Open question that wasnt really discussed in the article-
Why are charter schools demonized?
My local area HATES them, and I'm not sure if its politics or worthwhile.
EDIT: Why did I get 5 downvotes?
Why are charter schools demonized?
My local area HATES them, and I'm not sure if its politics or worthwhile.
EDIT: Why did I get 5 downvotes?
- Charter schools take money away from neighborhood public schools. Most schools are funded per-capita, so fewer students means less money. But many costs are fixed/discrete (e.g. school nurse costs N thousand dollars).
- Charter schools have inflated performance metrics. Often charter schools don't serve special needs students. More than that, charter schools bias towards engaged and interested parents. Because of policies like No Child Left Behind, it is really bad for local neighborhood schools to have all of their high performing students leave for charter schools.
- Corporatization is evil. Charter schools often run more like a business than a socialized institution. Some even pay kids for good grades. Often, the success of a charter school depends on marketing, and successful marketing depends on performing well on metrics. Charter schools are then incentivized to "teach to the test" and potentially force out students who don't perform well. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Thats an interesting way of saying that charter schools get better results.
> charter schools don't serve special needs students. More than that, charter schools bias towards engaged and interested parents. Because of policies like No Child Left Behind, it is really bad for local neighborhood schools to have all of their high performing students leave for charter schools.
But when taken to an extreme, this leads to exclusive areas and excluded people.
But the question of "where should I send _my_ kids" should be considered separately from "how should education in this country as a whole be structured."
You have to distinguish between the macro and micro. Another example is college. If my nephew asked me whether he should go to college, I'd say, definitely do that, if you can afford it. But on a macro level, college in the US has kind of become scam and we have to do something about it.
Automation will have decimated many industries, what will be left is up in the air, and when he graduates will those jobs still be there?
Unless in the future college is more of an extra-curricular boredom thing because post-scarcity society and all (wishful thinking).
"better results" should mean given a similar set of students. If you cherry-pick the inputs don't expect comparing outputs to be the same.
There's an attitude that everybody should do poorly together, and that's better than anybody succeeding. Like a bucket of crabs, each clawing at the others trying to get out and pulling them back in that keeps the poor, doing poorly. And well-meaning ivory-tower types fuel the culture with idealistic 'fairness' arguments.
Charter schools like elite colleges gain 90% of their reputation from rejecting average or below students. There is variation among school quality adjusting for incoming students, however that exists for both normal and charter schools with many charter schools preforming worse than expected and many public schools preforming far above expectations.
However, if you want to support the value of some institution or approach it's really easy to ignore this fact and create biased research.
Recent research on statewide voucher programs in Louisiana and Indiana has found that public school students that received vouchers to attend private schools subsequently scored lower on reading and math tests compared to similar students that remained in public schools. https://www.brookings.edu/research/on-negative-effects-of-vo...
Or do you want the actual research papers?
Charter schools are about - whatever each is constituted to be about. Like you can't go to a hardware store and grab a random tool and rate it on how well it drills holes. You shouldn't rate charter schools on your favorite metric. Some are about upper-class folk raising their kids with better music and art appreciation. Others are about escaping backward school boards. Sometimes they are in areas so backward, that the charter school still underperforms the national average. But if its an improvement for that area, its an improvement.
It's perfectly reasonable to look at the magnet school model as a good thing. However, you now have to defend the associated sacrifices.
I personally feel K-12 is to early to specialize so improvements at the cost of general achievement is a poor use of taxpayer funds.
For example for me specialization couldn't come too early. Specializing even at age 12 would have been fine. Everything else could have fallen by the wayside, I only was interested in and good at exactly one thing and only at University did I finally meet anybody who actually challenged me, only there did I find specialisations within the specialisation that were all attractive. In some ways the last 3-4 years of school were just waiting.
For plenty of other kids they got all the way to an undergraduate degree in some general subject area they didn't care about, still with no clear idea what they were about, no real direction, forcing them to specialize earlier would have hurt them severely by cutting off options.
Without fairly intensive Chemistry (and preferably some Biology) by age sixteen, you are not going to become a good medical doctor. Without putting many hours a week into mathematics (not just enough to grasp a vaguely analytical subject like engineering, serious fundamental mathematics) by age eighteen you are never going to become a serious mathematician. And sucks to be you if, aged twenty-five, you at last find out you are a natural with a basketball, or at soccer, or dozens of other sports which require peak physical performance that's unattainable in middle age.
All our options here suck, somewhere a kid will be betrayed by whatever happens, if they're able to specialise, some of them will pick wrong and regret it. No fault to them, just bad luck. If they can't specialise the mandatory general achievement will prevent some of the most talented in specific fields from ever achieving what was possible.
I have no recommendation here, just commiserations.
That said, you have a good point that some fields really do require a lot of early work. I just think they should be added as supplement not simply replacing the foundations of a good education.
Either that, or it is simply a follow on of the fact that parents with money, free time, and high levels of education tend to have students that do well in school. The school may make no difference at all if the kids learn a lot at home.
- Charter schools expand choice for low-income families. If your public school sucks and your family is doing well, you can always move elsewhere or go to private school. If you're from a poor family, charter schools are your only escape valve
- Maybe it's bad for the public school, but it's good for the high performing students themselves, who are no longer dragged down by disruptive/disengaged classmates.
- The vast majority of charter schools are non-profit. The people running and funding a charter school are just as motivated by good intentions, as those in public schools. They just happen to experiment with different approaches and methods, while giving students/parents the final say on where they want to go.
- Metrics can be gamed, but a complete lack of metrics can also be exploited by underperforming/incompetent/disengaged organizations. Tracking a reasonably good metric is better than tracking no metric at all - something seen in how most successful organizations operate.
According to this article [1], schools can technically be registered as a non-profit, but contract out day to day operations to a for-profit management company owned by the same people who run the non-profit.
This setup allows the school to take in tax free donations, but it means that from a profit motive standpoint it's identical to a for-profit school.
I have no idea how common this is, but it does mean that it's not quite as simple as saying that the vast majority are non-profit.
1. https://ourfuture.org/20170615/are-nonprofit-charter-schools...
Only if charter schools are not permitted to pick and choose who attends.
"Maybe it's bad for the public school, but it's good for the high performing students themselves, who are no longer dragged down by disruptive/disengaged classmates."
This kinda boils down to "fuck you, I've got mine." It's why no one likes libertarians.
"The vast majority of charter schools are non-profit."
Citation needed. And a citation that they're actually non-profit, and not a non-profit in the same way the NFL is a non-profit.
"They just happen to experiment with different approaches and methods, while giving students/parents the final say on where they want to go."
Yeah, but many times those "experiments" have to do with just breaking unions.
There is a charter coming to the highest population area of the county and people are excited simply because it's managed by a state level school board instead of the county.
What's the impediment to voting out those people? Do they represent areas that are mostly retirement communities or something?
Such a lie/distortion
[0] http://www.uaedreform.org/downloads/2014/07/the-productivity...
Because they don't have to serve all the students, and they don't have to serve special needs students. Not mentioning that is quite dishonest.
Once they start operating, they are intensely focused on minimizing cost. That translates into alot of student displacement as children who are disruptive or have various disabilities get tossed back, and increases the costs and operational challenges.
They are also disruptive to orderly and efficient operations of school districts. Kids and bureaucracies don't accept change well -- bouncing these kids creates problems.
In the small city I live in, charters appeared like locusts, and led the city district to close and sell a couple of schools. As the charters attrit troublesome students and get shut down for poor performance, hundreds of kids get "dumped". That results in overcrowded and high churn schools. My local elementary school lost it's music room, half of the library and has two outdoor classrooms as additional space that had to be cleared out to accomodate disabled students and handle growing class sizes.
They're stuck in a catch-22 -- their budgets are out of wack because they need proportionally more special ed teachers, and it's hard to know true capacity and more charters open and close.
As soon as there were social issues between my daughter and her teachers or her and other students (bullying by other students), the staff quickly turned against us. We met with the principal several times about specific students bullying her but all they wanted to talk about was how she wasn't showing up often enough to school (she often faked being sick to avoid her bullies).
We quickly realized that the school was only concerned about losing funding because of attendance metrics and we pulled her out. It was a horrible experience for us.
There are many benefits and drawbacks to charter schools. The conditions in my area are not universal to other parts of the country.
There seems to be a prevailing notion that they are enclaves for scared white parents, but the reality is a bit more complex than that.
Pretty good summary of the common criticisms.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/05/...
This means a greater burden on the non charter schools with the same budget (charter school students don't pay more) - and special needs kids aren't paid by federal funds (where I live it's mostly local tax).
Also they statistically perform equally or more poorly compared to public schools.
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short answer, is that a lot of them tend to be run by scammers trying to turn a buck
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Long answer, is that education is actually a weird product, with a lot of information asymmetries baked in, and where a lot of time the quality people are actually hoping to buy is the signal around the product, instead of the product itself
And the signal is often elusive if that's what you're actually hoping to buy
At first I just thought it was a schoolroom drama, but then I realized it was a full on anti-charter school propaganda piece. Like, mustache twisting, “if I can only get rid of this pesky teaching thing, I can get rich!” villains.
It struck me as bizzarre. Not because I disagree with their position... maybe that’s in fact happening in the Bay. I just didn’t understand who is enjoying such an overt propaganda piece. Where’s the joy in being beaten over the head with a political message?
And what are the producers thinking? People are too dumb to be informed or to form their own conclusions so we need to trick them into hating charter schools?
In some states/districts, they're basically public schools that have an external partner. I taught at such a school in Baltimore. In other places, they're more or less completely independent of the district that funds them. Anywhere on that spectrum, you can cherry-pick successes and disasters.
But certainly, they have introduced a great deal more complexity and ambiguity in the discourse of education. Much of the negativity towards charters comes from a skepticism that is difficult to fully inform. So people are forced to take the shortcut of deciding whether they are for or against "charter schools", broadly speaking. Fact is, not everyone has time to become an expert, in order to hold more nuanced opinions.
I prefer to frame the debate around the "school choice" movement, which is broader idea that districts should work more like marketplaces or laboratories for education. I'm very skeptical. For one thing, the "choice" that results isn't free and isn't equally distributed. For another, it tends to centralize the blame for poor outcomes on poor performers in the district, rather than systemic issues. Yet, most of the poor performers are the very schools that have the highest risk students, because these are the same students unlikely to have the agency and social capital to effectively exercise their choice.
Maybe blowing up the whole thing is the solution to bad management (which is the case in many school systems), but doing it circuitously sucks.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-charters-admissions-i...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/charter-schools-special...
Charter schools (usually) do not have unionized teachers that are part of the larger teacher's unions. That means they have their own standards for hiring and firing teachers that they can do in response to poor performing teachers.
The counter argument is that charter schools take money away from public school systems, further leading to their collapse as it's a vicious cycle. Parent pulls child from crappy school, school loses funding, school gets worse, more parents pull their kids, etc.
The Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the 'Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative' [0], only to find that teacher evaluation isn't an effective way to improve student outcomes.
Maybe there's more to improving student education than isolating individual teachers as a cause.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2018/06/25/5-less...
Did you actually read the article to which you linked? Some choice quotes (emphasis mine):
> The reforms demanded too much time. The evaluations required an enormous amount of time and paperwork, and were frequently seen as a burden and distraction by teachers and school leaders alike.
> Principals tended to rate teachers highly, and scores inflated over time. It turns out that principals generally don’t like to give negative evaluations to their teachers, especially when they don’t really trust that poor performers will be removed. If principals expect that teachers will stick around regardless, they’d rather be on good terms and avoid alienating their staff.
> None of this means that teacher evaluation “doesn’t work.”
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2018/06/25/5-less....
The problem isn't that rating and firing teachers doesn't work. It's that rating without the ability to fire is pointless and whatever rating system they came up with was too onerous. I blame both of those on teacher's unions which are, IMHO, one of the worst forms of public sector unions.
> rating without the ability to fire is pointless
A fair point.
> whatever rating system they came up with was too onerous.
All measurement systems come at a cost. Picking the unions to blame without looking at what the researchers or the funders required seems premature.
You don't like unions. Finland, where education reform has worked, has teachers unions. It might serve you well to investigate further if you want to achieve education reform here.
> A near-exclusive focus on TE might be insufficient to dramatically improve student outcomes. Many other factors might need to be addressed, ranging from early childhood education, to students' social and emotional competencies, to the school learning environment, to family support. Dramatic improvement in outcomes, particularly for LIM students, will likely require attention to many of these factors as well.
It vastly oversimplifies things to focus on teacher evaluation (and consequences) as a solution, and further oversimplifies things to blame unions.
> 5. None of this means that teacher evaluation "doesn’t work." Rather, the point is that it’s much more complicated and much harder to do well than advocates, the Gates Foundation, or these districts initially anticipated.
There is clearly more to 'improving student education than isolating individual teachers as a cause', but average effectiveness of the faculty of a program is going to be a fairly defining metric.
What if we focus on evaluating the technique rather than the teacher to take a little bit of the vindictiveness out of the discussion and more properly equip those that are entering the field? Today new K12 teachers in the US are given basic skills around classroom management, building student relationships and the technical substrate required to teach the material. From there, young teachers learn on the fly from the staff they work with (usually the first problem), their own intuition and whatever resources and experiences are available to them.
Clearly there is some kind of spectrum, Richard Feynman vs Ben Stein in Ferris Beuller's Day Off, how do you decompose those differences in a way that you can measure their component contribution to overall effectiveness and build the most important ones up in those that are just entering the field. Maybe there are different 'roles' in teaching that could be aligned to personality types...the 'inspirers' and the 'questioners' and the 'fortifiers' and the 'ass kickers'.
I don't know the answer. I do know there are good teachers and great teachers and ones that are ten years overdue for a different career and I feel that it's worth continued time and energy sorting out what makes it that way.