So do what my district does: make every single elementary school a magnet theme school, and allow tremendous latitude in which school a child attends.
Our system was set up as an alternative to bussing in order to desegregate our schools, and it results in a few folks not getting their first choice. The school I teach at has a great reputation, especially among wealthier white families, and has a waiting list for white students; another school in the district is still majority-black, even though our district is nothing like majority-black. So the system is not perfect. Still, though, it gives a lot of choice to parents.
Charter schools are not necessary if all you want is choice.
Again, though, I don’t oppose charter schools, as long as the laws to allow them are done right. These laws must include things like:
-A guarantee that funding won’t be drawn away from students at the local district.
-A guarantee that all students, including EC students, can attend the school.
-A guarantee that services disproportionately used by low-income students (e.g., transportation, free/reduced lunch, etc.) are available in a form that low-income families actually use. (So, no rich white families vaguely promising to provide rides to poor black kids and then shrugging helplessly when their offer’s not accepted).
-The same sort of standardized testing required of public schools (because if it’s not necessary for oversight of charters, it’s also not necessary for oversight of public schools).
In North Carolina, none of these provisions are in the law, and I think our system of charters is really problematic therefore. But it’s a problem with implementation, not necessarily a problem with charter schools in theory.
Ok, ask yourself this. 20 years ago, only a tiny number of charter schools existed. Today about three million kids attend charter schools in over 40 states, and the number is growing by about a quarter million per year. Many charter schools have opened in big urban school districts with large numbers of poor and racial minority students, such as New York, Newark, Detroit, New Orleans, and Los Angeles. Why the rapid growth, particularly in the big urban areas?
Could it be because the parents of poor, minority kids want their kids to attend charter schools? Indeed, in most cases, parents choose to enroll their kids in charters. Why are they choosing to enroll their kids there if the goal of charters is “to create a permanent underclass”? Do these parents want to go out of their way to make their kids part of a permanent underclass?
Some facts about test scores in a study of Success Academy, a charter school network serving mainly minority students in NYC:
Success Academy schools did well in English—68 percent of students were proficient, compared with 30 percent in the city over all—but in math, the scores were astonishing. Ninety-three percent of Success Academy test-takers were proficient in math, compared with 35 percent citywide.
To put that into perspective, of the 1,282 public schools tested, just 12[li] were part of the Success Academy network, or 1 percent of the total. Yet 5 out of the 10 schools that scored highest in math were part of the Success Academy network. Of the 20 schools that did best in math, 9 were part of the Success Academy network. All twelve schools in the network were ranked in the top 40 for math. Results of this sort were unheard of before Success Academy arrived on the scene.[/li]
Likewise, a study of charter schools in Detroit:
Compared to the educational gains that charter students would have had in a traditional public school (TPS), the analysis shows that, on average, students in Michigan charter schools make larger learning gains in both reading and mathematics. Thirty-five percent of the charter schools have significantly more positive learning gains than their TPS counterparts in reading, while two percent of charter schools have significantly lower learning gains. In math, forty-two percent of the charter schools studied outperform their TPS peers and six percent perform worse. These findings position Michigan among the highest performing charter school states CREDO has studied to date.
Charter students in the city of Detroit (27% of the state’s charter students), are performing even better than their peers in the rest of the state, on average gaining nearly three months achievement for each year they attend charter schools.
That seems to me like good reasons to not view charter schools as a nightmare. Indeed, it seems like good reasons to view those charter schools studied as wonderful things that brought opportunity to poor students who otherwise would probably have been stuck in lousy public schools.
You linked to John Oliver’s rant about charter schools. Oliver focused on certain charter schools that had been shut down for corruption mainly; those represent a tiny fraction of the total number of charter schools, so he did not give his audience a widely accurate picture of the charter school movement. Here’s an article that rebuts Oliver’s rant with the research that he omitted.
I like how you slip New Orleans in there. Why the rapid growth? Because the state fired all public school teachers after Katrina. Choosing to go to a public school suddenly became very difficult, as the state decided that charter schools were the solution.
The transportation thing is huge. People shrug this off because they really don’t get that for a lot of parents, having a school bus is absolutely essential. They are already taking public transportation an hour one way to get to work–not because they work far away from home, but because public transportation most places turns 15 minute drives into hour long bus trips. It’s just not logistically possible to take a small kid on public transport, get them to school in the 30 minute window when it’s not too early and not too late, and then get to work. So if transportation isn’t provided, there’s really no choice for many families.
School choice can be a sink or swim model: schools have to perform, or kids leave and they lose their funding, becoming even less able to serve the students they have. If you have a car, that sounds fine, because you’ll be one of the ones leaving–you rather expect everyone to leave, because that’s the rational thing to do. But what about the families that won’t have a choice?
ETA: Our magnets do bus, but it’s insanely expensive. Our “choice” schools don’t, which is why they do prioritize students who live closer.
The thing with transportation is that it actually cuts across a lot of socio economic classes.
We couldn’t school choice or charter our kids - despite being well off. We both worked full time through middle school and out here in the 'burbs, the bus lines are non-existent for getting a kid to a different part of town for school.
School choice works when you have sufficient funds to bus kids all over town or you have parents who have flexible schedules and enough transportation to take kids all over town.
It also only works if the population is large enough to support choices. My nephews go to school in North Dakota. The high school barely has enough kids to have a basketball team (they don’t for a football team) and to get that, they have kids busing in for forty five minutes into town. The Catholic school closed years ago - there weren’t enough kids to support two schools.
And that to me is the real shame in this debate. It sounds great, but as in most things, the devil is in the details. Charter schools don’t do much for rural districts. Underfunding public education in favor of vouchers doesn’t do a lot when the only school is the public high school. The focus on fixing our schools tends to be the broken inner city ones - media images of black kids struggling with poverty and failing schools. But they struggle with poverty and failing schools in Northern Minnesota and rural Mississippi - where school choice has a lot less meaning.
When my daughter was heading to middle school, we entered the lottery for the Math and Sciences Academy for her. Our elementary and high school are good, the middle school is horrible. I know that about a dozen kids from her sixth grade class entered the lottery, slightly weighted towards girls. Every boy who applied got in…none of the girls did.
Now, statistically, its possible that if you have a dozen kids, seven girls and five boys, and you pull for five slots, you will only pull the boys. But its statistically unlikely. (.00125)
When you visit, 70% of the students are boys. The school says that’s the distribution of applications, but that information isn’t available publicly.
The returns to schooling do have positive externalities but most of the returns are internalized by the student. Generally the more educated a person is the more money they make. Some of this is because of the human capital formed during the schooling. Much of this is because education signals both conscientiousness and intelligence. Signalling makes education a positional good. This is true more of college than lower education but there is still some signalling in secondary education. Societal investment in positional goods are a waste of resources.
That would be…impossible with the school boards. There’s plenty of fighting about even allowing intra district transfers. If you can afford it, you live in an area with a higher performing school. It would devalue those properties if anyone could go to any school, never mind the overcrowding. Currently CA has just over 5% of its public schools designated as magnet schools.
I want more than just choice, but choice is a huge part. For example, I don’t agree with this requirement. I think if we as a society agree that education should be publicly funded, I think the funds should follow the student. The district should have no right to those funds if the student doesn’t attend school in that district. The most popular way to do that is with vouchers. That’s a slight deviation from the subject of charters per se.
I think the issue of special education (which is what I think EC students are designated in NC) and other services like transportation, free and reduced lunch, etc. can be addressed with voucher scaling. I’m totally in favor of normalizing standardized testing. It’s the best way to measure across multiple schools.
In the anecdote my niece was threatened for being attractive, not being socially awkward.
It is obviously not easy to be a schools consumer but there are plenty of working markets where it is hard to be a consumer. Cars are insanely complicated and you never know if you have made the right decision until years after you buy. Yet the market has seen to it that cars are now so much better than they ever have been. In education a college is probably more complicated a consumer choice yet most people are able to tell the difference between a good school and a Vassar type school. In order for the market to work not everyone needs to be a marginal consumer, they just have to exist.
I never made that claim. It is obvious that those features are not available at every public school. If someone lives near one of those public schools that don’t have them, it is imperative that they have the choice to move to a school with those features.
I have worked in public and private education and it does not surprise me in the least that many charter schools are not as good as public ones. The good thing about a bad charter school is that they are easy to close. Bad public schools will be with us longer than cockroaches if the current system is left in place. Quality charter schools will be an emergent phenomenon.
It is like looking at the price tag for the Tesla and writing off electric cars. ICE cars have a hundred year head start and so it is not surprising that they are cheaper to make. In twenty or thirty years after all the car manufacturers have tried their hands at making electric cars I am sure that they will be cheaper than today and likely will dominate the market. Likewise many charter schools will fail and those that are left standing at the end will be the best. That means a future where students are not trapped in failing schools. In public schools change is glacially slow at best. The education department produced “A Nation at Risk” almost 35 years ago and almost nothing has changed since then.
It isn’t just poor and minority kids getting discriminated against, and it isn’t just the South where discrimination happens. Statistically, boys do better than girls in STEM coursework - and MSA really wants to keep their test scores among the best in the state. They don’t get scores on an application since admission is ability blind - they do get gender.
That is assuming that the for-profit can do it better. It is hard to determine precise outcomes, because for profit schools can choose their students through admission criteria, and can drop students that don’t do well enough, so determining their performance is problematic.
The one thing that is shown for absolutely sure, is whether or not the students that go to charter schools do better than they would have, the students that are not admitted are left with fewer resources, leading to a situation where the educational opportunities of the less fortunate students are being sacrificed to subsidize those who are more fortunate.
A better educated workforce is a better workforce.
The major returns of education are realized by the community that has educated citizens. The student is the second beneficiary, and the parents a far third. (which is why parents are the ones to make all the decisions, because they are actually hardly affected by the outcomes.)
Because when there is a profit motive, there is an incentive to spend less on the education to pocket the profits. Older textbooks, teachers who can’t get jobs at public schools and will take a lower salary, sub par facilities, internet connectivity insufficient to do research with, dependence on an underfunded public library.
Now, if the results are the same, maybe that’s fine. But one of the big issues with charters is lack of oversight, different requirements (they don’t need to take special needs or free and reduced lunch kids) and different measurement criteria.
This is especially disturbing when you consider the funding calculation described above. If you pull the per capita education cost of $10k per kid from our district to give it to a charter school, you aren’t pulling the modal per capita spend. You are including the spend on the kid who has a full time ASL translator because he can’t hear, and the kids who are six to a room due to ODD. That ASL translator still needs to get paid, so the modal amount going to the average public school student goes down, and someone makes a profit. Especially disturbing if the average student has to stay at the public school because of transportation issues and therefore doesn’t get to engage in “choice.”
I may have phrased that unclearly, but look at my examples. Let’s say a school district is allotted $10,000 per student, and $50 for each student to cover the entire ROTC program. Since the school has 1,000 students, that’s $10 million plus $50,000 for ROTC. The ROTC funds must all go to the ROTC program.
Under current funding, a charter school opens and takes 100 students. The current funding system allots them $10,050 per student (including ROTC funds), even though they don’t have an ROTC program, or $1,005,000. With me? The school district is now at $9,045,000. Out of that, they must spend $50,000 for the ROTC program, since all ROTC funds must go to ROTC. That leaves $8,995,000 to cover the needs of 900 students.
Now each student, instead of having $10,000 allotted to their care at public and at charter schools, has $10,050 at charter schools and $9994.44 at public schools. (Or include ROTC, for $10,044.44 at public schools, probably a fairer comparison).
Same thing occurs with buses and with school lunch.
That’s what I’m talking about when I talk about “a guarantee that funding won’t be drawn away from students at the local district.” We need to be sure that charter schools only take funds used for their programs, and that funds earmarked for certain programs at public schools are only transferred to charter schools that will actually offer those programs to their students.
But if your niece was part of the clique, she wouldn’t be threatened. Ergo, she’s not in the clique, and the most obvious reason she wouldn’t be is some level of social awkwardness. (I don’t mean she’s necessarily socially awkward, in and of herself, but she’s not as socially adept as the clique, or has some other characteristic that makes her unappealing to the clique. Attractiveness is not usually a barrier.)
Cars tend to fit into categories: if you buy a Toyota Camry, you have a reasonably good idea of what to expect and how it will work out. Kids aren’t Camrys, and they don’t fit into neat little categories.
The college example is particularly bad, because the evidence of lower-income and first-generation-college kids choosing wildly inappropriate schools is widespread. For example, lower-income students are about three and a half times more likely to choose a for-profit school than students from more prosperous households, but they’re also more likely to end up with higher loan debts, higher loan default rates, and higher unemployment rates. (cite) Slick marketing draws students into the likes of Corinthian Colleges, recently shuttered under heavy pressure from regulators over its deceptive marketing. We’ve had discussions on this very board (example) about the merits of places like Univ of Phoenix, yet these are precisely the sorts of places that attract naive students.
Then we’re back to school choice, which is orthogonal to charter schools.
Cite? If a powerful person or company is making money from that school, what’s the incentive to cross them by closing it?
So how about working on improving the current system, rather than siphoning off resources into a system that benefits some students and leaves others worse off?
What happens to the students who end up in those failing charter schools, the ones riddled by fraud or staffed by people too incompetent to work in the public schools? Do you really think it okay to sacrifice them in the name of some hypothetical future?
Everything else aside, what’s the difference between a “good school” and a “Vassar-type school”? Are you under the impression that Vassar is a finishing school or something? Because itisn’t.
A car is not your child’s education. If people mess up picking a car, it doesn’t ruin their life.
LHoD, I’d add one thing to your list: a standardized fact sheet about the school so that people could make comparisons meaningful comparisons.
Maybe I didn’t understand you. When you say “all ROTC funds must go to the ROTC”, did you mean “the ROTC program must be funded at $50,000 a year”? That’s not the same thing.
If “all ROTC funds must go to the ROTC”, then wouldn’t the ROTC funds stay with the ROTC at the public school?