 10:48 AM | TrackBackInteresting.
But charter schools are often public schools. The Edison issue is separate.
Posted by: praktike at August 17, 2004 11:11 AMI know. I'll change it to show that I'm introducing a slightly different issue.
Posted by: jesse at August 17, 2004 11:14 AMMuch of this dribbles back to the conservative fantasy that everything should be run like a business. The charter schools were supposed to earn their bonus mileage by dramatically outperforming their run-of-the-mill counterparts. Instead, they've turned into more-expensive operations that don't do a demonstrably better job.
Somewhere along the line we lost sight of the objective. Therefore it must be time to redouble our efforts.
Posted by: Derelict at August 17, 2004 11:18 AMHence the bad business of careless reaction. "Public schools suck (pick your reason why), so we have to do something. What is that something? We don't know, but dammit, we're going to do it anyway."
Educating young people is a hell of a tricky business; much more difficult than most strident opponents of public-school education will admit. But as you point out, Jesse, maybe now is the time for the sheen to wear off of these alt-education movements and the country take a hard look at improving public education. Instead of just running from it.
Posted by: southerner at August 17, 2004 11:28 AMThe public school teacher speaks:
The problem with running a school like a business is that educating children usually does not show dividends for almost 15 years, when the students begin to enter society. These dividends, by the way, are also somewhat intangible and hard to track, since they take the form of things like a more intelligent and capable work force, less jails needing to be built, etc.
Unfortunately, since we are such a results-driven society, new school reform ideas are usually only kept in place for a few years before they're gleefully chucked over the side in favor of the newest set of ideas. A few years later, they're thrown out for the next set.
Fun to be a teacher nowadays, kids.
Posted by: Uncle Mike at August 17, 2004 11:35 AMThis study, with its incredibly broad set of data, really doesn't tell us much. Neither does your limited, anecdotal experience in Dayton about the types of students at charter schools. What we need to know is what improvement, if any, did the charter school kids experience. I don't have a horse in this race, but I don't think you can use this study to analyze the success or failure of charter schools.
Posted by: GB at August 17, 2004 12:02 PMI hate to say it, but I have to hope that Edison Schools do well. Why? Because I teach in Florida, and guess what state government is the largest investor in Edison? My pension fund is now tied up in 'private' schools. Thanks, Jeb.
Posted by: Steve M at August 17, 2004 02:40 PMmaybe now is the time for the sheen to wear off of these alt-education movements and the country take a hard look at improving public education. Instead of just running from it.
See, this is why/where testing could have been used much more effectively. Why didn't we test for 3-5 years with no penalties on the schools for failing scores (and perhaps even anonymity) and see what is wrong and why it's not working, so that we could actually fix it? If you do something right the first time, it's much more effective than doing it wrong 20 times quickly.
The problem with public schools is not simply money, and it's not simply mismanagement or unaccountability. The problems are different in different places.
The problem with government is that nobody seems to be trained to "problem solve" anymore, and the problem with the public is that they want things done now rather than things done right.
Ally
Posted by: Ally at August 17, 2004 03:44 PMSorry to hear that Steve M is so financially dependent on Edison Schools. I can't imagine a worse investment. Schools spend about 95% of their money on buildings, furniture and teachers. None of those items get appreciably cheaper with privatization. Texas has a state-wide book purchasing system which saves some bucks, but doing that does not require that the schools themselves be privatized.
When Edison found it was spending too much on teachers, they recommended farming out some of the administrative paperwork to the students because they were so desperate to save a buck or two.
Sorry, but the future of privatization is a very dark and gloomy one. We ought to put ALL of our energies into improving schools within the context of keeping them public.