NAACP members call for ban on privately managed charter schools
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
In D.C.--a city where student performance continues to be abysmal despite nearly double the per-capita funding of surrounding "rich" counties--some of the most well-regarded schools in heavily-minority neighborhoods are charters. Indeed, D.C. charters educate about 45% of the students and are outperforming the district schools, despite having poorer students and less funding: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/2015/10/05/wash...; https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/more-dc-stude...
Educating kids in poor minority neighborhoods is hard enough. There is no reason to hamstring the process--indeed, to make it intractable--by running schools like General Motors circa 1960.
I think the NAACPs primary agenda here is that they feel Charter schools create a policy "out" for the history of being unwilling to take the steps necessary to make public schools work (and union reform is high on that list). As a result they can't get any traction on getting the public schools fixed if the policy maker says "well get your children into the charter school if you have a problem with it." and since Charter schools cannot serve the entire population, people will not make it in who would have benefited from being in, and the school they are "forced" to go to, is being neglected by people who should fix it.
Citation please. Seriously, I see no reason whatsoever why charter schools, over time, could not service 100% of the population.
There is no reason per se to reform the public school system, just like there is no reason per se to continue to develop DOS—just use Windows. Or Linux. Etc.
Not everything needs to live forever, including "public schools".
I remember that I just said the other day that we can train and retrain law enforcement all day long but we won't see any meaningful improvement without enforcement with "teeth" and that unions are actively hurting their members if not because of what they do then because of the "optics" of what they do. I think the same applies for teachers' unions as well.
We talked about the case of interns being fired en masse a little while ago and some of not many people in that discussion agreed that it didn't look good that the interns were riled up over something (dress code) that didn't help the business much. When teachers bring up the issue of low pay, I can't help but feel a lot of parents and voters see it as selfish in the same way. "The teachers should not spend so much time thinking about their own pay but rather about the students and what they can do to help students."
> I think the NAACPs primary agenda here is that they feel Charter schools create a policy "out" for the history of being unwilling to take the steps necessary to make public schools work (and union reform is high on that list).
Absolutely! I kind of want to go back to the topic of tap water versus bottled water. The people who can't afford to buy bottled water are unlikely to have much of a voice in local government to have their issue fixed. The parents who can't get their kids in chartered schools or who don't care enough to get their kids in chartered schools are unlikely to have much of a voice in local government to make public education better either. Now that I think about it, it sounds just like segregation. The only difference is that instead of an official policy, it is a little more latent.
Nationally, Charters often have comparable proportions (and in some cases, a larger proportion) of students from disadvantaged groups: http://www.publiccharters.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/NAP....
https://cloakinginequity.com/2016/08/01/breaking-news-aclu-f...
Those are good things. These kids almost always have serious impulse control problems, and it's better for both those kids and for everyone else to have education tailored to those kids' needs. Teachers should be teachers--they shouldn't have to do double-duty as behavioral therapists.
> and are usually not obligated to provide special education services.
That's just false. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act's (IDEA) requirement to provide education appropriate to individuals with disabilities applies to charter schools: https://www2.ed.gov/offices/OCR/archives/charterqa/chardisab....
> corporate-run
Those aren't dirty words. Do you want your school run like an Apple Store, or like a DMV location?
I don't understand your comment at all, but I am very curious to know what you actually mean. Can you please clarify and expand? To begin, what do you mean by "they" when you say we can debate whether they're good things or not?
Imagine we compare Denver Broncos against Miami Dolphins. Just a small adjustment. We require Miami Dolphins to let anyone who is a resident of Florida in the team. We put no such restriction on the Denver Broncos (because Go Broncos!) Now, we compare average 40 yard dash between the "average" Denver Broncos player and the "average" Miami Dolphins "player". What do you think will happen?
The charter school I work for puts a special emphasis on SpEd. I don't know if we are required to, but we do. And we are pretty damn good at it.
OK so who provides that?
This is 100% false in California.
Charter schools are publicly-funded schools exempted, via the grant of a special charter (hence the name), from some of the generally-applicable rules governing the public school systems of which they are a part (which particular rules exceptions are made for varies from charter to charter.) They may be publicly operated, operated by private for-profit enterprises, or operated by private non-profit enterprises.
> And it's not a situation where only rich people can get their kids into charter schools.
While that may be the case, among the rules that charters are often exempted are ones which prevent them for cherry-picking students on grounds which, while they may not directly relate to wealth, are strongly correlated with it.
> Charter public schools are concentrated neighborhoods with mostly minority populations.
That's actually part of the problem that minority-interest groups have with them; among the problems that this creates is that they often displace schools that are subject to the normal public rules from those areas, forcing children who are not admitted under the charters rules to go to more distant traditional public schools than they would have to if the charter did not exist. (Another is that, for less-selective charters, members of the population may be effectively coerced into attending the charter as opposed to a traditional public school by the lack of access to traditional public school caused by the charter placement.)
Think about other limited-time transactions, such as car ownership. Yes, one can spend countless years petitioning Dodge and Kia to improve its quality standards, or just buy a Toyota and call it a day.
I agree with you on water, as it's not a limited-time engagement, and therefore the attitude people have towards it is not transactional.
What do we since people haven't managed to fix public schools yet? Just outlaw the bottled water?
This is a common theme that charter schools seem to do "better" than the standard public schools in urban areas while they do worse in suburban areas.
The problem is that this means that the charter schools aren't doing better because of education reasons but are instead sub-selecting the students and leaving the worse students behind (either by selection or expulsion) to poison the public schools.
However, there is a giant elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. The single biggest improvement in school performance (charter or public) comes from switching to year-round school--especially among minorities. For a modest 25% budget increase, we can make a huge boost in everybody's performance.
But, see, charter schools aren't about improvement. They are about blaming people without actually having to commit more money to solve the actual problem.
The U.S. spends far more money on education per capita than any other OECD country besides Switzerland. D.C. spends twice as much compared to Fairfax County next door. We don't need more money, we need reform.
Kids in poverty are missing classes, not doing homework, not able to concentrate because they are missing basic neccesities of life. Like a quiet room with a bed. Enough food. A ride to school when weather is bad. Clean clothes. A place to do homework. Pencils/papers/books/etc. An educated adult to help with homework. Etc, etc.
No amount of "education reform" is going to get much better performance from kids in such circumstances without the lower level problems being addressed. But for whatever reason, US policy tends to ignore this.
The most effective years of education I had involved zero homework, but admittedly a longer school day. Homework that requires aid from an educated adult is the school dodging the responsibility to teach by trying to farm it out to parents. Not to mention even educated parents can struggle with the ways in which concepts are now taught, referring back to their own knowledge/techniques and confusing the student.
We need to put the money where it works. And year round school is one of the few things shown to actually work.
Publicly-run schools are structurally incapable of putting money where it works.
Publicly-run schools can't even make basic operational decisions (hiring and firing, closing down unnecessary facilities, etc) without dealing with the last stand of the labor movement or the repercussions of decades of racial oppression. CPS didn't create the excesses of unregulated capitalism, but we punish it by forcing it to pay far more for the same level of credentials than the private sector. CPS didn't segregate the black population of Chicago into the south side, but when CPS tries to close down under-capacity schools, we make it pay for those sins. We impose regulation on the business of educating kids that are so stifling that we'd never dream of imposing similar ones on a private-sector industry, for fear of killing it.
Which is not to say that those cosmic issues are unimportant. Maybe people with English degrees should be paid more and maybe black communities need more resources to deal with the impacts of segregation. But school districts are entirely the wrong level of abstraction for dealing with those problems.
Privately-run education doesn't entirely solve the agency problem, but it insulates the business of teach kids from the irrelevant politics.
[1] I mean, the article is actually a prime example of this. None of the criticisms of charters are substantive. After all, few people could say with a straight face that we should pass a moratorium on the expansion of Starbucks because, as a company led by a white-male CEO, it is unable to meet the needs of black communities.
Why is this? This sounds like "keeping them busy"...
So, the year-round set-up gives consistency for the kids, and probably also allows school to serve as childcare year round. Once you have the stability, you can start funding bigger things and maybe seeing some returns. But until then, education is largely a square peg that's never going into the round hole.
And here is the primary purpose of public school. Why else is there such a push to create younger and younger pre-kindergarten programs? It's simple. Public schooling is not about education, it is about warehousing children during working hours, since the economy has shifted to require two full-time incomes.
Several studies have shown that minority students actually show gains very similar to non-minority students over the course of the school year. However, the summer vacation provides a double whammy--non-minority students continue to improve during the summer while minority students actually lose a lot of the gains made.
The easiest way to stabilize this is year-round school.
I don't understand. The Republicans certainly don't prop up teachers' unions.
I totally agree that there are some excellent charter schools — but there are excellent public schools too, and not only in extremely wealthy neighborhoods. Our challenge is finding the best model we can that can be replicated at scale; charter schools don't seem to be helping with that.
That's not entirely true. In urban areas, they do better than public schools. In suburban areas, they do almost exactly the same amount worse.
http://credo.stanford.edu/documents/la_report_2013_7_26_2013...
The problem is that tells you that the gain in charter schools is due to student selection bias rather than inherent educational advantage.
There is also no reason to disbelieve that the findings don't extend. You don't get to summarily reject presented evidence that doesn't match your agenda/opinion without evidence to the contrary.
There are other studies that show similar results--urban charters are better than public, suburban charters are worse than public. Unfortunately, that demonstrates that the educational facets aren't the deciding factor in educational achievement.
You will note that I said "unfortunately". I really wish charters were better than public schools from an educational standpoint so we would have something we could roll out in the public schools. Sadly, most of the "gains" from charters are from student selection.
There have been lots of attempts to be better than the public school system. None of them have reliably worked, yet. The Gates foundation hasn't coughed up anything better, either, without expending vastly more money than we are willing to.
Or we can recognize that each area is unique, and stop trying to force a specific approach on everyone "at scale"?
Seriously, consider that there is no educational approach that works "at scale" across vastly different socio-economic, cultural, genetic, and other factors.
People seem to believe that "the best" students will have identical achievement no matter who their surrounding students are. This is (at best) unproven and seems to defy common sense.
I went to a magnet STEM school for half of every day in my last two years of high school. In my rural county, there was no way I was going to get good calculus and physics classes, let alone any programming, modern physics, or advanced math, without the pooling of resources among the several farm town high schools. It undoubtedly increased what my high school education could provide me.
It also would not show up on any testing that would be measured in these studies. I could have watched Netflix instead of taking classes for all of my last two years of high school, and I still would have showed up the same from the perspective of this study: passed every standardized test.
But people fall for these metrics time after time, and school rankings are based on them. My public high school was ranked in the bottom 10% because our pass rates are abysmal, which obviously stems from our huge number of impoverished broken families. The 85-90% AP test pass rate told a different story: show up every day ready to work, and they had some good teachers who would really work with you.
Thus, the results don't show that charter schools have some secret sauce that is unavailable to district schools. What you're saying is, separate the winners from the losers and the winners will do better than they would otherwise.
That's a defensible position perhaps, but it undermines any argument that privately managed schools are somehow inherently better than district schools.
Public schools are famously bad at picking (hiring, promoting, retaining) the best teachers as well.
Inner cities are a disaster, full stop. Which probably explains why the schools there are also a disaster.
After all, wouldn't it be strange if inner cities were a disaster but the schools located there were a paragon of academic achievement?
There is this alarming trend in our politics which seems to have decided that the poorer and blacker you are, the less you ought to be trusted with your and your own family's livelihood. It's amazing for me to see all of the teachers that I know (I work in the ed. industry) speak often about trying to get into better placements in other schools and whatnot, but at the same time, when it comes to choice and mobility for lower income families, somehow then the "obvious" decision is to force them to be in the system that has systematically underserved them for decades.
If the arguments about needing to put money into public schools is real, and that the exit of certain students to charter schools serves to further undermine the quality of public education, then let's really go all out: Let's forbid charter schools from developing and let's strictly enforce the publicly-funded neighborhood school. But then, let's do the same with administrators, teachers, and staff: Let's have them all be assigned to a school, without any possibility of re-assignment.
See how well teachers/unions/NAACP like that policy...
We were specifically called out in the article for having a board composition that is not diverse and also not representative of parents. It's not clearly stated but is implied that this combination of elements cannot lead to good outcomes for the students involved, and the NAACP is specifically saying that charter schools in general are bad for minorities.
I don't know the education landscape well enough to argue that charter schools are, in general, a good thing for society.
But I do know specifically about what we are doing and how we are doing it and how effective we are at it.
State testing results were released a couple of weeks ago, and we scrambled to make sense of the numbers. Results are here:
http://www.successacademies.org/results/
I can't speak for charter schools as a class, but I can talk about ours. We do outperform public schools consistently and by a wide margin.
There is no spin to these results. We--as a data science team--are ruthlessly and brutally honest with ourselves and with the organization and with the public about how we are performing.
Our organization is guilty as charged in the article of having a board full of mostly white, male, wealthy individuals. Facts are facts, after all.
What doesn't get mentioned is that we target our schools to the areas in NYC that are served the worst by public education. And we are out-performing not only the public schools that are closest in proximity but almost all public schools in NYC and NY state.
The kids that go to our schools are overwhelmingly minorities, overwhelmingly in poor socio-economic circumstances, and overwhelmingly beating the odds and getting one of the best possible educations that's available anywhere. And they are getting that education as close to home as possible or, if they choose, as close to where they would like to be. That's the data that can't be argued with.
The personal anecdotal information that has no bearing on this situation is what I see on the subway day in and day out. I see kids in little SA uniforms with their little SA backpacks on the subway with each other or with a parent, talking about what they learned in school today, what they are excited about learning tomorrow.
None of this represents the official stance of SA, by the way. I'm just a guy writing code and posting on HN. But my opinion is that quality of education is one of the major factors driving inequality in this country right now. I think that we--Success Academy--are a positive influence.
I think that the NAACP stance as stated in the resolution would hurt us, our mission, and the students that we teach every day. I'm not an expert on education in general, and I'm not an expert on race-relations or equality. And I will happily accept critiques about how we can do things better and how we should.
But the NAACP ban on charter schools isn't something that helps the situation. As I see it, the situation is bad. Public schools are not getting the job done. Reform isn't working. We need innovation in this space, and that can't happen within the strictures of the DOE and unionized teachers.
This country needs a better, more equitable education model. And we are trying to find that model. And we are doing it with a data-centric attitude. Every decision we make is based on data. From where to open the next school to how we use technology in the classroom to how we decide to skip or hold back a student.
The article makes it sound like it's impossible for an organization run by wealthy white males to do anything other than make life better for other wealthy white males. It makes an implicit assumption that we are all incapable of working toward a goal of better for everyone. That is clearly not true. The real data does not support that at all.
To be very squishy and not data-centric about it, I devote my life to making the world a better place for minorities. I work hard on my nights and weekends to make life a little better for kids I don't know. Kids who probably wouldn't have a chance in the world if they went to a public school.
Everyone at SA does that. A blanket judgement that all charter schools are bad is wrong in at least one instance.
I don't think they made any such statement.
> We applaud the one out of five charter schools that are truly centers of innovation, fulfilling their original intent.
> I suggest they all take a deep breath and read the resolutions again. The NAACP does not want charter schools shut down. It wants a pause on new, privately managed charters.
Most of the "bad" schools get the same (or even more) amount of funding, resources, coursework/material, as the "good" schools.
The difference that separates the two categories are the students (and their parents).
Charter schools simply don't have to put up with the same destructive students - and are able to create a productive environment for learning for the constructive students.
The problem is they tend to also not follow the NAACP approved racial demographics/splits.
Schools are being used to:
* Warehouse children while their guardian(s) work.
* Train young animals that they are more than wild animals.
* Educate children so that they can be functional in society.
* Allow society to examine children it's members are raising to make sure that things are going well.
The problem is a lack of recognition that these are the actual tasks being formed and the lack of positive feedback loops designed to promote success in these tasks.
I think it would also help if 'schools' were more like an MMO-RPG quest/leveling system than an assembly line.
Which is to say, the NAACP is reiterating the teachers' unions' talking points. It may even believe them — I can't say.