Under a charter school system, if a child feels unsafe in a school, or the parent feels like the education is not up to par, they can enroll at a new school with no financial penalties, as long as there is a charter school willing to enroll the child mid-year, and as long as that school is within transportation range, and as long as that school offers similar or better educational opportunities, and as long as that school doesn’t have its own bitchy-female-student clique, etc, etc, etc. None of these are guaranteed, even in a broad charter school system.
No, SOME studies have shown that SOME charter schools mean lower costs and higher test scores, at least for SOME students. The heterogeneity of charter schools means that other studies show higher costs and lower scores. Overall, research shows decidedly mixed results; see the CREDO website at Stanford for links to many different studies with widely varying results.
The mixed results are exactly why I think we need to be careful in discussions around charters. A charter school that has strong oversight, that is funded according to the programs they actually offer, and that engages in no direct or indirect strategies to reduce enrollment of poor/minority/EC students, can be a great addition to our public education system. Charter schools with poor oversight, with funding that doesn’t match services provided, or that act as a sneaky way to resegregate schools, should be transformed into private schools with no public funding.
I also feel like it’s very hard for parents to be wise consumers of education–especially parents who did not come through the American education system themselves. If there’s no oversight, if schools can present themselves however they like without any standardized data to compare or outside standards to live up to, there is a real incentive to spend a little bit of money on cosmetic shiny stuff that wows people on at an open-house interest meeting and not on actual educational improvements.
I also want to point out that a lot of private schools suck, too. There are some incredible ones, of course, but there are also a great many that offer a “ready for regional state level college” education as their most ambitious program. And a lot in the middle that basically prepare kids about the same as a standard suburban high school–certainly no better. People don’t pay for rock-start education. They pay for safety, stability, community, control, flexibility, and status.
Very true. To the extent that people see charter schools as a solution to the ills of public schools, they’re wrong, for this reason among others: we need to have public schools sufficient to meet the needs of children whose parents aren’t adroit at navigating a bureaucracy. If our current public schools don’t do that, we can’t just siphon some kids off into charter schools; we need to change our public schools.
There can be many different ways to set up a school choice system for charter schools. If there are only a couple of charter schools in an awful district then they would probably be oversubscribed. However, if charter schools were allowed to be built to satisfy demand then it would be possible to change schools mid year.
So in your hypothetical there is a network of mean girls that communicates from school to school which girls need to be bullied so there is no way to escape them? More choices do not guarantee better choices but it does tend to go that way.
It is hard for people to be wise consumers of anything. However most people manage. It is definitely easier to become a wise consumer of schools than it is to learn how to navigate the byzantine bureaucracy of a school district in order to educate one’s child.
Aren’t safety, stability, community, control, flexibility, and status good things that should be available to people who can not afford a private school?
That doesn’t seem automatic to me. Charter schools aren’t going to run much under capacity: you can’t afford to. Public schools don’t–we move teachers around every October in my district, “leveling” to make sure that no one is paying for more teachers than they need. Public schools will take kids mid-year because 1) they have to and 2) the natural attrition usually insures that there are slots. But do charter schools have the same attrition? Part of their appeal is that “parents of agency” leads to a more stable population.
The byzantine bureaucracy of a public school system at least doesn’t have an explicit profit motive to distort and misrepresent its program. Public oversight of all schools receiving public money–public and charter–goes a long way toward helping parents understand what’s going on.
I am not convinced that charters can offer “safety, stability, community, control, flexibility, and status” at a higher rate than public schools. The private schools that do this charge a lot more per head than what a charter gets from the state.
If this is a problem serious enough for a solution, the simplest solution would be to allow more flexibility in moving from one public school to another. Building an entire extra layer of schools just to accommodate this rare problem (“bullying” isn’t the rare problem; rather, “bullying so bad that a kid wants to change schools, AND a staff unable or unwilling to put an end to it” is pretty rare) seems like overkill.
Bullying is not the only problem in schools. Some schools just have poor academics, some could have a bad principal, or a lack of activities. All of these problems can be ameliorated by letting the parents pick the child’s school. From slash 2k’s link “According to a 2013 study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), the relative performance of charter schools compared to traditional schools has improved each year. The most recent CREDO study showed that charter school students in urban areas gain roughly 40 days of additional learning per year in math and 28 additional days of learning per year in reading.”
Anyone who studied economics or evolution should not be suprised at these results. Currently if you have a good school and a bad school, the good school does not expand and the bad school does not shrink. If parents could choose the good school instead of the bad school there would be more children at good schools and lessstudents at bad schools. Bad urban schools have been a problem for as long as I can remember so why not try something other than the status quo. The theory is good, the results so far are promising, why do we need to sacrifice any more generations of kids to poor schools?
School choice is honestly a completely different conversation than charter schools. I’m all for districts have a robust system of differentiated schools, though I feel pretty strongly that there needs to be serious effort to ensure real transportation options to those schools.
Why do you think charter schools are outside the conversation of school choice in general? They are part of a spectrum of choices that parents should have in education.
The charter I worked at, they started as a 12 person after school program. They eventually grew to offer full K-12 education so kids could go through an entire program through graduation serving thousands of students. This turned around an entrenched system that was failing kids with no way to improve it. Teachers and administrators could not be removed and it took shuttering the school and converting it to a charter to achieve those results. It’s made a world of difference in the community for those kids.
Not a panacea, but a potential solution in the right environment.
But you can be pro-school choice and anti-charter, or at least anti-lots of models of charters. If your only pro-charter argument is that you want school choice, I think you need to have some sort of argument why school choice can’t be built within the existing school system.
There are other arguments for charters–flexibility to experiment and the ability to focus instruction are the two most compelling, I think–but puddleglum is focused on choice.
I’m only familiar with the CA school system so my comments are limited to those. There is no choice in public schools - it’s controlled by your address. Transfers are allowed, but preference for admission is always given to those students in the geographic boundary as set by the school boards. Higher performing schools drive home prices higher, and these schools will not have room typically. In my area, houses on the side of the boundary that has the good school could cost 30% or more greater than ones on the other side of the street. The ones on the other side of the street will never get into the other school because it’s full. Actually it’s at over 150% capacity of what it was designed for.
Right. But in my (large, urban) district we have a host of magnets that specialize in all sorts of things, from pre-K to 12th grade. Those schools are desegregation legacies, and they provide busses. Most have admission criteria, but many are not strenuous. We also have “choice schools” which have attendance zones that overlay “neighborhood schools”. Kids that live closer to choice schools have priority, but it’s a wider zone than the neighborhood schools, and there is enough capacity that most end up taking kids outside the immediate area. I think they are all lottery. What with one thing or another, we have capacity for something like 40% of our 9th graders outside of their neighborhood schools. These schools are all part of the district. There are also tons of charter schools around, as well.
There’s overlap between the school choice and the charter school debate, to be sure, but they are not the same debate.
That seems to me like a very naive perspective, just based on the fundamental characteristics of universal childhood education.
Namely, elementary/secondary education is chockablock with what the econ types call “positive externalities”. That means that a large share of the benefits it produces doesn’t go to the people who directly pay for its costs. Rather, it goes to third parties, such as future employers, co-workers, offspring, fellow citizens, etc.: all the people who will benefit in the future from dealing with well-educated, knowledgeable critical reasoners instead of ignorant dolts.
Enterprises with few positive externalities are comparatively easy to make money off of. Most of the benefit produced is captured by the consumer who’s doing the paying, so what they’re willing to pay is on a par with the costs and profit that the producer’s price is supposed to cover.
You buy a new TV, say, and most of the benefit of that TV is being directly received by you, the purchaser. So a new TV seems to you to be “worth” a fairly good chunk of money, so it’s not hard to sell decent TVs and make a good profit at the same time.
But when it comes to paying for universal basic education, which is a highly costly enterprise, most of the people directly paying for it are not directly receiving most of the benefits of it. So there is a strong general tendency to think of education as “too expensive”. Hence the chronic underfundedness of much of American education, especially in districts where poorer taxpayers can’t afford a lot of support and wealthier neighboring communities are highly averse to sharing resources.
When somebody bounces in to a situation like that and chirps “Hey, we’re going to provide great education and we’ll make good money at it, too!”, I tend to be very skeptical of their claims. Universal basic education, like universal healthcare, public transit, etc., is inherently not an easy-profits field because of the positive externalities. It is so difficult to get and maintain funding for even necessary school activities that promises of “generating big profits for owners” on top of that seem extremely unconvincing.
And yeah, the last time we all rode this merry-go-round we heard a whole lot about how private enterprise is so genius compared to the stupid old public sector that they’ll naturally find ways to produce terrific education and great profits at the same time. Well, the real-world results generally turned out to be massively underwhelming. Private enterprise makes money out of education initiatives the same way it’s always done: by either providing very specific targeted skillset training or skimping on services while ripping off the consumer. I see no reason to expect that things would magically work out differently this time around.
And for those who are about to object that private schools make money and often provide excellent education, I have one word: Endowments. There are damn few, if any, high-quality private schools actually operating on a fully for-profit basis.
No, there is no need of such a network. The Bitchy Female Clique can spot the socially awkward without any prompting from their cohorts elsewhere; the kid who gets bullied at School A not infrequently gets bullied at schools B, C, and D too.
Not really. What makes a school a wise choice? Is safety more or less important than adequate lab materials? Is a strong community more or less important than a strong curriculum? How do you even know what’s a strong curriculum anymore? Is the Common Core a good set of standards, or a liberal/commie plot to undermine American youth? Is the school’s approach to teaching math more or less likely to help your child than the pedagogy used at that other school?
Sure, you’ll likely figure out in a few years whether your child gained adequate skills, but if the kid didn’t, being several grade levels behind by sixth grade isn’t a recipe for long-term success–your child may be so far behind his or her peers that they have lasting effects. Moreover, you probably won’t know whether your child gained the most they were capable of gaining: if the kid was capable of stellar performance and merely gained “adequate” skills, that could also have a lifetime of impacts.
Where’s the research that these features are only available, or most widely available, in charter schools?
Yep. Did you read the part of the 2013 CREDO study of all charter schools (not just urban ones) that shows that charter students in twelve states have better learning gains in mathematics than their peers at traditional public schools, while charter students in thirteen states have LOWER learning gains (and two states have comparable results across both groups)? It’s on page 52 of the 2013 study. On page 57, we find that when comparing academic achievement at charter schools to the traditional public schools in the same locale/market, 40% had roughly comparable results in math, 29% of charters did significantly better, and 31% did significantly worse. Nearly one-third of students being moved from bad schools to worse ones isn’t exactly avoiding sacrificing another generation.