The Rise and Fall of For-Profit Schools
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The other side of this industry are charter schools. These are for-profit K-12 schools, often paid for by state / local governments. The problems with them are:
1) Graft is common, with charter school administrators sometimes taking home ludicrous salaries ($500k+ for schools with ~1,000 students)
2) Funding often comes directly from the local school district, most of which are already severely cash-strapped. The problem here is that the cost of a single student attending a school district is largely buried in fixed costs: when the state takes $6000/yr from a district and gives it to a charter school, the district's costs do not decrease by $6000. This makes school districts worse, which accelerates flight to charter / private schools.
3) Educational standards are different -- in most states, faith-based charter schools are totally ok. As long as they teach some bare-minimum requirements, they can teach as much religion as they want. Also, most states offer some sort of funding incentive based on test scores -- which just encourages schools to play the numbers game by finding reasons to suspend/expel struggling students, encourage cheating on tests, etc.
To be fair, not all charter schools are for-profit, and there are good charter schools and bad ones. But the entire system stinks; it cuts funding to struggling districts, leaving them in a perpetual budget crisis. It often does little to improve the education of students, while placing more of the burden on parents to go shopping for a school.
Charter schools, in many states, occupy the absurd position of being able to claim that they out-perform local schools while selecting or quasi-selecting their student population and still not actually participating -- at all -- in the standardized testing that justified their existence in the first place.
Also public schools in NY are zoned so you have to live the right place to get your kid into the right school.
I attended the best public schools in the county. Consistently listed in the top 10 nationally. My former public high school is effectively a private school. Just a few miles away are some of the worst performing schools in my state. Elsewhere, most schools are somewhere in the middle.
Similarly, some charters are above average, many are terrible, most are somewhere in between.
Overall, charter schools performance is no different than public schools.
All I want is for my kid to learn first of all reading, writing and math.
I don't even care about whether one school outperform another but there seem to be various studies showing different things.
My guess is that charter schools work a little better because of the Hawthorne Effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
And studies show different things. According to this it's better in general. But to me thats less important you can probably find studies that shows other things too.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-25/stanford-u...
That being said, I'm not sure either of these are a problem. The real problem (one of them at least) is that a school's performance is measured by the student's scores on standardized testing.
The selection bias of SA pales in comparison both purely by principle and in practice by the diversity of it's students.
And who care enough to move (showing a massive parental interest in their child's education).
This is why using test scores to compare schools, be it charter vs. public in the same district or public vs. public in another district, is inherently flawed.
With zoned schools you can have an interest in your childs education and have no way of getting in simply because you can't afford it.
The point is that those who claim that charter schools get to pick the good students and leave the bad ones with the public schools are simply wrong. It's the public schools in the rich areas that get to pick their students simply by whether they can afford to live where they do or not.
no, they aren't. Sorry, this isn't a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact. Every study ever performed on this question indicates that you are the one who is wrong.
> It's the public schools in the rich areas that get to pick their students simply by whether they can afford to live where they do or not.
The existence of selection bias X doesn't preclude the existence of another selection bias Y... why would you think that's the case?
This is exactly what I meany by quasi-selection. The dat are absolutely clear on this question -- lotteries create a very nearly insurmountable selection bias.
> public schools in NY are zoned so you have to live the right place to get your kid into the right school
This is immaterial to the question of whether charter schools are more effective than public schools for reasons that are essential to their organization (rather than incidental).
Furthermore, I don't think this (or any) anecdata gets to the heart of my criticisms, which I'll explain further below.
The core of the claim you made above -- that a charter is one of the best performing schools -- is not even a reasonable claim in most states because Charters aren't subject to the same testing and reporting requirements as public schools!
In many areas, Charters are not required to report at all, or are allowed to self-report. Guess what? Public schools also do totally fanstically when they are allowed to sefl-report! Comparing self-reported data to data obtained through a standardized process is meaningless.
Again, I'm not saying this is necessarily the case in NY. Just that it is a real problem nationally.
No it's not immaterial whether someone can put their kids to a public school in Tribecca vs. Harlem.
Your comment started with "Again this is simply wrong", without specifying "this".
I assume you were refering to: "[charters are] selecting or quasi-selecting their student population".
So, my interpretation of your claim: "Charter schools that use lotteries out-perform, which means their performance is not attirbutable to student selection."
My response to this claim was that lotteries are a form of selection bias!, and that lotteries are exactly what I meant by "quasi-selection".
> Please argue against things I have said instead of things I never said.
I did respond to the substance of your comment. lotteries == selection bias, so a lottery school performing well isn't a sufficient answer to the problem of selection bias. (Also, if you don't want people to mis-interpret your comments, then don't open your comment with a dangling antecedent... saying "this is simply wrong" without saying what "this" is, is literally inviting people to interpret the thing to which you were referring.)
In other comments you've narrowed the scope of your claims to something about your child's specific school. If that's your intention, then Im not sure why you stared your comment with "this is simply wrong" when I clearly wasn't referring to your child's specific school, but rather was very clearly asserting a general statistical truth that applicable nationally and even internationally, regardless of the vagaries of a single individual event.
2. The back half of my comment was essentially: whether or not lottories are a form of selection bias, it's never-the-less the case that charter schools sometimes aren't evaluated in the same way as public schools, making it impossible to actually evaluate public vs. charter -- which is the central thesis of my comment.
> it's not immaterial whether someone can put their kids to a public school in Tribecca vs. Harlem.
Me: The charters vs public national comparisons are skewed comparisons in general because they're not being evaluated using equivalent metrics -- huge huge problem! Also, selection and quasi-selection bias.
You: Lotteries != selection bias. And there's another compounding variable -- income of student's parents!
Me: Lottories == selection bias. And yes, income or whatever is yet another thing we should control for when comparing public to charter. But in addition to controlling for these other variables, we need to -- at a minimum -- compare based on the same metrics. If charters don't have to take (the same) standarized tests, then controlling for every other variable in the world is pointless.
That you are right because you can claim that parents who are interested in their childs educations and apply to charter schools is the selection bias.
But this is not what this discussion is about. The claim being made was that charter school had an advantage because they got to pick the best kids and leave the rest for the public school system.
It doesn't and so the selection bias you keep insisting exist is really nothing compared to the one that exist in the public system where you are completely depending on how rich your parents are so they can live the right place and you are zoned for that.
Thats what parents do btw. Move to the good school districts. Those who can afford it. To any extent a lottery is selection bias it's simply not relevant or interesting for the premise of this discussion which is that the charter schools had an advantage.
They don't. Public schools in rich neighborhoods however do.
1. Just because X (here, income distribution) creates a bias that we have to correct for doesn't mean that the bias created by Y (here, self-selection for lottery participation) isn't also problematic form a statistical perspective.
2. There are a lot of reasons to believe that, in the case where we compare charters to publics, that the volunteer selection bias is more problematic than the income distribution bias in public schools. Namely, we pretty much already know how to statistically control for the latter, but it's a lot more difficult to statistically control for the former.
So, you're wrong. Period. Voluntary selection bias exists. This is just a scientific fact. You have to correct for it in statistical studies. Period. End of story. Do other biases exist? Yes. Are they more important? No, because that's a stupid question. Any sort of selection bias is a threat to validity, and the entire point of a bias is that it's hard to know exactly the effect it's having until you correct for that.
But, and I stress this because you seem to be ignoring it, the important portion of all of my posts has NOTHING to do with selection bias!
In many states we don't even have a meaningful statistic upon which to make a comparison between chaters and non-charters because charters aren't taking the same standardized tests. So even after perfectly correcting for bias, we still have zero hope of actually comparing charters to publics.
Fundamental take-away: any school taking taxpayer money should be required to take the same standardized tests as public schools. Otherwise, any and all comparisons between them are bunk.
Public shools in NY are zoned so if you want your kid to go to that good school in Tribecca you most probably have to move there.
True for public schools.
2) Funding often comes directly from the local school district, most of which are already severely cash-strapped. The problem here is that the cost of a single student attending a school district is largely buried in fixed costs: when the state takes $6000/yr from a district and gives it to a charter school, the district's costs do not decrease by $6000. This makes school districts worse, which accelerates flight to charter / private schools.
Open enrollment causes the same issues.
3) Educational standards are different -- Also, most states offer some sort of funding incentive based on test scores -- which just encourages schools to play the numbers game by finding reasons to suspend/expel struggling students, encourage cheating on tests, etc.
True for public schools.
In Ontario, Canada, the public spent $23.6B on education in the 2013-2014 fiscal year. That's total cost, including salaries and building maintenance and supplies and everything else that goes into running an education system. That works out to $11.7k per student per year based on 2,015,411 students in the 2013-2014 school year.
That's similar to what you'd pay in private school tuition, and that's with all the bureaucracy and unions and teacher's salaries (teachers here top out at around $100k salary) and all the other things people complain about as reasons public schooling is a waste of money. It's not; it's about the same cost as private schooling.
But with public funding, a good education is available to everyone, and the public has more direct oversight of the curricula and of standards. As a result, Canada scores well in international school rankings, similar to the best European countries -- which are also, almost universally, funded publically (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PISA_2012#Results).
Canada, Finland, Singapore and South Korea are some of the exceptions as far as I remember.
Some charter schools is a response to the problem of amongst other issues, a way too strong teachers union and it's inability to develop contemporary learning environments for children. In California teachers union have in their agreement that they can't get replaced by new technology.
The high salaries is a tradeoff from the high pressure they put on the teachers and the very fact that they can get fired.
My son start 7.30 in the morning and ends 4.30 in the afternoon you can guess how much the teachers work. They are 32 children in each class.
Success Academy started in Harlem and was responsible for taking the kids out of their social fragile environments and starting to give them good habits and start showing that that others expected things from them and believed in them to deliver. Success Academy is one of the best performing schools in NY state.
Compared to the usual public school system, charter schools when done right is an amazing alternative to the public system.
Now I don't believe charter schools are the only way to do things, but I do believe that teachers unions are way to strong and until they start to change I will do what I can to keep my kids out of them.
Success Academy is privately run but publicly funded and the school have to fight for every dime they get while still staying out of the control of the teachers unions influence through the DOE.
So it's a much more complex discussion than the one you paint here. If anything when charterschools are done right they are a much better model for how the public school system should work IMO.
Teaching is hard, getting a school to run properly is hard in todays environment.
Charterschools are good because they allow for differentiation in education. We don't want anyone to be educated exactly the same way. Thats not a good thing.
That charterschools allow for people to take advantage of them is another discussion and can be solved in many different ways.
Instead of just critiquing the fact that they can be misused perhaps it would be more constructive to discuss how to make sure snake oil salesmen doesn't take advantage of the system.
Just like we do with other businesses in general.
When I was in public schools, there was a lot of differentiation in education, and students definitely weren't taught all the same, including different levels (eg, AP vs. non AP history), different tracks (eg, extra courses for those interested in practical arts, or interested in programming, for a career), and special support for students with more specific needs, including in my case speech therapy.
Nor do I get the sense that my school system was special in that regard.
"getting a school to run properly is hard in todays environment"
When was it ever easy to run properly?
Success Academy was started because the public school system failed to educate kids in Harlem. The philosophy have since then been copied at other schools with success my son is in Williamsburg.
This isn't only about the curriculum but about the very approach to teaching the kids AND the parents involvement in their kids education.
The difference between today and back then I feel is best illustrated by this http://i.imgur.com/LglSapk.jpg
Success Academy fights this with tooth and nail but in return require quite a lot from their teachers.
It's not a perfect system but I prefer it compared to the public school he first went to exactly because its focus on getting parents back on the side of the teacher and their goal and method for getting the kids to love learning.
galby: "there are some truly awful charters out there"
exelius: "To be fair, not all charter schools are for-profit, and there are good charter schools and bad ones. But the entire system stinks; it cuts funding to struggling districts, leaving them in a perpetual budget crisis."
Neither say charter schools are categorically bad. Exelius's point is that the funding system to support charter schools is what stinks.
Your illustration has no historical basis. You are viewing history through rose-colored glasses.
I'll demonstrate with a classic, the 1955 book "Why Johnny Can't Read: And What You Can Do about It". This placed the blame on teachers and the school pedagogy for poor childhood literacy rates, not the students. Parents reacted to that by pushing for policy changes. That book reverberated for decades. At https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=qtZQAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ORME... you can see:
> Since then, other arguments [besides teachers 'simply using the wrong techniques'] have cropped up. Those who sympathize with teachers blame overly-defensive administrations and boards of education. Still others say parents are responsible for having abdicated social duties to the schools, transforming them from educational institutions into huge day care centers.
Sound like a familiar discussion?
Here's an example of a letter to the editor from 1976, https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=VdYeAAAAIBAJ&sjid=nVYE... , where a teacher places the blame on school boards for not letting the teachers apply real discipline to the "hoodlums" who get to pass because of "social promotions." This teacher doesn't think the students are getting any discipline from their parents over poor grades.
This Ann Landers humor piece from 1984 reflects the idea that the students are doing poorly because the parents don't care; both parent and child veg in front of the TV: https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=zbUfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=htcE...
My comment here is surely no strong proof, only suggestive that you may need to research the history which brought us movies like "Blackboard Jungle".
Galby and I agree, again I would urge you to actually read the exchange rather than cherry picking what you think they basically said.
With regards to the past. No one is glorifying anything. But if you want to launch an attack on charter schools and claiming that budgets and teacher salaries are the reason why public schools are doing bad and that charter schools are stealing things then you aren't being true to the discussion. The reason why charter schools work when they work is that they are putting a lot of the effort onto the parents. That bad schools existed before is no secret but it's now almost the rule more than the exception in the public school system.
All I can see is that a Charter School like SA changed things for the better in very socially challenged areas while still functioning by the budgetary constraints as a normal public school and that by it's lottery actually is a much more fair way than ex. the zoned principles in NY.
1) As far as I know, only one school principal has broken the $500k+ barrier, and that is a charter school principal from a failed school in Florida. I do not believe this specific detail was that convincing.
On the topic of graft, this is hard to pin down but it's not insignificant. See http://neatoday.org/2015/06/04/can-charter-schools-be-rescue... for one commentary:
> Some charter advocates may dismiss reports of malfeasance as the shenanigans of a few bad actors, but the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) exposed the massive scale of the sector’s shoddy practices in a series of startling reports. In April, CPD revealed at least $200 million in 15 states had been squandered or misused through various activities – everything from the use of taxpayer funds to support other businesses to outright embezzlement. That total is probably higher, but, according to the report, it’s difficult to pinpont “because the federal government, the states, and local charter authorizers lack the oversight necessary to detect the fraud.”
If the books are private, it's hard to really tell if there's graft, no? At least with public schools it's easier to see where the money goes.
Charter school supporters should push for more transparency, as this veil of corporate secrecy makes a great target.
2) "Funding often comes directly from the local school district, most of which are already severely cash-strapped."
There's no question that this is true for many districts. For example, in Pennsylvania, the local public school system must reimburse charter schools based on their own per capita costs per student. Students on the autism spectrum are more expensive to teach, as are students who are emotionally disturbed. At Chester Uplands those students make up 8.4% and 13.6% of the student population, respectively. At one local charter school, those are 2.1% and 2.8% respectively, while at two other charter schools, those are 0%.
As a result, the school district sends more money to the local charter schools than it gets from the state, and may soon be bankrupt.
See http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/08/pa-charter-vampir... for a summary.
In Ohio, according to this report http://innovationohio.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Unfair-... , "Because of the $774 million deducted from traditional public schools in FY 2012 to fund charters, children in traditional public schools received, on average, $235 (or 6.5%) less state aid than the state itself said they needed."
I therefore think this is valid critique by exelius about how charters are funded, independent of the quality of the education provided.
3) "Educational standards are different"
Isn't that also true? https://www.the74million.org/article/whitmire-5-ways-to-stop... comments, in defense of good charter schools, that opponents to charter schools have some valid arguments. One is:
> Identify the low bar, and enforce it.
> This is another lesson from California, which leads the nation in actively trying to boost charter quality. There is no agreement on what makes a great charter; depending on the student population being served, that will vary greatly. But there should be an agreement on the low end of the bar. So set that bar, and enforce it.
> That low bar has to be precise about what constitutes academic achievement.
If charters have a lower bar than public schools, then there's inventive to teach to that lower bar, which lowers cost for a charter school, and leads to profit for the charter owner rather than savings for the taxpayer.
I believe this a valid critique, though I do not know the evidence.
3b) "Also, most states offer some sort of funding incentive based on test scores -- which just encourages schools to play the numbers game by finding reasons to suspend/expel struggling students, encourage cheating on tests, etc."
There are any number of sources which say that the charter schools cherry pick students. There are any number of those which say the opposite. You can dismiss it the claim, but all evidence is that it's part of a valid critique of the charter system, and intimately tied with the funding question.
You commented: "and that charter schools are stealing things"
By stealing, do you mean violating the law? I liked this text from https://preaprez.wordpress.com/2013/02/15/in-chicago-98-mill... :
> When the story broke last week that Juan Rangel’s United Neighborhood Organization funneled $98 million dollars in state grants to friends and relatives of higher ups in the organization, Patrick O’Connor, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s aldermanic floor leader said, “Nothing being reported means they’ve done anything illegal or improper. It might sound crude, but it’s kind of like picking your nose in public. It looks bad. It’s not classy. But it’s not illegal.”
Or do you mean the metaphorical sense, like "stealing a child's future"?
It's really that simple.
Charter schools are publicly funded and privately run. If the public doesen't feel like the schools are living up to their promise they can simply stop the funding.
That some schools have been taking advantage of that situation says absolutely nothing about the charter school as an educational system or whether it's the fact that it's a charter school that makes it take money from the public schools. The primary thing for me is that you can fire bad teachers.
If anything it's the oversight with charter schools thats the problem not the funding. That can be solved.
You are cherrypicking your examples to try and defend what is fundamentally a wrong premise for why public school system is failing.
Thats your right to do so but it doesn't make the claims right and nothing you have provided here shows that.
> they can simply stop the funding.
How? The school board doesn't have the authority. In many cases the state has removed local democratic control over the process. The only solution is to replace a significant portion of the state legislature, and that is no simple task.
> fundamentally a wrong premise for why public school system is failing
My premise is there's too much state and federal dabbling in what was a working system, and not enough spent on long-term social support systems. As I haven't mentioned it, I'm much more certain that you are projecting views onto me.
After, what, 15 years of testing, charter, education reforms, there's precious little success to come out of a lot of new spending. We saw that most recently in the NEAP scores, at http://edexcellence.net/articles/heartbreak-on-naep .
Out-of-school experiences, like poverty, have a more significant impact than teacher quality. The reform movement calls that an "excuse" for bad teaching. So where is the evidence that this new world of teaching is any more successful ... sorry, less of a failure ... than what we had before?
And before you say that charters have nothing to do with testing, in principle you're right. Except for all those schools with low test scores that were labeled "failing" and were shut down or converted into a privately run charter school. That difference in standards is one of Exelius's valid criticisms.
If you can't be bothered start by watching the Documentary "The Lottery" and then come back and tell me that a schools methods can't make a difference.
If you are still not convinced I can certainly live with that.
You consistently respond by pointing to a single charter school. No one has ever claimed that there aren't some excellent charter schools. But why should I believe that Success Academy Charter Schools is characteristic of charter schools as a whole?
Of course a school's method's can make a difference on the students. There's a entire genre of movies on the topic. I mentioned "Blackboard Jungle". Another example is the turn-around at George Washington Preparatory High School, which was portrayed in the movie 'Hard Lessons'. There's "Dead Poets Society" based in part on the teaching impact of Samuel Pickering, and "Lean on Me" is based on principal Joe Clark and Eastside High School. As a New Yorker, you should well know of NYC's history with alternative schools, which includes public alternative high schools like 'The High School of Performing Arts', which was the basis for the movie 'Fame'.
But the choice of pedagogy has very little to do with the the complaints about 1) extra opportunity for graft in charter schools, 2) a general funding preference for charter schools over public schools, and 3) charter schools which are held to lower minimum standards than public schools.
1,198 charter schools in California only 6 of them are LTDs.
And yes I talk about a single charter school exactly because I don't want claim what I have no data to back up with, which is what the OP did.
> Whitmire: 5 Ways to Stop Bad Charters from Derailing Education Reform
> 2. Charter advocates need to name names.
> That’s a sensitive one. Already, charters are under attack from teachers unions and many superintendents. Why pile on by naming the low-performers among you? That probably explains why so few state charter organizers single out charters for closure. But there’s an important exception: California, home to the most robust charter system in the nation.
> “About five years ago we realized we had a quality problem,” said Elizabeth Robitaille, who oversees performance issues at the California Charter Schools Association. By controlling for socioeconomic factors, the group could see that its schools tended to fall on opposite ends of a scatter graph — a disproportionate number of both high- and low-performers.
The critique is that most districts don't hold charters to the same standards as public schools.
You point out the only state where that isn't true.
And it was put into place to address exactly that critique.
So you can't defend charter schools as a whole from that critique by pointing to the one state which took that critique to heart.
For example, this 1995 article describes how a school for the blind was closing because of the mainstreaming of blind students. https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=_DRQAAAAIBAJ&sjid=pVUD... . Here's a recent example of a teacher using the term 'mainstreaming', http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/10/pa-shutting-down-... , and doing so only in the context of special ed.
Either your school district was using its own definition, or you misunderstood the context.
"Well-rounded education" was a bigger buzzword in the 1940s and 1950s. See https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=well-rounded+e... . It's part of the American education system that students are required to take course in a diverse set of subjects. It doesn't require that everyone take the same classes.
That clarification aside, and assuming I'm completely wrong, how does a charter system, which presumably has the same general graduation requirements, change things?
Anything more about your circumstances requires understanding more about your district. Eg, was everyone in the same level of math, so that no one (or everyone) took calculus by the time they graduated? Were there only 25 students in the class? Did everyone take the same foreign language course?
Wow! My school has changed. There's a "Drafting / Illustrative Design Technology" track, a "Fashion Design" track, which includes "Fashion Marketing Management", an "Arts, A/V Technology & Communications" cluster, and more http://www.coralgablescavaliers.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uRE... .
You are assuming it's about the curriculum it's not. It's about the environment, the parent participation etc.
Therefore I can't see why you think I assume it's only about the curriculum.
Nor do I see how unions are relevant. Your 1960's classroom, in the cartoon that resonates so strongly with you, was almost certainly run by a union teacher, in a time when unions were much more powerful than now.
You can't decide to choose one part of history and not the other.
Do you have any evidence that that's actually true? My examples demonstrate that it was far from universally true in the 1960s.
If was was true, when did it change? There are plenty of complaints in the 1970s complaining about how the parents are at fault. In fact, I can find complaints from the 1940s about how the young people these days have things given to them on a platter and never have to face any challenges.
If it isn't claiming an actual historical propensity, why does it use "1960"?
And if you think the highly unionized school teacher of the 1960s was effective, then why do you think unions are the problem now?
Success Accademy functions by lottery so it has kids from all over new york. Public schools are zoned which means that the best schools are those where the parents have the best incomes.
So even on a "fairness" scale I believe at least Success Academy pass the test.
---------------------------
What are some things that Charter schools allow teachers to do (to develop a contemporary learning environment) that teachers' unions prevent in public schools? (and not other factors like budget constraints, etc.)
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21599005-reforme...
In California the teachers union even have a clause that prevents their teachers from getting fired because of technological advance in the class room.
Private schools are and have always been an option if you don't like the level of education provided by your local district. If we feel we're not getting our money's worth from our public schools, that's fine -- but fix the public schools, don't divert the money elsewhere. Schools don't react to competitive pressures, so all that causing competition for state funding is going to do is decrease quality.
There is a world of difference between a public school in Tribecca and one in Harlem. To be able to attend the one in Tribecca you need to live in Tribecca, you have to be zoned.
Success Academy have a lottery which means kids from harlem, bronx, tribecca, williamsburg all will attend the same school regardless of where they live.
What you are claiming about charter schools are many many times worse in public school system where you get a lot of lousy education and very strong teachers unions on top of it.
Now let's say you take away 10% of the students from that school, such that you now have 29 students in each class. The school's budget is now $2 million, but they haven't shed any costs: they still have the same number of teachers, the same buildings to maintain, etc. So they have to get creative with their budget, which is how you end up with crappy local schools that don't have arts classes, a school nurse, or enough books to go around. This causes more students to flee to the charter school system, making the problem worse and creating situations where kids are frequently unsupervised. Worse, these schools are often forced to take on students with no additional funding in the event a charter school goes bankrupt (which happens to 1-2 charter schools a year in most major cities).
I'm sure my take on this issue would be different if I had kids, and the teacher's unions are part of the problem. But we should fix the unions and the schools, not provide an unregulated system where government money is funneled into private businesses with little to no oversight.
It's NOT the budget and never have been. My sons school doesn't have anywhere near the budget of a private school. That doesn't mean that they are doing worse.
The entire idea of money being the key indication only make sense if we are talking about litterally not being able to pay for teachers.
You contradict yourself when you then claim that places like Kahn Academy provides similar education for no money at all.
It's way way cheaper budget they run by and they don't have any benefit of having in person teachers.
And yes your take would be different once you have kids for reasons not easily detectable in statistics or public research and you can't set it up in some table and start comparing it purely via non-human metrics.
None the less your characterization of charter schools in general is mostly wrong and that is what I take issue with. Not whether there are problems with some charter schools.
I've helped a few Charter Schools and religious ones, and while the kids are mostly behaved everyone I've been too they are way behind track academically. I think the actual lack of oversight creates a different problem.
You want to fix education in the US, the money must follow the student. Until the school systems themselves are forced to improve by having students want to attend they won't.
The recent issue with testing which they said was putting too much pressure on students and teachers is also a misdirect. The old school method before testing was required was just to pass the student. As in, Johnny got a D where in no way he knew anything but he is now in eight grade.
We have no teacher shortage, we have less student per teacher than anytime before. The amounts spent per student are many times higher than in the seventies yet what about the value of that education.
It isn't a money issue.
With regards to for profit college educations, well the same with all new high costs course at my local state university - they are created to soak up the money because the fed loans it.
Teachers don't make money or have respect. I'd challenge you to do an excellent job in that scenario.
Make a ranked list of factors and teacher competency isn't even in the top ten. Which makes all this school reform chatter drive me nuts.
No matter what it's not a money problem. No amount of money will solve that problem. Only a shift back where parents are as responsible for their childrens education as they paren't will solve this.
Or would you say "I bet these employees are poorly managed. I'm sure they can work more effectively if we change aspects of the process."
Here's an idea that doesn't cost any money: segregate students by ability so that kids can learn at their own pace.
1. Don't see how you can claim that is a zero cost idea.
2. In practice this just becomes the smart kids, normal kids, idiots. Good luck once you get labelled an idiot.
It would of course suck if you just had a cold on the day of the rest and wound up in the idiot school by accident, you'd need to review performance regularly. Ideally you'd have more than three levels of schooling. Maybe five, you could label them alpha through epsilon.
This ($57k) is right around the median household income in the US. Note that is per household, which may include multiple earners.
Tough to look at teacher salaries, which are above the median, and say that's garbage.
Yes, they have a tough job, balancing between students, administrators, and (especially) parents. But lots of people do want to do the job, and get paid an OK salary, and get lots of time off during the year.
[0] http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/high-school-teache...
According to http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm the median salary for an individual with a master's degree in the US in 2014 was $1326/week or about $69k/year.
How does that money get spent?
In other words, it's a governance issue. (Also, I believe, but cannot prove, it's also a scale issue. Large districts should be split up. Would give parents more choice.)
A buddy was CFO for the local school district. Admin swallows half the budget. Real estate investments are poorly managed. Maintenance has been neglected.
Meanwhile, teachers are underpaid, no COL raises for years, student to teacher ratios continue to climb, they're adding "portables" because they ran out of class room space, special needs kids are neglected, programs are cut to the bare minimum.
Et cetera, et cetera.
Yes, we US taxpayers spend a lot education. No, we're not getting our money's worth. No, privatizing via charter schools (reducing transparency and accountability) doesn't help.
Meanwhile, our kids are screwed.
The reason why charter schools work is because parents are often more involved in their kids education. The school simply forces it.
For instance:
Readling Log. Every day we have to write which book we read with our son and what book(s) he read.
Student corrections. The students are measured everyday from Green (no corrections) to yello (some and a warning) and red (paren't gets called)
Pick-up Parents line up and the teacher tells them how the day went and if there are things they need to improve.
Just a few of the things that are forcing parent involvement.
But apparently miraculously when SA started in Harlem the parent who cared about their childs education appeared in perfect sync with the charter school. Before that they simply didn't exist.
I have lost track of what this discussion is about anymore. No one is saying that charter schools is the only way to do things. I was reacting to a claim that charter schools had advantages compared to public schools.
There is a very specific reason why the kids spend a long time in school btw but since you are more interested in miracles I will save that for another day.
Some school districts spend almost $25,000 per student which is drastically larger than all but a handful of the most expensive private K-12 schools in the world.
Money is simply not the problem and every single statistical number I have seen shows it.
Yes. The responsibility to make a free appropriate public education (FAPE) available to all students with disabilities applies to ALL public schools under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).9 Charter schools are public schools; therefore, they bear the same responsibility.
Who is actually responsible for ensuring that special education services are available to students with disabilities in a charter school? The answer depends on how the charter school is legally identified in the state.
If a charter school is considered to be an independent Local Education Agency (LEA) under its state’s law, that charter school bears the exact same legal requirements for providing special education services as any other LEA (or district).
If a charter school is considered part of an existing LEA, the LEA (or district) retains most or all of the responsibility for special education in the charter school. The charter school is considered a school within that LEA and is responsible for following LEA policy.
A new government report shows that charter schools are not enrolling as high a portion of special-education students as traditional public schools, despite federal laws mandating that publicly financed schools run by private entities take almost every disabled student seeking to enroll.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023033792045774770...
When it is a nationwide difference it is not just "some" schools; it is systemic. That doesn't make charter schools the bad guys. That doesn't make public schools the good guys. It does, however, mean that this is a complex issue and charter schools are competing on unequal footing in at least one respect.
If you are given the best students and money is thrown at you, you are being handed success. The rest of the schools are being handed failure. When all schools are charter schools then we will see many of them fail and be replaced by more charter schools and the problem will just be perpetuated in a different form.
I wish it were true that charter schools were all about giving students a better education. It is unfortunately not. It is part political and part financial. The political aspect comes from showing success through change (see my first paragraph to understand how that success is gained). The financial aspect goes to the higher salaries paid to administrators. The school districts are happy to pay higher salaries now to rid themselves of unions and more importantly, pensions since charter schools are not unionized. Teachers at those schools work long hours for slightly higher pay. The approach is churn and burn. They hire younger teachers who are just passing through the system on their way to their true careers after they burn out and become disillusioned about the system. Some people will make off pretty well during this growth stage, but the long term outlook is poor.
The reason why charter schools like Success Academy are popular is because it's strong focus and philosophy.
Plenty of kids in Harlem goes to Success Academy. Most of the kids in Williamsburg comes from fairly low-income families. That was the very premise of the school and why it's popular.
Watch the documentary The Lottery on Netflix it's quite illuminating.
Their research was based on magnet schools in Chicago in the nineties. I don't know how well that model correlates with Success Academy.
Which from today's NYT at http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/nyregion/at-a-success-a... apparently includes pushing out any students.
That is, says Brown, principal at Success Academy Fort Greene: "Some of them needed an alternative setting with highly specialized services".
You know where those (expensive) 'highly specialized' services are? Public schools.
After 19 suspensions, this both with ADHD now attends "Public School 119 in Brooklyn, where Ms. Wimbish said he was very happy and had not been suspended once."
Is it really the parents to blame? Or a 'one size fits all' discipline model that just happens to select for the easier, most compliant children?
Any negative news about the effects of privatisation elsewhere, such as this, is sidestepped deftly, as, you see, academies aren't privatisation, they're, uh, enabling, um, better education, for the children, saving the taxpayer.... look over there, shiny thing!
Academies have already come under fire for all varieties of corruption and improper practice, but individuals ("a few bad eggs") are being blamed rather than the system which promotes the viewing of and engagement with children as nascent consumers.
shakes head
For example, I'd dearly like to take some advanced math courses like those in the junior/senior years of any good undergrad curriculum. But no college in the Philadelphia area offers these on evenings or weekends, and no college (I know) offers them online. I can't imagine that there's no market for this. Why should this be?
Given the wide availability of community colleges and today's computers and networking infrastructure, it should be easy to teach strong uppergraduate courses to nontraditional students in a wide range of useful tech subjects like engineering, physics, astronomy, chemistry, etc. Using the physical resources of local community colleges, even many uppergrad lab-based courses could be supported.
But to expand their charter, community colleges will need better support, and not just from their local communities. Most CCs today are overwhelmed with lowergraduate demand, given the universal unaffordability of college education.
If congress wants to do something constructive, they should shift their support and attention away from for-profit schools and transfer to community colleges.
My suggestion would be to simply extend the accreditation process to such networks, and have more of them appear grassroots on the level of individual communities and neighborhoods.
Any entity or means that delivers a high quality education, and especially does so affordably, works for me. Ideally such accreditation would work to improve (or expand) the reputation of community college themselves. Too many provide a second rate experience, (probably due to their often demanding less from the student than the better four year schools do).
If CCs were to offer some sort of degree beyond the Associate's by augmenting the existing CC workload (perhaps with courses and material arising from groups like Western Governors or even Kahn or Udacity) that met the standard of a good accredited university, that would be useful to many and a good start toward customizing their offerings while assuring academic repute and respectability.
What I'd want to see is expansion of community colleges to include 4 year degrees, and I also support the model of Western Governors, which is much cheaper and allows students to take classes as quickly or as slowly as they can/want.
Sure, but why would we want to encourage anyone to attend "colleges" like Corinthians and University of Phoenix, if the effects are on average as harmful as described in the article? Not sure if this is just the author trying to shoehorn in some "debate" at the end of the article but it feels like it, given the details of the rest of the piece.
The problem is many people, like myself and parents, didn't know this. I'm doing fine though but I would not recommend it to anyone.
Maybe my experience is not the norm. I've heard a lot of bad things about schools like Phoenix and DeVry. But I went to DeVry (quite a few years ago) and got a 2-year tech diploma. They also offered a 4 year accredited BSEE at the school I attended (Arizona). It was failry challenging, a lot of people dropped out, but literally eveyone who graduated had a job offer waiting for them, several if you had decent grades. I had three offers from which to choose. It launched a nice career for me, including getting an employer to sponsor me to complete my BSEE.
Things must have changed, because it was pretty solid at that time.
Unfortunately all of the for profit school hate lumps them all together which makes people biased towards any for profit degree regardless of accreditation.
Or go STEM, work your butt off, and get paid well. These are grown up choices.
One of the services that my company (IntegriShield) provides is collecting these placement statistics; it is one of the less-profitable things we do, the sort of grunt work that you'd usually offload to a call center, but we insist on Doing It Right. It's a messy business: usually contact information is sparse and incorrect, and graduates mostly just let calls go to voicemail rather than give us 5 minutes of their time, possibly because they hear "we're calling you on behalf of <your university's name here>" and think "we're calling you about your student loans" or so, which we're not.
I guess my point is, I'm totally unsurprised that less-scrupulous employees faced with that hairball just said, eh, I'll make up that I successfully contacted them, what harm could that do? -- and if that happens, you've got across-the-board confirmation bias going on, "of course our graduates land good jobs in the field."
> a 2010 undercover government investigation of fifteen for-profit colleges found that all fifteen “made deceptive or otherwise questionable statements.”
Yep, that's another service we offer: we'll call your admissions reps undercover and see if you lie to us. Then you can retrain admissions reps to scale back or remove those claims.
> For-profit colleges have capitalized on our desire to make education more inclusive.
For chrissakes, don't blame the for-profit colleges for this! They did what any company does: they stepped into a business void. Your typical for-profit might be a barber/hairstyling/cosmetology college; they don't do anything that an apprenticeship at a similar business didn't already do; they just made it their raison d'être. The business gap existed because the apprenticeship normally takes a while and can't be done by dilettantes (people who have other jobs going on in their lives).
What really happened was that the economic recession led to lots of people being laid off, and some of those people had always wanted to move into a more-artistic service industry instead. They funded this training with government-issued student loans, which unfortunately have draconian legislation on them (like they can't be discharged in bankruptcy, the government doesn't even try to audit where the money is going, etc.). Still, the people who took these loans in theory were taking an informed risk; there's been no scandal about "nobody told me how much tuition was until after I graduated;" nobody's been fleeced.
Yes, there is some chicanery about for-profit colleges making the dream seem too-good-to-be-true (especially with regard to graduate placement). Combined with aggressive marketing that encourages people to dream big, there may be a valid complaint that they're overtraining the population so that more people are qualified barbers than any city legitimately needs, so that job prospects bottom out alongside wages. But they didn't provide the dream and they didn't provide the loan, they just inserted themselves in the middle, to take the loan money and service the dream. A voice of wisdom saying "hey, are you sure you want to drop everything for this dream? You're going to be in debt for quite some time if you take this loan" would be nice but it's also supererogatory: capitalism doesn't usually breed such saints.
Well, my experience is that it's more of a selection bias than anything else. Not outright employee-not-wanting-to-do-their-job lying. When the calls go out to graduates to get employment data, the successful ones have no problems giving their data, while the unemployed ones hesitate. This can be seen where the percentage of graduates reporting data is given.
This also happens with salary data, those working temp jobs or minimum wage don't as readily give out their salary data as those who are really successful early on.
One seemingly effective way I've seen universities get more representative data has been to hold diplomas until a survey is filled out. Obviously this doesn't capture later data (like salaries/employment 9 months out), but it gives a good picture of recent graduate data with extremely high reporting percentages.