The Myth of Charter Schools
nybooks.com
nybooks.com
Here are (I believe all) of the factual arguments presented in the article:
* The film admits only 20% of charter schools gets "amazing results". In reality, the huge study that stat comes from says only 17% of charters beat public schools, 46% generate comparable results, and 37% are worse.
* The film higlights successes but ignores chains of charters with newsworthy mismanagement scandals (real estate scams, embezzlement, religious indoctrination, $300-400k salaries to teach small student bodies).
* Since test scores are what determines the perceived value of a charter, some charters expel students just before testing days or have high student turnover, particularly with low-performing students.
* The NAEP test the movie relies on for the claim that 70% of 8th graders can't read at grade level says nothing of the sort; the movie distorts the results so that any student scoring less than a B is "below grade level", when in fact only 25% are below C, not 70%. The author of the article was a member of the NAEP governing board.
* One of the film's heroes, Geoffrey Canada, runs a organization managing two (2) charter schools that is funded to the tune of $200MM, and is paid $400,000; the author of the article is an admirer, but implies that no public school system is similarly well equipped.
* In 2010 state tests, 60% of Canada's 4th graders were below "proficient". Canada also expelled his entire first middle school class because their scores were too low, which the movie didn't note.
* Another charter the movie celebrates, Green Dot's Locke High, took $15MM in funding and got only tiny improvements; only 15% of its students are now proficient in English, up from 13.7%; math rose from 4 to 6.7%.
* Another charter, SEED in DC, is successful, but spends 3 times what the average public school spends ($35,000 per student).
* Studies appear to show that teacher quality --- while the most important factor within a school --- accounts for only 10-20% of outcomes, while non-school factors account for almost 60% of the outcome.
* Americans are dissatisfied with the quality of schools in general, but 77% of them rate their own school A or B.
* Finland, the movie's model school system, is entirely unionized, has much lower poverty, and has a stronger social safety net than the US.
* While the movie points out that only 0.04% of teachers ever lose their certificate, it omits the fact that 50% of new teachers leave the profession within 5 years, mostly because of working conditions.
In essence it seems that charter schools either perform at the median or only slightly better than similar public schools.
These issues are cultural, and until we recognize that for large swaths of America the culture is fundamentally broken, nothing will change.
That's a huge oversimplification. Canada's intention was always to use his baby college as a pipeline to feed into his school system. He tried accepting older kids who hadn't gone through the baby college, but found that many had severe discipline problems and IIRC he was also having some major staffing problems. So he decided to kill off the grade while he reorganized his staff, mainly on the theory that he needed to start with younger kids in order for the program to work. Anyway I'm in no way defending KIPP or Canada as a whole, but I also think this critique isn't entirely intellectually honest.
But contrary to the myth that Guggenheim propounds about “amazing results,” even Geoffrey Canada’s schools have many students who are not proficient. On the 2010 state tests, 60 percent of the fourth-grade students in one of his charter schools were not proficient in reading, nor were 50 percent in the other. It should be noted—and Guggenheim didn’t note it—that Canada kicked out his entire first class of middle school students when they didn’t get good enough test scores to satisfy his board of trustees. This sad event was documented by Paul Tough in his laudatory account of Canada’s Har- lem Children’s Zone, Whatever It Takes (2009). Contrary to Guggenheim’s mythology, even the best-funded charters, with the finest services, can’t completely negate the effects of poverty.
One might salvage the author's point by saying that it's simply arguing that charters aren't a cure-all; that the disciplinary problems that sabotaged that middle school class are going to exist for any charter, &c.
One difference - you can close the failing charters. Failing public schools are virtually immortal.
Another difference - choice is also valuable.
> * Finland, the movie's model school system, is entirely unionized, has much lower poverty, and has a stronger social safety net than the US.
Finland is less populous than LA, almost all interactions involve relatives and long-term acquaintances, and it's all proto-Scandanavians.
The last point is important - anything works if you just have to deal with Scandanavians (or Mormons).
> * While the movie points out that only 0.04% of teachers ever lose their certificate, it omits the fact that 50% of new teachers leave the profession within 5 years, mostly because of working conditions.
Apples and Oranges. Bad working conditions drive out both good and bad teachers. (Conditions might be more of a issue for folks who have other options, which might be disproportionatly the good teachers.) Certificate revocation is likely to be dominated by bad teachers.
You've restated the article author's point regarding Finland.
You also may have restated the author's point about the 50% of new teachers who don't stick it out 5 years.
Actually, it's not routine. It's a long drawn out struggle. Charters get closed much faster.
> You've restated the article author's point regarding Finland.
The person whom I was responding to seemed to be suggesting that Finland's experience tells us something important about the US. My point is that it doesn't.
> You also may have restated the author's point about the 50% of new teachers who don't stick it out 5 years.
Again, the person to whom I was responding suggested that certificate loss rates and the percentage of teachers leaving the profession because of work conditions have something to do with one another. They don't.
Not true. The school systems in Sweden and Norway are far behind Finland in terms of results.
I'm laughing because that sentence instantly reminded me of pg because of this:
http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
(Which is actually one of my favorite pg essays, but it's still kind of funny.)
Our student body was made up solely of court-involved truants. These were kids who refused to go to school. They attended from 8am until 8pm and worked on regular course work as well as vocational training (I worked in the tech vocational program teaching design / web development / and Cisco networking).
The school had a graduation rate over 90% and over 75% went on to college.
Charter schools do tend to be thematic and some may seem frivolous, but the good ones are designed to help a poorly served segment to excel. It doesn't always work, but when it does it is remarkable.
Charter schools cannot fix the entire system, but I do feel they are an important cog.
If you have students that aren't willing or able to perform in a standard school having alternatives available for them is a great thing. There's no reason that students that have no desire to go to college or what not should not have the option of a school that also offers vocational programs.
If that's all that we're doing as teachers, it doesn't matter a single bit where it happens, so long as students can be made to comply.
Some info: http://www.jefflindsay.com/EducData.shtml
Remember, the goal of schools is to educate children, not provide enjoyable high-wage employment for teachers. Or at least, that is the stated goal.
"There's no need for teachers in that kind of a system since they aren't allowed to deviate from the scripts ...It's really depressing to see what some schools are resorting to to make AYP."
If DI isn't improving student achievement in some categories of student, I agree we should scrap it. If we don't know if it is doing so, we should conduct randomized trials to determine that. But that isn't the critique ktsmith is making.
I am wary of silver-bullet solutions like DI, though; not only might they not work, but they could also be just as damaging to classroom performance as teach-to-the-test standardized testing has been.
Those words were put into my mouth by yummyfajitas. My complaint with DI is that it focuses on repetition and memorization rather than comprehension. It's great that a child can see a word on a test and recognize it then bubble in the correct answer because then we have "achievement." It's result though is meaningless if the child doesn't know what the word means.
I didn't speak to the enjoyment of the job as all I can provide is anecdotal evidence from seven years of observing the classes that I've volunteered in and comments from my wife's time as a teacher. Even this year I have observed that the children and the instructors seem to get more enjoyment out of less scripted and more creatively structured lesson plans, but that's as you said, not the stated goal of education. I would however argue that the rote memorization of facts and formulas isn't education either, the ability to solve problems and think critically in addition to knowing facts and formulas is. That's where I feel direct instruction really fails.
As to easily replaceable teachers... Well, if we are only going to allow scripted lessons, prevent the instructor from using their training to detect which students aren't understanding or incorporate supplemental instruction and alternative methods for those students then why even have teachers? Trained monkeys should do just fine.
If you are asserting that the standardized tests are not properly measuring achievement, then why are you critiquing the education method rather than poorly designed tests? It seems as if your problem is not that DI is failing to achieve the goals of the school, but that you disagree with the school's goals.
... the ability to solve problems and think critically in addition to knowing facts and formulas is.
Could you explain what this means, and how I could measure it?
if we are only going to allow scripted lessons...then why even have teachers? Trained monkeys should do just fine.
This is probably why teachers unions oppose DI.
If this is true (I believe this is likely to be the case), we should invest vastly less in education than we currently do. Rather than trying to find good teachers, we should just aim for the cheapest warm bodies we can find, not to mention speeding up the process (e.g., graduate at 14).
This belief lies behind the signalling model of education - education adds little value but signals to employers that value was already present.
- Good teaching does make a huge difference. A large amount does get washed out due to other factors, but that doesn't mean it would make sense to purposely hire 'warm bodies'.
- Good teachers don't necessarily cost more than bad teachers.
- Teachers salaries are only a small part of school spending. I don't know the exact numbers, but my guess would be 30% of the annual district budget, which IIRC wouldn't include extraordinary expenses.
- Schools aren't the only component of education. There's also early childhood education, libraries, community colleges, etc.
I actually had two chemistry teachers in high school who fit this description. The first was a drunk that they hired off the street (seriously, the administration not believe us until we found an empty whiskey bottle in the back cupboard). They replaced her the second quarter with a flighty woman who didn't understand the material and regularly lost our assignments and tests; some time after they fired her I saw an article in the variety section of the local paper showing her in her home, back to the camera, with her hands on her hips staring at the massive pile of junk in her house—it was an article about ADHD adult packrats. For the final quarter they put us in a real chemistry teacher's class, where none of us were at all prepared having learning nothing for the first 2/3rds of the year, and they had to just give us the credit for the year.
The point of this anecdote is that there were plenty of smart, motivated students in this class, but the teachers made it impossible to learn, so the performance of everyone was equalized to the lowest common denominator. The only people who learned anything were the ones willing to read the book for its own sake without any guarantee of proper labs or tests. The next year I got into the physics class of a teacher who was widely regarded as the best in the school. We learned a lot in that class, but even there you had problem kids who refused to make any effort, despite the fact that the teacher clearly cared about the students; they saw him as someone to be taken advantage of.
So you see, neither factor stands alone. You need decent teachers, and you need kids to show up.
ZachPruckowski and RyanMcGreal seem to be claiming that variation in teaching methods has little effect on achievement, and demographics/non-school factors seem to be the major cause of variations in achievement. If teaching is not a major cause of achievement, we should not waste time and money on it. Similarly, we should not waste time and money on shark repelling sticks or homeopathy.
But I should point out that the anecdote you repeat seems to imply that teachers don't have a particularly large effect on achievement. As you say, "even there you had problem kids who refused to make any effort" and you had "the ones willing to read the book for its own sake". The teacher won't help either of these categories of student very much. Supposing, for the sake of argument, that these two types of students make up 2/3 of the class, and a good teacher can improve the grades of receptive students by 20% over a crappy one, then teacher quality only accounts for 6% of the achievement of the class.
Then there's the Hierarchy of Needs issue. Before you can really learn and grow and develop, you have to fulfill your basic needs. If you're starving, then the only fractions you're able to focus on are fractions of a sandwich.
By the way, no one in America (besides anorexic rich girls) is starving. Gluttony is the only food-related problem faced by the poor, starvation hasn't existed for a while.
So you're suggesting we abandon schooling altogether, and just let all those kids wander around unable to read?
>Gluttony is the only food-related problem faced by the poor, starvation hasn't existed for a while.
Would it were so.
This absolutely not true, some students only meal of the day comes in school with reduced or free lunch. Not every poor kid is accustomed to nothing but what McDonald's serves.
http://www.learnmoreindiana.org/needtoknow/pages/valueofeduc...
As you say, education can increase achievement by 10-20%. Supposing we can get a 20% improvement in graduation rates, that would only be worth $57k/student to the population of future high school dropouts (and it would slightly harm those who don't dropout, but I'll ignore that). A quick google search suggests that about 8% of students drop out.
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16
$57k x 20% x 8% = $900 (per student, over K-12).
If we spend more than $900 to increase graduation rates by 20%, we are wasting our money. If we could reduce dropout rates to 0%, it would be worth $22.9k/student (again, over 12 years).
[edit: fixed calculation.]
The point that the article is making is that it damages the argument against teacher union lock-in to observe that the best teachers in the public school system can only produce a 10-20% bump, because it implies that the free-market hiring practices of charter schools won't solve the core problem. Meanwhile, 50% of all teachers, including (one assumes) several good ones, are leaving the profession early because conditions suck.
Suppose a student costs $8k/year. If spend 3x more to reduce dropout rates to 0%, and we achieve the hypothesized increase in income, we are wasting $170k per student (i.e., we are spending an extra $192k to avoid a $22k loss).
This also assumes that the educational buckets are "drop out, high school, college, and advanced degree". What do you think happens if we substitute "college" with "trade school"? What percentage of students will learn a formal trade if they complete high school that wouldn't if they had to get a GED first?
You also ignore the externalities of high school drop-outs; for instance, what percentage of high school drop-outs end up in prison? Note also that juvenile prisons are spectacularly more expensive than adult prisons. Are you hoping to stipulate that the burden to society of supporting drop-outs is wash against the competitive advantages given to people who complete school?
Also, I suspect that yes, the benefits of having these people graduate high school is a wash. Currently, a high school degree is a signal that you are not dealing with the utter dregs of society and that the student can do what they are told for 12 years. If we spend $16k/year graduating everyone, a high school degree will be a signal that if an employer is willing to devote $16k/year to supervising the employee, they might be able to get some useful low skill labor out of them.
As for your theory of poor kids dropping out and then going bad/getting arrested, it just doesn't fit my experience. At the school I dropped out of, the kids were carrying metal long before they dropped out, and there was nothing that Dangerous Minds could do for them.
Look, I haven't worked out all the numbers. I've just a feel for the orders of magnitude. If you want to "spend 3x more", we will spend more on education than we spend on SS, Medicare and the military combined. I don't see any remotely reasonable way that the benefits would exceed this cost. But feel free to post your own numbers.
[Edit: just noticed I used a slang term. "Dangerous Minds" is a mocking term for nice liberal white girls trying to save their students. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112792/ (Also usable as a verb.)]
However, we may need to triple what we're spending to teach kids in Englewood, or Harlem, or Oakland.
If we could add 100-200bn to education spending to triple the resources allocated to the bottom 10% of school systems, that might very well be worth it: those students are disproportionately likely to benefit from that spending, earn hundreds of thousands of dollars more throughout their life, secure jobs that include health insurance, avoid expensive prison terms, and draw less on welfare.
I believe what the original post was talking about though is something else entirely. Public schools are forced to take any student that is zoned to go there. Charter schools may pick and choose which students attend. In some cases this means that the schools are selecting only those students that will excel at the school thus making the school look better than perhaps it really is. There are charter schools on the end of the spectrum as well. My wife spent a year teaching at a charter school that took in lots of students that were behavior problems in the public schools and who's parents weren't willing to work with the administration/district. That school performs below the level of the public schools. If you look at charter schools, a very small percentage performs better than average, a very small percentage performs worse than average, and the majority are no better than public schools.
Technically her position is actually the more popular one, it's just that you'd never know it because the media has teamed up with silicon valley and wall street to push charter schools and standardized testing. Anyway there is some more analysis on the previous thread linked below, but the fact is that though both Ravitch and the movie make a lot of valid points, neither is fully correct and you're never really going to understand why without reading books. Hacker News is fun and all, but there's no way you're going to understand the last 50 years of educational research after reading a few dozen comments.
This article from BBC summarizes the basics, plus a couple videos. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8601207.stm This focuses in particular on student age, school structure, and respect for the teaching profession.
An longer article about Finland's school reforms since the 1970s. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3098447
``For many people, these arguments require a willing suspension of disbelief. Most Americans graduated from public schools, and most went from school to college or the workplace without thinking that their school had limited their life chances.''
In other words, her argument seems at least in part based on the assumption that the public schools of today are equivalent in quality with the public schools in which most adults today were themselves educated.
It's not clear to me that this is correct...
If we so desire, there could be a genuine basic electrical engineering classes where kids are taught to assemble their own electronics, build robots, amongst other things.
What we got though, is the uninspired math class, the boring basic computer class, reading plays that are meant to be played out, and so on.
However, formal education must use a metric of some kind. A way to say a neat number. The penchants for mechanization where teachers are taught to "teach", not learn and teach, are widespread. Why don't we have industry professional, scientists, and so on, work with the teacher directly?
Doesn't it alway seem to you that educations are in general, just mediocre. The IQ of kids are more than enough to handle complex ideas.
We don't try very hard, but those who try are more likely to be successful, and seemly much more knowledgeable.
I suspect that the "back to the basics" ethos of NCLB has done more harm than good (it's amazing how quickly children learn to read when they're read to every day, rather than the current method which seems to involve lots of phonics instruction in spite of English's phonetic weirdness).
This is the same "back to the basics" ethos that was promoted shortly after Sputnik was launched, and the same ethos that was promoted after "A Nation at Risk" was published.
And when that ethos doesn't work, we generally pile even more on it. "Chidren not performing well enough at math? We'll do 2 hours instead of 1! We'll cut recess!"
I don't think I'm disagreeing with you here, but the only successful attempts I've seen to "improve education" have been the ones that offer more engagement and more freedom, with higher expectations placed on students (as well as a willingness to work around student learning, rather than forcing student learning to work around a pre-determined progress chart).
Everything else has been ham-handed, at best.
The schools in "Waiting for 'Superman'" are the rare few that are getting exceptional results. Yes, we as a country would be smarter if every public school was a charter school with exceptional results, but that's like saying we'd be smarter if every public college was replaced with Harvard or MIT.
And that's just the first argument. Then it breaks into several more about non-school factors being responsible for the majority of achievement variance among students, and about charter school selection effects[1], as well as a lot of discussion of relevant omissions and factual errors in the movie.
I'm not saying I agree absolutely with the article (I haven't seen WfS yet), but if you're dismissing it based on a fact-free first impression of a throw-away line halfway through it, you're doing yourself a disservice.
[1] - Since only students with parents who are deeply involved in their education even apply to charter schools, those students are at an inherent advantage whether or not they get in.
"The annual Gallup poll about education shows that Americans are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the quality of the nation’s schools, but 77 percent of public school parents award their own child’s public school a grade of A or B, the highest level of approval since the question was first asked in 1985."
More central to her argument, however, was her point that once you control for spending and other factors, charter schools seem not to perform significantly better than public schools.
All in all though it's probably the best analysis of the movie I've seen so far, which in itself is kind of sad.