Gotta Close the Bad Charter Schools
Dana Goldstein’s final column for The American Prospect looks at some examples of murky evidence in the education policy realm. The point is well-taken, but I think in one specific example she uses—charter schools—the policy solution is pretty clear:
In the past six months, two high-profile studies of charter schools, both out of Stanford University, have attracted significant media attention. The first, a study of charter schools in 16 states conducted by CREDO, an education research group affiliated with the university, found that in math, only 17 percent of charters increase achievement over traditional public schools. The report’s authors called the results “sobering.”
The second, a close look at 75 New York City charter schools by education economist Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford professor and Hoover Institute fellow, couldn’t have drawn a more disparate conclusion. Hoxby’s study, comparing students who win charter school lotteries to those who lose them, found that New York charter students do 31 points better in math and 23 points better in English than their lottery-losing peers, who remain in neighborhood public schools.
Whatever you think of the methodological dispute here (Goldstein explains it well and I guess I side with Hoxby) the crux of the matter is that there’s substantial variation in the performance of different charters. What you need to do is identify schools that consistently perform poorly and shut them down. Then you create space for more effective models to replicate themselves and also for new ideas to be tried out. The promise of charter schools is that by allowing more experimentation we’ll find some good models. But it’s not as if public education in the United States currently achieves some theoretical maximum of badness—with experimentation we’re also discovering bad models. You’ve got to shut those models down, while at the same time curbing state legislators’ tendency to impose arbitrary numerical caps on the total quantity of charter schools. We should let a thousand flowers bloom and then kill 20-30 percent of them if they turn out to look ugly.
51 Responses to “Gotta Close the Bad Charter Schools”
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October 14th, 2009 at 8:47 am
Very nice sentence, that last one.
October 14th, 2009 at 8:50 am
I think the sobering aspect of the article isn’t so much that there are bad charter schools (shockhorrorgasp) but that there’s so many of them. If only 17% achieve increase over traditional public school, then what percentage perform worse? If there were 20-30% underperforming, as you indicate, then it might not be a loss. But suppose we’re talking about 17% over-achieving, 28% matching, and then 55% underachieving? Or what about 17% over-achieving, 17% matching, and 66% underachieving?
From a public policy perspective, there’s a cost to that 55-66% failure rate (if that’s what the failure rate is). If experimenting with charter schools turns out to have a very low rate of return compared with simply pouring that money into retooling the public schools, then it may not be as hot of an option as it seemed before.
Someone will have to crunch those numbers though, before they leap to that conclusion. I’m just saying it’s a possibility that might be suggested by the first number.
October 14th, 2009 at 9:00 am
I think Matt’s heart is totally in the right place here, but the odor of technocratic hubris in this whole discourse is kind of eye-wateringly powerful. Engineers of human souls we be–and are chirren iz ginnee pigz!
October 14th, 2009 at 9:01 am
Here’s an idea. Let’s scrap the charter school model altogether. They are disruptive and questionably effective. Instead, we should invest fresh talent and ideas into existing schools and work with the entire community to raise standards and expectations. The flowers are already in the ground; some of them just need better gardeners.
October 14th, 2009 at 9:02 am
You can’t really believe that it’s as easy as that to open and shut schools. Continuity matters to small kids, and parents will fight to keep the school open their child feels comfortable in. This is reason enough to be skeptical of grand policy pronunciamenti like yours, but there are others, too, like recruitment issues, lease arrangements and so on. Districts can be on the hook financially in a legal sense for schools they’d like to see shut down. Experiment is a great idea, but I think it’s likely more effective to conduct these grand experiments as schools within schools, or similar arrangements.
October 14th, 2009 at 9:04 am
You’re ignoring the considerable social cost of closing (and opening) schools.
October 14th, 2009 at 9:07 am
I very much agree with Matt’s point in this post: implicit in the basic case for charter schools is the notion that failed charters need to be rigorously closed.
Still, I also think the evidence available from charter schools demonstrates that traditional public schools are often doing a pretty good job given the resources they have and the students they are teaching, such that it is often pretty tough to beat their outcomes using the same level of resources with the same students.
But to bring this full circle, there are also specific instances of traditional public schools failing to perform well (which, as an aside, helps explain Hoxby’s result). And so one of the virtues of charters it that they can speed up the process of substitution for failing traditional public schools, even if the substituted charter school is not likely to be much better than a more typical public school. And perhaps just as importantly as the increased speed of this process, charters can make it easier for this substitution process to occur without requiring families to move.
October 14th, 2009 at 9:08 am
Wow, what a surprise! Matt sides with a right wing think tank on education!
October 14th, 2009 at 9:10 am
How much variation in new charter schools involves the physical plant of the school itself? It should require as much effort to swap out one charter school model for another model in the same brick-and-mortar school as it does to fire the coaching and GM of your favorite sports team in the off season. If it doesn’t then charter schools are simply duplicating the same entrenched bureaucracy they are designed to fight.
October 14th, 2009 at 9:12 am
Charter schools have failed. Those who supported Charter Schools made all sorts of promises, basically slandered the public school system, and then went on to do an even more worse job.
Lets do what will actually work and equally fund every school district instead of privileging wealthier neighborhoods with a stronger tax base and then looking for excuses not to address the obvious problem.
October 14th, 2009 at 9:16 am
Going back to a theme I touched on last week this morning Yglesias has a post up regarding the efficacy of Charter Schools. It’s almost sweet in its earnesty,
Except that the data doesn’t show that 70-80% of Charter Schools flourish – quite the opposite. As for experimentation to find good models that’s just the problem – with very few exceptions the successes in one school are not repeatable in other schools. Much less other school districts or other states. Yglesias talks as though we were building a truely scientific experiment, one in which the results are verifiable and repeatable. We’re not.
Instead we are trying to replicate successes without the ability to control or even the willingness to acknowledge the key variable – socio-economic status. Poverty.
Without trying to address poverty in a real and substantive way (and yes, education is one tool to address poverty in the long term) we’re just going to continue spinning our wheels trying to “overhaul” our education system when what needs fixing is our economic system.
October 14th, 2009 at 9:19 am
With respect to the costs of closing schools:
I think it should be noted that new charter schools are usually specifically set up in a way to moderate the public costs of their closing. Typically the school is granted a charter for a limited number of years, usually around 3-5, and may only gradually grow to full planned size during those initial years. Charters are also typically structured to place the financial risk associated with closure on the third parties operating the school, and not the chartering district. All this is done with the express purpose of creating an evaluation period in which the chartering district can determine whether or not the school is fulfilling its mission according to the perfomance measurements usually specified in the charter.
Now I can see the case for making it harder to close charter schools once they have passed this initial probationary period. But this initial evaluation period is crucial to the claimed purposes of charter schools, and prospective parents should be well-informed that they are taking on the risk of closure when choosing to send their children to a new charter school.
October 14th, 2009 at 9:28 am
By the way, I agree that what public education really needs in this country is a great leveling of the funds available for instruction to each child, regardless of where that child resides (ideally the funding would be tied to need, but I would be happy to start with equality given the current circumstances). And not only would that be better for many children, it would be good for their parents as well to have their decisions about residential location decoupled from school funding levels, freeing parent to optimize residential location on other dimensions (like shorter commute times, more desirable neighborhood structures and amenities, and so on).
So if it was indeed a matter of choosing either charters or this great leveling, I’d easily take the great leveling. But that is not really the current choice being presented to us, and in fact I think there is a good case to be made that robust charter laws will help pave the way for more leveling, as opposed to serving as a substitute for more leveling.
October 14th, 2009 at 9:48 am
ISTM that there’s a certain amount of essentialism in this argument: some charter schools are getting better results, so it must be because of something about the schools. This is not well supported by evidence. I know it’s popular to blame the teachers or the administrators because the Department of Education can’t do anything about the students’ home lives or communities, but that doesn’t make it smart or reality-based. Just because you can’t do anything about the engine, that doesn’t mean that changing the tires is going to help.
Also, don’t end what you can mend. Underperforming charter schools should be encouraged or perhaps even forced to adopt the methods of their more successful peers (assuming measures of successfulness are valid in the first place and the methodological differences are actually identified as causal), but there’s no reason to incur the high financial and social costs of closing one school to open another one when you can just place it under new management or get the current management to adopt new methods. There isn’t some kind of miasma of stupidity in the building itself.
October 14th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Why are we measuring success with test scores? What’s the point of “experimenting” with public education if you always use the same questionable yardsticks to measure their success?
October 14th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Re Matthew’s comment “We should let a thousand flowers bloom and then kill 20-30 percent of them if they turn out to look ugly. ”
————–
Er..while I can see the value of shooting the 30 percent lowest performing teachers, won’t the teachers unions object?
October 14th, 2009 at 10:09 am
Or was Matthew referring to shooting the 30 percent lowest performing STUDENTS? Uh..”pour encourager les autres”, as the French Foreign Legion would say.
That would certainly lift the SAT curve. And our Chinese creditors like the idea.
October 14th, 2009 at 10:09 am
It will be a cold day in hell before any study authored by Caroline Hoxby comes up with a negative result for the impacts of school choice, charters, etc.
October 14th, 2009 at 10:12 am
but there’s no reason to incur the high financial and social costs of closing one school to open another one when you can just place it under new management or get the current management to adopt new methods. There isn’t some kind of miasma of stupidity in the building itself.
I think there is a little ongoing confusion here about what it means to “shut down” or “kill” a charter school.
Fundamentally, a charter school isn’t a building, it is a contract between the authorizing district and a particular group of third parties. That contract will specify how funding will flow to the school, and in return these third parties will agree to operate the school in a certain way. Finally, the authorizing district will require the school to meet certain performance objectives as a condition of renewal of the charter after a specified period.
So shutting down a charter school typically just means the authorizing district refusing to renew this contract because the school has failed to meet its performance objectives as specified in its charter. That doesn’t preclude some new group of third parties using the same physical location to start up a new charter school. Indeed, it doesn’t preclude the same group of third parties from trying again in the same location under a new charter.
That said, to make those scenarios work there has to be such a new third party available to take over the location, or you have to be able to work out a new charter with the old third parties that reasonably can be expected to do better. If you can’t, you are then left with the choice of discontinuing education at that location or renewing a charter despite the school failing to meet its specified performance objectives. And I think Matt is right to suggest that we should be rigorous about choosing not to renew charters in such situations–that isn’t a great result, but it is better than just kicking the can down the road.
October 14th, 2009 at 10:29 am
Just FYI, Hoxby is a school-choice hack who left Harvard under less-than-ideal circumstances when it turned out that the significant results of one of her IV regressions (of outcomes on school district size) were entirely sensitive to her definition of what was a “river.”
October 14th, 2009 at 10:30 am
Having worked at a K-12 charter school (I just got laid-off last week due to low enrollment), I can see the positives as well as the negatives. My biggest problem was the top-down structure built in to my specific school’s model. And this was in large part due to the lack of union support to back up teacher-directed decision making.
Of course, there are obviously problems with the union model. But in my case I just saw again and again a situation where an inept administration made bad decisions while teachers were in no position to disagree. It is widely known that charter schools have a tradition of being non-union, so this must be part of the discussion.
I often feel like this is the elephant in the room, especially among the more market oriented neo-liberals who tend to emphasize the negatives of unions in education without acknowledging the tradition of teacher advocacy that, as a teacher, I feel is so important – especially considering the increasing pressure we are all under to basically save the entire country’s social and economic problems.
October 14th, 2009 at 10:38 am
The plural of anecdote may not be data, but only one explanation seems to fit both the data and the word of mouth: The only clear, unambiguous, universal benefit to sending your child outside the public school system is selection bias. The parents who care the least about education correlate strongly with the students who care the least about education and are the most disruptive and potentially violent.
I have never seen any hard evidence to indicate that inner-city private schools, charter schools, or public magnet schools have a clear, nationwide advantage over any of the other models if you adjust for demographics. It doesn’t particularly matter whether your school district chooses to reform their existing schools or allow new ones to be chartered — in most cases, it’s probably a good idea to do both. What matters is that students have options, and that schools are closed whenever institutional rot sets in.
October 14th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Eli,
I agree it is a complicated situation when it comes to unions. The reality is that teacher’s unions can do a lot of good (after all, it is spending on instruction that actually correlates best with outcomes), but like any large institutions they can also be a source of inertia and friction when there is manifest need for reform. So I have no easy answer for how to balance these factors when considering things like charter schools, although I would again just suggest the evidence is that traditional public schools are often doing a pretty good job given their resource levels and students.
LaFollette Progressive,
I basically agree. To me, by far the most compelling case for charters is that they lower barriers to reform and speed up the pace of reform in specific cases, not that they are somehow obviously better as a class than traditional public schools.
October 14th, 2009 at 10:49 am
This is a fascinating and personal debate to me in that after years of opposing school vouchers and various choice programs, my wife (a teacher who now stays home with our kids), and I entered a lottery for a very strong-performing charter school that has several campuses across TX, all of which perform well on a variety of measures. One thing that drew us to the school was that there is no statistically significant variation among different ethnicities (it is quite diverse) or socioeconomic groups (I forget the percentage of school lunch qualifiers, but it is large).
Now this is one experience, and our area has seen its share of charlatan charter schools. I don’t know what the right answer is. But I do know that our experience to date has been excellent; our son is at a more diverse school than our neighborhood school, with higher test scores, and, at upper grades (it is a k-12 charter school), better achievement in academic contests, SAT/ACT scores, and college admissions than the schools we feed into.
The one variable I can point to is that suggested by LaFollette — selection bias. Though the school has socioeconomic diversity, all of the parents are expected to be involved. Parents are expected to contribute time (not money) to their child’s education and must be proactive to enter the school lottery.
October 14th, 2009 at 11:03 am
What Christopher said @ #15.
October 14th, 2009 at 11:11 am
13
… it would be good for their parents as well to have their decisions about residential location decoupled from school funding levels, …
Parents don’t care about school funding levels, they care about who the other kids are going to be. So they will still try to live in rich districts.
October 14th, 2009 at 11:14 am
23
… (after all, it is spending on instruction that actually correlates best with outcomes), …
This is wrong, what correlates best with outcomes is the quality of the entering students. Good students at a poorly funded school will do better than bad students at a well funded school.
October 14th, 2009 at 11:19 am
The Hoxby study compares lottery-winners to lottery-losers in NYC charters schools. That’s arguably an advance in granularity from comparing the charter schools to the district as a whole. But it fails to account for the improved student body in the charter school–everyone who is there wants to be there. The greater concentration of motivated students, and the relative absence of disaffected and disruptive students, could quite plausibly explain all of the difference in achievement, even though there were no actual pedagogical or administrative difference in the two sets of students.
Public schools have to take everybody. It’s not reasonable to expect them to compete on an equal footing with schools that have no such requirement (though again, the Hoxby study is a step in the right direction, just not good enough for a verdict yet).
October 14th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
The promise of charter schools is that by allowing more experimentation we’ll find some good models.
The promise of charter schools was to close public schools, force all children into private for-profit schools, and break the teacher’s union.(most charter schools are non-union).
It’s time for a real revival of excellent education in America. We need to make sure none of our young minds are going to waste. This means all schools should be better funded and better run. To carve out Charters and give them special funding at the expense of the rest of the school system is just plain stupid.
October 14th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
@28: If everyone (including the learning-disabled students) were mandatorily entered in the lottery, you might be able to control for that variable too.
But then the charter school would actually have the student body of a public school, which would doom it to the outcomes of a public school and (according to Matt) it should therefore be closed.
Cherry-picking is still the only proven route to being “better” at the school level. This is pretty strong evidence that nothing interesting actually happens at the school level and as James B. Shearer notes, the results you get out of a school are mostly a function of what students go in.
The proper policy response to parents trying to self-segregate by class and/or race (to keep their kids away from bad influences like their janitors’ kids) is a rather thorny question. I went to a white flight high school myself, and looking at the difference between city and county schools, I think we probably abandoned busing too soon. If better schools and worse schools exist for ineffable reasons handed down from Mt. Sinai, you can’t really blame parents for trying to get their kids into the former, but if school quality is basically dependent on student body demographics, then allowing the parents to self-segregate is what makes the bad schools bad.
But this is the kind of problem that can only be solved at the collective level — I don’t have any children myself, but even if I did, putting my children where my mouth is (so to speak) wouldn’t help the overall quality difference between the schools unless lots of people did it. Money transfers alone won’t solve the problem if the problem is partly (or mostly) one of peer groups and the culture of the school. If rich students walk into the school with social capital that affects the success of not just them, but other students who interact with them, then the only way to redistribute the social capital is to redistribute the students themselves.
October 14th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Has anyone attempted to test the relationship between chartering requirements and charter school performance? Anecdotally, I have heard that New York has stricter controls on charters than most states and a greater willingness to revoke charters when schools underperform. My understanding is that controls in DC are more relaxed perhaps explaining its mediocre performance. I can’t speak to any of the other 15 states in CREDO study.
October 14th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Sorry if this was said in the commentaries, but studies of charter schools that rely on lotteries necessarily focus on heavily over-subscribed schools (ones with large enough waiting lists that you can do a study like this). Presumably the over-subscribed schools are better, at least in the eyes of the parents.
Evidence from studies like Hoxby’s should be used to decide whether to expand existing popular charter schools, not to pass judgment on less heavily enrolled ones.
October 14th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
The proper policy response to parents trying to self-segregate by class and/or race (to keep their kids away from bad influences like their janitors’ kids) is a rather thorny question. I went to a white flight high school myself, and looking at the difference between city and county schools, I think we probably abandoned busing too soon.
then the only way to redistribute the social capital is to redistribute the students themselves.
I can’t help but notice that you take as a given that we need to equalize the schools. If tht means busing kids four hours away to make certain that things are equal, so be it.
Why? If schools are unequal due to demographics, why not acept that as a fact of life?
Busing does nothing but turn the parents of good children against the public school system, increase white flight, and cause schools to adopt ridiculously strict “zero tloerance” polciies because any use of sensible discretion risks a disparate impact lawsuit.
If we are to be sensible, we can do one of two things: accept the inequality or encourage those with low IQs to get sterilized.
October 14th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
The obvious thing to point out is that we use ‘parental satisfaciot’ as a the metric for ‘how good is the school’ a bad charter school will close itself, no study necessary.
Per all these social science studies on the efficacy of schools, obviously if the social science study metric and the parental satisfaction metric are wildly at odds, someone in the room, either the social scientist or the parent, is an idiot. Are you sure it’s not the social scientist?
October 14th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
It’s fine (not really, but for the sake of argument) if we want to stratify our public school systems, and get the students who can and want to succeed away from the ones who don’t/can’t. But we don’t need charter schools or vouchers to do this. Just expand the system of magnet schools, so that maybe half of the schools in a given district are “good” schools, and retention is not automatic: students have to keep their grades and conduct up, parents have to be involved, otherwise it’s back to the lousy school for you.
The point is that it is entirely possible that the charter school/voucher program is bringing exactly nothing to the table except for the ability to include/exclude. Which, again, could be provided by the public school system itself. We really need to see if this is all that the charter/voucher effect consists of, before we take the wrecking ball to the current system of public education.
October 14th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Surprise: those who are allowed to membership in the club of elite students with messianic teachers and parents do better than those who don’t get selected. The fact that it’s done by lottery is meaningless to the dynamic that the pro-charter people simply do not grasp.
Built into all the enthusiasm for charters is a profoundly illiberal resignation: acceptance of the idea that because they are generally in all-black neighborhoods, and because they are not populated with students whose parents went through the effort to get them into an environment of like-minded people, it is impossible for the neighborhood school, any neighborhood school, to be improved. There is a strong visual and visceral image of the inner-city neighborhood school, including supposedly shiftless and burned-out teachers and administrators, and it is not a pretty one.
Can we do a charter school for every student? By definition, no. Can we do specialty and magnet schools that appeal to some but not all students? Yes. Except for the narrow purpose of serving as an incubator for educational ideas that have, shall we say, peer-reviewed promise — not starry-eyed visions of one dynamic individual — the charter movement is a gigantic distraction and waste of time.
October 14th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
j mct, public schools are not something parents provide for their children, but that the community provides for its future citizens. The majority of taxpayers at a given moment (including businesses and non-homesteading property owners) aren’t parents of school-age children. Making “parental satisfaction” the measure of a school’s success is a recipe for turning our public schools into a system of madrassahs.
If a parent wants his kid to be taught that God made the universe 6000 years ago, that’s fine, just don’t ask me (no kids) to pay for it.
October 14th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
The charter high school I’m most familiar with was founded by the best teachers at my kid’s middle school, who recruited the best students at the middle school. Sure, it was supposed to be a lottery, but when I asked if my kid had been picked in the lottery, the administrator (my kid’s old teacher) put the clipboard down, and said, “He’s in,” implying very clearly that there had never been a doubt that the “lottery” was going to pick my kid’s name.
So, what happens when this “model” of cherrypicking the best teachers and best students succeeds so well it has to double in size to take in the teachers and students from the loser schools? Regression toward the mean?
October 14th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
MY is much too glib (as is his wont lately) about the “methodological dispute” between the two studies. NY charter schools operate under much stricter regulation, as was mentioned in the story linked too.
Unless the authors of the two studies can compare their methods on samples of schools with simiarl characteristics, we do not know how much difference the method of choosing controls will make in the study results.
October 14th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Matt, I think it is a mistake to side with Hoxby on this. Her method is solid as far as it goes (clearly going to a charter school helps if you’re already motivated, though that may be as much because the school is full of motivated students, as because the school is doing something different) — the lottery is a very good instrument. But her criticisms of the CREDO method are erratic and their defense is pretty good. I say this as someone who is skeptical both of the matching method they use, and the results they report (I think they are *too* rosy for charters, actually, since the small percentage that do do better may do so just out of random variation). But at least they are looking across the whole spectrum of charter schools, not just the elite ones. Hoxby may show that the elite ones work (or at least, successfully skim, the way magnet schools do), but a) it is difficult to generalize from that to charter schools overall, and b) her methodological critiques of CREDO are flawed (though the matching method does have deep flaws itself). So far, I see no hard evidence that charter schools have any success other than that which can be ascribed to cherry-picking and random variation.
October 14th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Two points:
There is a finite number of students and resources. Thereby the number of schools you open in an area decreases the amount of support for any one school. This can be bad. So don’t plant a thousand flowers unless you have a hundred thousand students.
Don’t shut down neighborhood schools. That doesn’t make them better, that just smears the problems around. And students who have to travel further to a neighborhood school tend to do worse… Because they’re not near their neighbors, they’re spending more time in cars and busses, etc. Invest in neighborhoods.
In Portland, OR, they shut down one neighborhood school and so they ended up with a deadzone. Those students still didn’t do any better, but now they were ghettoized in three schools that wanted nothing to do with the students. And charter schools only want the good kids – which is great for them, but worse for the rest of us. What good does it do the mediocre student if the better student who they worked with in their projects, drama class, or labs is shuttled off to another school?
October 14th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
[...] opinions on topics of which he has little to no experience or training.* Today, MY offers us an excellent example of ideology in action… The lesson: How to retain one’s ideological belief in the face [...]
October 14th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Built into all the enthusiasm for charters is a profoundly illiberal resignation: acceptance of the idea that because they are generally in all-black neighborhoods, and because they are not populated with students whose parents went through the effort to get them into an environment of like-minded people, it is impossible for the neighborhood school, any neighborhood school, to be improved. There is a strong visual and visceral image of the inner-city neighborhood school, including supposedly shiftless and burned-out teachers and administrators, and it is not a pretty one.
I don’t accept that there is nothing that can be done to improve schools in all-black areas.
I’m just not sure that there is any workable way to improve these schools that won’t involve educators adopting a somewhat paternalistic attitude toward the people in these neighborhoods.
October 14th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
[...] Charter School Double Standard I agree with what MattY has to say here about the need to close charter schools that do not perform well, and that the baby shouldn’t [...]
October 14th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
That’s why, Glaiv, the whole blame-the-schools crowd will be so sadly disappointed; you can’t fix a school unless you fix those who attend.
We need universal health care, free early childhood education, and jobs for the families who now must negotiate life as if it is a contest between haves and have-nots.
We know who wins. It’s who’s winning now, and who will continue to win. The rich, MY.
Charter school are merely an education privatization scheme for folks like Gates and Broad. They are going to make a killing ruining education. Broad already has his superintendent academy, some of whose graduates have already quit, been fired, or indicted.
Public schools need proper funding, and their neighborhoods need to be safe. Poverty is the reason for all the ills, not shitty teachers.
And if you think teachers are the most important aspect of a child’s education (it’s not. It’s parents) then why don’t we pay them better? Because the line that teachers should be paid more is easier to say than actually doing it.
When America begins to value education, teacher salaries will rise. When America decides 40 million of its citizens deserve health care, and the rest of us deserve it cheaper, we’ll get universal health care.
But since none of that will happen, what to do?
I must say, I am about ready to give up.
October 14th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
You’re not going to give up, TFT and you know it.
I’m in one of my more optimistic moods so I’ll just chime in to point towards more social research = better socio-political philosophy = better social policy.
This is a cycle that’s really hardly a couple of centuries old and we already pretty much know what peace-on-earth takes. 10, 20, or 50 years and we’ll know that much more about the brain, about the cycle of poverty, about behavioral economics.
I think the bright side of what’s going on right now is that people actually are seeing the connection between school/family and success in life. Now, if only we could turn that around and get successful people to accept that it goes both ways: they OWE something to the underprivileged…
October 14th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
Thanks, Eli. I like your last paragraph best.
October 14th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
People have a hard time accepting that without charter schools, people who see that the quality of the local schools is poor will leave the city for suburbs. At present, those who feel that the local school system is inadequate will pick up and move to a neighboring district. In cities, this basically decimates the middle class. Charter schools are basically a safety valve for parents who want to give their kids other opportunities while still remaining in the district.
What good does it do the mediocre student if the better student who they worked with in their projects, drama class, or labs is shuttled off to another school?
Well, if the mediocre student and his family have academic ambitions, and the local school system is inadequate, hopefully they’ll find another school. Certainly the “better student” found the current situation inadequate. That’s why he left. I’m sure being regarded as a resource to be “exploited” for the benefit of the “mediocre students” instead of being taught to the limits of his abilities played a role, as well.
October 15th, 2009 at 7:24 am
This is wrong, what correlates best with outcomes is the quality of the entering students.
Any decent measure of outcomes already controls for the “quality” of the students. Although personally I wouldn’t use that word in reference to children–a child who has not been properly prepared for school and who does not receive adequate support during their schooling is not in my mind of lesser “quality”, just at a disadvantage.
Anyway, assuming we are using such a measure of outcomes (one which appropriately controls for the student mix), what I reported above is indeed accurate: funding specifically for instruction remains the best-confirmed factor in improving such outcomes.
October 15th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
So in other words even if some of the charters are crappy say 20-30% then its ok because eventually they will fail and we will close them down. But what about the kids that attend these bad charters in the meantime. Won’t that hurt their education more. The point is to make education better for the kids not worse.
October 15th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
@Erin: Yes, it’s ok to risk having some families make a transition out of a school that they chose and that turned out to be a failure. If transition is painful, that system will make parents work even harder over time to select schools that have a promising future. And if they do find their school closing before they complete the terminal grade, then they will find a spot in another school. That’s how a robust education sector works.
In fact, we should be doing the same thing for traditional public schools. If they are consistently failing then close them and let their staff go. If their staff are good, they will be rehired elsewhere. If not, good riddance.
By the way, school closures are rare, even in states with tough charter authorizers. It’s more the threat of closure and the threat of other intermediate steps that works so well to keep schools accountable. If only we had that kind of accountability throughout the system our education dollars would be better spent.