Do charter schools work? A new study of Boston schools says yes.
slate.com
slate.com
Take any single "successful" or "highly rated" charter school in the country and then tell them they must educate all of the kids in the public school district in which their school resides and I doubt we would see the same results. To get into charter schools parents must fill out applications. Right off the bat you have created a pool of potential students who at the very least have parents at home who are active in their children's education. Children like that typically perform better in school regardless of the type of school.
So yeah charters can work. But they work not because they schools are better. They work because the students going to them are better.
Sure, that's something that a public school -- bound by law to include everyone -- can't do, but it's no reason to drag others down into the mess that is public schools.
For example, in MN, we have a number of Somali-language bilingual charters for our massive Somali immigrant population. Fantastic option for Somali immigrant kids. Not so fantastic for other kids. That's not just selection bias on parental involvement, that's appropriate environment for the kids' needs.
You could argue that charters have a selection bias for more passionate teachers and staff, but that's kind of proving the point of the charter schools.
Public schools have to accept everyone, charter schools can be selective.
The ones with lotteries are self-selecting too, because you have to have an involved parent to even enter the lottery, which means only the kids with "good parents" go to that school, which again biases them towards greater success.
Do we not want schools that serve the needs of many different groups?
It also marks you as a person who is conspicuously dishonest. Seriously, saying it isn't "perfectly"" apples to apples is a gross mischaracterization. And yes, that's a very real form of dishonesty.
None of this is to say that anything about public schools, from their founding principles to their day to day administration, is above criticism. That's not the case. But slandering them by way of inappropriate comparisons - then adding to the dishonesty by downplaying just how inappropriate that comparison really is - is wrong.
But saying "apples and oranges" makes it sound like we're talking about elite private schools and urban public schools. We're not. We're talking about schools that are both publicly funded, but have different mandates in how they run their particular institutions.
My point is that if charter schools are a legitimate way to better serve one segment of the population, it seems foolish to discount them just because of the types of people that go to them. We should be striving to give all students the best possible opportunity for success, not hampering them on purpose by making them attend schools that don't meet their needs.
Spinning an already misleading comparison is dishonest, full stop. And saying you were "concerned" that an accurate analogy "makes it sound like we're talking about elite private schools and urban public schools" is even more ridiculous when we are very explicitly talking about the difference between involved and uninvolved parents.
Moreover, if you were truly "concerned" about being misunderstood in this fashion, there's an honest way of handling that - which is saying so in your post. After, all there's no character limit on HN. You're free to be as clear as you need to be.
If you want to argue that charters are better because they can select better students AND they're free to operate in ways that have proven beneficial, then by all means do so. Indeed it would be fascinating to hear about approaches that produce clear benefit regardless of the quality of the students. But that's a much tougher case to make.
Indeed, the most famous example - that of Geoffrey Canada in Harlem - reveals how even the freest, best endowed schools struggle to educate people well enough to break the cycle of poverty.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/education/13harlem.html?pa...
Within those parameters, making a comparison between a Charter School and a Public School is apples to apples - and is a valid comparison to make. It is also completely valid to make what I will call "Granny Smith to Granny Smith comparisons" between different schools of the same variety.
My original point was just to state that Charter Schools might better serve students who have more involved parents - and that I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing.
And now I'm hungry for apples.
Charter schools cannot be selective, by law, in most states, including my state (Minnesota), where charter schools have existed longest.
You are right, though, in that you're starting with a pool of students whose parents care enough to look for something better and take an active role in their children's education. You might have a problem with that. If so, I suggest you read Harrison Bergeron.
edit: More to the point... if I could have attended the fine charter my kids attended, I would have had a better trajectory overall. But more important than the schooling was my innate talent and determination. I'm way over on the nature end of the nature-vs-nurture scale. Bad families and bad schools make the success formula more difficult for kids, but not impossible.
Otherwise we create a situation that looks like this:
1. Parents who are involved fight a losing battle to help their kids succeed in a school that is simply not equipped to educate them.
2. Those students fail to achieve in traditional ways, reinforcing the idea that it's pointless to try.
3. Repeat until everyone suffers from an acute case of learned helplessness.
Not if the funding for the more rigorous school is coming from the same pool of funds that could have gone to the public school.
Shouldn't we work to break up the student population into smaller, more manageable chunks? That way you can target the specific needs of a smaller group and work to make each succeed rather than doing a mediocre job of trying to meet the incredibly diverse needs of a much larger group.
We do not want to have a society where an elite, educated aristocracy rules over an uneducated serf class. That means we need to educate everyone, including people who have less potential.
"Shouldn't we work to break up the student population into smaller, more manageable chunks?"
1. Who is going to pay for it? You will need more teachers, and you will need to pay for a system for dividing students.
2. Politics will come into play. The moment you divide students by anything other than their age, you face accusations of bias. Education is highly political; here is an example that should resonate with the HN crowd:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/nyregion/software-enginee...
True, the serf class needs to be educated.
[edit]
...and I guess an uneducated aristocracy as well.
Grouping people by age during their developmental years is a great way to stunt some people and leaves others hopelessly behind.
[/edit]
I agree with that goal. And that is why I support public policies that allow more learner choice in education, so that everyone can shop for a good fit, and all providers of education are on notice that they can lose revenue if they don't meet learner needs.
My basis of knowledge: I have lived in more than one country, and see that learner power to shop is an important incentive to improved education. I live in the state of the United States that had charter schools the earliest,
http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-Charter...
and that had statewide open enrollment first,
http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...
so I have a direct experience base with living in a state with a moderate degree of learner choice, and that is not harmful to learners.
By which you mean, "If they don't meet the expectations of parents, school board members, and politicians." By what criteria will schools be judged?
Right now, we have a serious problem in education in America: we focus on standardized tests. Schools do "better" if students get high test scores; they do "worse" if students get low test scores. Nobody is asking, "Can the students think for themselves? Can they solve problems they have not seen before?" Is that what you want schools to do -- to just train students to score high on tests?
Politicians love tests, because they are single-dimensional numbers that are easy to point to. Parents like tests because that is what colleges use to filter applicants. School boards like tests because they can point to them when they need to ask the government for money. Nobody cares if students are learning anything other than test taking skills, except for dedicated teachers who actually want to teach. There are exceptions, but such people are, well, exceptional.
The real issue here is that the results of education are long-term, but these "market based" or "accountability based" approaches to school focus entirely on the short-term. You need to look at what the graduates of a particular school are doing 10 or 20 years later. Are they curing cancer? Did they overthrow a corrupt government? Are they working an honest job? Test scores do not tell you these things. It makes sense to shut down a school whose graduates are more likely to wind up in prison than to live a good life. It does not make sense to shut down a school based on standardized tests or college admissions (which is not independent from standardized test scores).
It is not an easy problem. It means taking risks. Yet right now, we are not even trying; we just point to test scores, talk about how terrible unions are, and continue to pretend that "the market" will find a good answer for us.
People learn in many different ways. There were people at the charter school I went to that really didn't care all that much so their experience was a lot different from mine. I complete agree with you when you say that you don't like how people state "this charter school is better than this public school." People learn differently than others. The traditional route is perfect for some and charter schools are better for others. Not all charter schools are the same along with public schools.
The first charter my kids attended, in sixth grade, was awful for them. They were miserable and got bad grades. Does that mean it was a bad school? No, it's a great school! But it was a bad school for my children. The rigid, Catholic-like environment of that first school is great for regular kids who could use a more disciplined environment, but for neuroatypicals, it sucked.
The second school we tried was absolutely wonderful. It followed a project-based learning curriculum that gave children a lot of control over their own learning, but also demanded a lot of responsibility. My oddball children (and the herd of aspies, ADD cases, and queers that accompanied them) thrived in this environment. But frankly, I think it would be a bad school for most kids. It's too demanding.
Charters are in part about experimentation. And some experiments will fail. It's not a good idea to conduct large-scale, risky educational experiments on involuntary subjects - mainstream schools. But for parents and kids who CHOOSE to try new things, the opportunities are fantastic.
Sadly, most people's opinions of charters are knee-jerk political reflex, rationalized with "results" that have nothing to do with how parents or kids feel about their education.
They picked 6 schools that were known to have done well by other measures, and then analyzed a new statistic over the same time period. But the fact that they had done well by other measures could be explained if they had been lucky in the students they got in the lottery, which would also explain their doing well by a new measure.
The simplest way to solve this is to select schools by how well they did with one cohort, and analyze them by how well they do with another. For instance you can select them based on performance during people who entered in even years on one exam, then analyze them by people who entered in odd years on the other exam. Yes, this cuts your sample size in half. But it avoids this particular bias.
(This does not, unfortunately, avoid the possible bias from getting lucky with who they hired as teachers. Yes, the school may work. But was it by design or chance? The school will always think by design, but unless some charter school can start pumping out successful franchisees, it will be hard to find proof.)
Moreover, charters with a clearly-defined academic approach attract a certain kind of student, and a certain kind of parent. So you're not getting a flat, level field of either teachers or students (what I call a "perfectly spherical cow"). You're getting a selective subset of both teachers and students, which will bias the results right there.
But you have an excellent point that a certain charter may be an excellent fit for some subset of teachers/parents, but not be appropriate for the broader population.
States that allow charters to be selective are on a bad path, imho. Like public schools, charters should be required to accept any students who apply and get through the lottery.
Market segmentation is a good thing. Lenovo builds great laptops for me and other linux geeks. Apple builds great laptops for hipsters and their moms. And both Apple and Lenovo (together with their customers) can segment the market. Does that mean the computer industry is on a "bad path"?
What you're talking about is more like the case of Abercrombie and Fitch refusing to make clothes for people that they don't find attractive size-wise. That's fine for private business, but not appropriate for publicly-funded systems like schools.
How is this not a pareto win (for students)?
Back in the real world, when you create one system for relatively well-off people and another for the rest, the tendency is to see the privileged system constantly improved and the fallback languish into a horrible state. This has certainly happened in education. If you create charter schools and allow them to choose who can attend, it is inevitable that successful ones will cherrypick children who start with intellectual abilities and the financial/educational family background to back that up. This creates the kind of two-tiered system that has lead to problems in the past.
That result may be pareto optimal, but it is a social injustice of the kind that many don't on principle want supported by tax dollars. (Of course in practice, if you're personally benefitting, protests tend to be much more muted...)
...the tendency is to see the privileged system constantly improved and the fallback languish into a horrible state.
I'm don't understand - how does the existence of alternatives prevent improvement? Could you clarify this point?
If Lenovo's customers were superior (in any relevant sense) to Apple's customers, would that cause apple to "languish into a horrible state"?
It is very simple. If there are two somewhat separable programs, but one is much more heavily used by the constituents that politicians care about, the privileged one will consistently enjoy an advantage in resource allocation decisions. This eventually will cause them to be very unequal alternatives.
Also schools are in the habit of raising money from parents in a variety of ways. If all of the well-off parents go to one school, then that school will naturally enjoy a significant funding advantage. If this is what the parents want to do, then fine. But that should be a private school, rather than a charter school that received public funds on top.
Furthermore while the amount of state money that follows students may be the same, when schools raise money from parents, having parents with money helps a lot.
Thus, your first concern "the privileged one will consistently enjoy an advantage in resource allocation decisions" is invalid with this simple system.
As for your second concern, it seems as if you want to prevent people from investing in their own children's education. Should children who attend publicly funded schools also be prevented from attending Kumon, and should the hiring of private tutors by their parents be banned? If not, why not?
What this DOES result in is at best marginal increases in test scores, but significantly happier parents, students, and teachers.
The politics surrounding education. Is there an underrepresented minority at your school? Are there more men than women?
Basically, if your school is dividing students by anything other than age, and if applicants are selected by something other than a lottery, politics will kill you (but never mind that college admissions, which seem to be a goal of some charter schools, are not based on lotteries or on age groups; politics is not supposed to make sense, right?).
[Edit: there are exceptions, of course; I attended a public high school that screened applicants with a test. In general, though, it is hard for a public school to be selective, because public schools are subject to political pressures.]
Charter schools can be set up for any purpose. Some focus on the arts, others emphasize cultural heritage (there are multiple Hmong charter schools in the Twin Cities alone); some are vocational, others rigorously academic. As Rockoff puts it, asking whether a particular school is good based on test scores or college placement is in many cases the wrong question: “To extend the restaurant metaphor, some people like Italian, others like Thai food. Similarly, many [charter] schools focus on tested subjects, while others might emphasize creative writing or the arts.” Not every charter school is right for every kid.
That said, this article fails to mention one of the most salient arguments in favor of charter schools: If education is the primary path for upward social mobility, then every parent should have some choice in where their child goes to school. And that choice should not be wholly dependent on current socioeconomic status.
Some schools may not do better according to traditional measurements, but creating a system where schools more transparently market their strengths and weaknesses to parents doesn't just give them more decision making power, over time it also creates a more informed parent class. Eventually leading to even better schools.
I don't see how this follows.
So, if the government is going to force people to send their children to school, but isn't going to MANDATE a minimum quality level, they should at least give people a choice in deciding what's best for their kids. Because as it is now, the government is forcing people to send their kids to schools we all know are terrible.
However, I live in a small Texas town and my wife's business deals with two private school. If these schools are typical, it is entirely possible for parents to put their children into a worse-by-design school that teaches young-earth creationism and inculcates habits and an anti-social orientation and which breeds awkward, dysfunctional people.
On one hand, the state and local governing bodies do mandate a level of quality that can be avoided by parochial schools and on the other hand it is entirely possible for people to actively choose standards poorer than the public ones.
Actually, I think the most important thing about charter schools is the failure feedback loop: bad ones can fail, which most large, urban school districts can't. No matter how bad a district or school might be, most parents have no cost-effective choice.
Charters at least solve that problem. I don't think they're a panacea or that all charters are automatically better than public schools, but at least they can fail.
Maybe charter schools haven't been widely operating long enough for this, but is anyone aware of any studies - either completed or in progress - that compare charter/standard public/private school student life-outcomes on a longer time-scale?
I certainly agree that the same shoe can't fit every person, but systems that allow self-selection and the stranding of the downtrodden in hopeless and ineffective environments can't be good for the health of a nation which relies on elections and by proxy the ability of each citizen to think and reason their way through the ballot box.
I tend to think that forcing everyone to use public education would coerce the parents who send their kids to charter and private schools to instead push for improvements in public education that all students would benefit from, rather than being able to ignore large segments of society and having strong incentives to make public education worse at the expense of the country as a whole.
And more bluntly, I find it really frustrating that diversity is a liberal value EXCEPT when it comes to education. The real value of charters imho is diversity, not superiority. Give kids a chance to be educated in a a manner suited to their own minds and personalities, not trapped in a one-size-fits-most-but-really-sucks-for-others system.
Charter schools allow those who aren't that well of to get a better education for their kids, which is fair as it is their tax money which pays for the education in the first place.
Do some charter schools work? A new study of Boston schools says yes.
http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.htm...
Today most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.
http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf
http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html
The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two further reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment
http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...
and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.
http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index...
And Minnesota also has the oldest charter school statute in the United States.
http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-Charter...
Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detect the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and give it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices.
The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. It's a start. More choices would be even better.
That said, your comment basically amounts to an ad hominem attack against an article and related study that you clearly didn't even read, as the information you were asking for was provided in the article. Your post does nothing to further intelligent discussion. It's bad, and you should feel bad.
[1]: http://www.tbf.org/ [2]: http://seii.mit.edu/