Charter Schools Are Not the Silver Bullet

[xchrom]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/12930/charter_schools_are_not_the_silver_bullet

Talk K-12 education for more than five minutes, and inevitably, the conversation turns to charter schools – those publicly funded, privately administered institutions that now educate more than 2 million American children. Parents wonder if they are better than the neighborhood public school. Politicians tout them as a silver-bullet solution to the education crisis. Education technology companies promote them for their profit potential. Opponents of organized labor like the Walton family embrace them for their ability to crush teachers unions.

But amid all the buzz, the single most important question is being ignored: Are charter schools living up to their original mission as experimental schools pioneering better education outcomes and reducing segregation? That was the vision of the late American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker when he proposed charters a quarter-century ago – and according to new data, it looks like those objectives are not being realized.

In recent years, major studies suggest that, on the whole, charter schools are producing worse educational achievement results than traditional public schools. For example, a landmark study from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes discovered that while 17 percent of charter schools “provide superior education opportunities for their students,” a whopping “37 percent deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their students would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.” Likewise, the National Center for Education Statistics found that charter school students performed significantly worse on academic assessments than their peers in traditional public schools.

These numbers might be a bit less alarming if charters were at least making sure to “not be school(s) where all the advantaged kids or all the white kids or any other group is segregated,” as Shanker envisioned. According to a new report from the National Education Policy Center, however, charters “tend to be more racially segregated than traditional public schools” – and in lots of places, they seem to be openly hostile to children who are poor, who are from minority communities or who have special education needs.

[longship]

1. But, but, but, but...

I know that charter schools are better because the Repugnant party said so. If they aren't doing well it must be because we haven't yet gotten rid of the Department of Education. And, we have to get rid of all the public schools, then the charter, for profit, schools will be the best. Plus, they'll be even better when we allow them to charge tuition.

[vi5]

2. Charter schools ARE the silver bullet.....

..if what you are trying to kill is public education.

And it's hard to strictly pin this whole deal on the Republicans when far too many Democrats, including the president and his education appointees also seem to think they are the solution to the problem.

[xchrom]

3. +1 -- it's been sold as some sort of conventional wisdom.

w/ a lot of the wreckage foisted on the poor.

close down perceived underperforming schools -- limit access in the community to certain kids -- ship the rest off to schools other than what's in their neighborhood.

never putting all the resources necessary into poor schools to get them where they should be.

there shouldn't be any 'poor' schools in america.

[caraher]

4. Yup

That's the main purpose - take down teachers' unions. I'm utterly mystified by Democrats who embrace these "reform" movements. Sure, we could do a lot of things better in our schools, but the whole process looks more like a headlong rush into privatization rather than an evidence-based move to a more effective model of education.

[vi5]

5. Exactly....

There is zero evidence that charter schools do ANYTHING better, or have any better results over all. Yet they are continually touted. The whole school reform sham is little more than one front in the war on unions, that sadly our wonderful Democrats have largely been all too happy to side with the other side on.

[Igel]

6. First, get clear data.

However, data is in short supply. Esp. clear, unambiguous data.

It's the same with pretty much all ed research. Very little research uses control groups with randomly sorted students. You get lots of studies with short-term effects or which aren't replicatable. Lots of studies that are poorly designed or which use poorly defined terms. Lots of studies with one variable under the microscope but where the researchers change several things--and are so unaware that they mention other things they've changed in passing.

Charter school research is among the worst. Charter School X may be characterized in a certain way, but it's an incomplete characterization. Not wrong. Just not quite right. Or it'll be compared to a public school (or another charter school) that's not properly characterized. The worst is mixing fiction and reality, looking at what one school says it does or using outdated data and looking at the other school's present reality. Another problem is looking at funding. "Charter school gets X results but spends less money" (or "more money", depending upon whether you include bond funds in the public school's ed expenses).

I look at the research, listen to people talk, and they may as well not even quote the research. They pick and choose research that's already picked and chosen their terms and data to support the conclusions they want to reach.

A lot of times you find averages used for one school versus specific examples for another school.

I think some charter schools do better than public schools serving the same community. I think this sometimes makes the public schools do worse. I think many charter schools are places where kids are warehoused for various reasons or money machines for their founders and the groups running them (or both). I think many public schools are viewed by parents as cheap daycare, and, in fact, the public schools are little more than cheap daycare.

I think that many view the entire public/charter school issue as a war on unions. I also think this is a foolish argument.

It's about the kids. As soon as either side tries to make it an argument about the unions or politics, we've said that our kids are pawns.

The NEA said this decades back. As soon as the other side agrees, we've all agreed that our kids are pawns. Now we're working on figuring out what to sacrifice pawns for. Petty.

Politicians decided decades before the NEA made it all about the unions that it was all about politics, however. At that point the entire "union" debate that would follow was already rendered unimportant.

Public ed is broken. Badly broken. Everybody has their pet causes that they've decided a priori must be the deciding factor in the breakage. This includes researchers and is the reason we can't get clean, clear data. Hell, we aren't allowed to pose some questions or consider some possible hypotheses (and it doesn't matter if a lot of the data we do have seems to hint at these possible hypotheses).

[vi5]

7. We have a public school system....

I'm all for anything and everything that people want to do in order to make it better. Privatization (and I'm sorry no matter how people want to twist it around, charter schools are privatization) is not the way to do it.

At least the data I've seen where I live in NJ is that using standardized testing scores (which I agree is idiotic, but keep in mind that is the playing field that privatization fans and anti public school folks have chosen to play on and what the people who point to how broken our public schools are love to point to as proof), charter schools have not performed better.

Public ed is not broken everywhere. That is something that people just love to say, but it's little more than hyperbole. It's broken in some places but not in many others. And most of the time where it's broken is tied to economics and money. The fact is that kids from poor areas are more likely to have parents who have to work twice as hard to make ends meet and have less time to fully immerse themelves in their kids school curriculum. Taking those kids out of public schools and into charter schools does nothing to remedy that situation which is why in a lot of poor areas the charters don't outperform the public schools.

What's broken more than public schools is parenting and parental involvement. Parents are either not involved enough and their kids suffer, or parents are involved too much to the point that they bully and intimidate teachers and administrators into giving their kids grades they don't deserve. And the problem is that removing tenure (another pet cause of the privatization crowd) is only going to make that situation worse and make teachers jobs harder.