
The Unappreciated Success of Charter Schools - jseliger
http://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2015/01/11/charter-success
======
adpirz
I work at one of those high-performing charter schools that serves primarily
low-income students. It's interesting hearing the criticisms of the charter
movement as a whole considering its actually made up of many different types
of schools serving many different demographics. That said, there are quite a
few studies, the Stanford CREDO study cited in the article chief among them,
that demonstrate the effectiveness high-performing charter networks aimed at
lower income populations (Uncommon Schools, Achievement Prep, and RePublic
Schools in the south -- also where I work).

Also, we have, to my knowledge, one of the only compulsory middle school
computer programming courses in the state (that's what I teach), maybe the
country--the goal being that all of our kids have solid computer programming
and web development fundamentals under their belt before they graduate high
school.

~~~
mc32
I wish San Francisco could bring itself to embrace charter schools. SF is a
perennial laggard in educational performance for its public schools. There are
a few good schools, mostly heavily leaning Asian --due to parental
acculturation. But, for the most part the schools are very under-performing. I
wish there was something to get them to address the issue --and parents need
to stop thinking 'education' and aptitude begin and stop in the classroom.

Also, it would help to have special schools for children of parents for whom
education was not part of their upbringing --those kids need some full blown
indoctrination to get them to see schooling as an essential part of their
lives and not something which interrupts their lives.

~~~
adpirz
I don't know about SF proper, but there's a pretty sizable charter movement in
the Bay Area. See: [http://www.kippbayarea.org/](http://www.kippbayarea.org/)
[http://www.rsed.org/bayarea/](http://www.rsed.org/bayarea/) Those are two off
the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure there are others...

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delecti
Does the research take into account that charter schools are opt-in, and thus
likely to be populated by children with parents more heavily involved in their
upbringing? Maybe I missed it being mentioned in the article, but it seems
like that'd be a much bigger factor.

If that wasn't controlled for, then it's less that the schools themselves are
necessarily any better (though that could also be the case) and more that
students with already better chances of doing better are being "self"-selected
into a different population.

~~~
jotux
>populated by children with parents more heavily involved in their upbringing

Is there evidence to back up this statement?

~~~
mikeyouse
Simple logic would dictate that parents who opt in for better schools for
their kids are more involved than those who don't opt in for better schools..

It's getting a bit out of hand where every single statement online is now
getting a [Citation Needed] afterwards. There isn't a randomized controlled
study for every single aspect of the universe, we'll have to use intuition
occasionally.

~~~
savanaly
I'm told it's called sea-lioning.
[http://wondermark.com/1k62/](http://wondermark.com/1k62/)

~~~
emptytheory
Statements of preference are different than assertions about the world. The
comic is funny, but it does have an antiphilosophical spirit, especially if
you think it relates to the present conversation.

I'm sorry. I care. (sorry (sorry)) ((((((sorry))))))

------
lsiebert
I don't know if comparing charter schools to regular schools is fair, when I
think their may be a significant difference in the population of the school.
Or at least I don't know that there isn't.

Even with a lottery, you have a bias towards students with parents that enter
the lottery. People with caretakers that are less concerned about their well-
being probably are less likely to be entered in the lottery.

You should really compare students who attempted to get into a charter school
vs those that didn't.

If you want to show evidence of charter school success that's definitive, you
would need a randomized controlled trial. split a school district into half
charter schools half public schools. And you wouldn't let the charter schools
kick out students who underperform or have behavior problems, or otherwise
make sure that such students don't skew the charter school's metrics. See what
happens.

I guess I'm not sure how much the success of a student population can be
attributed to teaching methods, and how much to aspects of the child's life.
We all know that wealth has dramatic effect at college attendance and graduate
rates for those that attend college.

~~~
tristanz
Most of the lottery evidence suggests that the gains from charter schools are
largest for students that that are more disadvantaged (limited english,
learning disabilities, and low initial test scores). So while these studies
only give causal estimates for students that apply to the lottery, it's quite
plausible that average effects would be even larger if all students were
included.

Source:
[http://users.nber.org/~dynarski/kipp_may05_2010_web.pdf](http://users.nber.org/~dynarski/kipp_may05_2010_web.pdf)

------
menssen
Charter school grad here. From a school which often came out as the top school
in the state on standardized tests, in a high income suburb in a state with an
already strong public education system (MN).

Anecdotal observations:

From what I could tell, the success of the school was due to three things:

1\. Parents who had available time, money, and energy to devote to the school.
This would likely be less true in a lower income area, but as has been
mentioned elsewhere, could account for higher average performance of schools
that parents actively chose to put their kids in, regardless of location.

2\. Excellent staffing, mostly due to the attractiveness of working in an
environment with more freedom to innovate.

3\. That the environment was different enough from the huge suburban public
schools nearby that some students would perform better in that kind of
environment.

One other thing I noticed that I haven't heard mentioned before, which is a
situation that is unique to looking at the upper end of public schools and
income brackets rather than the lower: the school I went to was not good at
playing the college prep game. All the courses were difficult, so nobody had
any "honors" courses on their transcript. GPAs were generally lower. Fewer
extracurricular activities were available because of the size of the school.
These facts resulted in a lower number of students going on to prestigious
post-secondary institutions than you would expect from an otherwise high
performing school.

ALL of these observations point to the conclusion that Charter schools are
really just an "alternative", and naturally some alternatives will be an
improvement and some will be a failure.

I like this article because it indicates that charter schools specifically
help marginalized groups (black, poor), which fits nicely with the idea that
having alternative environments in general is good for some students, and also
matches my personal experience. (I promise this is the only time I will ever
claim "white male nerd" as a marginalized group.)

~~~
NoPiece
Charter schools may not be a panacea for low income neighborhoods. But there
are a lot of low income parents who do really care and can devote time and
energy to education. For those families, charter schools can change lives, so
lets give them that option.

~~~
themartorana
I agree, and I disagree. In most cases (each state is different) the charter
school is paid a stipend per pupil from the local school district. Here in
Philadelphia, and in other places, the sheer amount of charter schools pulls
significant money out of public schools, which are already almost destitute.

I love the idea of a child getting a chance that they wouldn't normally have.
But I wonder if it's at the expense of children of uneducated or uninvolved
parents?

The one thing you can never do is blame the child for the parents' level of
involvement. But it seems this may be punishing them doubly.

It's a tough nut to crack...

~~~
jack-r-abbit
Here in the East Bay (San Fran Area), the charter school my kids attend gets
~$1300 less per student. So every student that moves from a non-charter to a
charter frees up ~$1300 to be used another way by the district (or at least
reduces the financial burden of the district if it is _already almost
destitute_ ). So I wonder... if all those ~1200 charter students were
attending the non-charter schools in the district, what happens to that ~$1.5
Million gap? I don't imagine that the school district just has an extra $1.5M
sitting around to cover the difference. So does it spread that cut around so
now _all_ public schools get less per student? It seems to me that the charter
school is saving money not sucking it out. Even if they are only as good as
the non-charter schools, they would be doing the same job for less money.

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bsder
> While overall charters and public schools compare relatively closely, both
> the 2009 and 2013 study found that charters did better for students in
> poverty. In addition, performance gap is growing over time:

It's not that hard to explain reversion to the mean. The schools in the lowest
socioeconomic areas are generally, a priori, the worst of the bunch.

Consequently, just about _anything_ will perform better. This is especially
true if there is any ability to self-select (lottery is insufficient evidence
as expelling "bad" students back to the public school is the same as self-
selection).

When charter schools are compared in the suburbs, they generally perform worse
than a public school.

~~~
tristanz
Almost all the evidence is based on lotteries and addresses attrition.
Expelling bad students is a potential problem, but students are tracked across
schools. Some students are lost, of course. However, the evidence in the KIPP
study shows that attrition actually raises the scores of the lottery losers
more than lottery winners. This is because winning the lottery encourages some
bad students to stick with it.

~~~
IndianAstronaut
I don't see the lottery as a bad thing. It lets kids ezcape from a bad
environment. In a inner city public school, there is often too much peer
pressure which forces the kids into poor performance or gang life.

~~~
bsder
The lottery is not a bad thing. And, I'm not even against non-lottery based
selection for schools. They are allowed to do so.

The only issue is when trying to _compare_ private school type X vs public
school Y. Public school Y is _required_ to take all comers ... no exceptions.
If you want to claim that Private School X is better, worse, etc. you need to
control for that because the worst students consume the most resource--even
the expulsion of just a very small number of students can make a
disproportionate difference.

------
SwellJoe
A friend of mine is a public school teacher, and her specialty is special
needs children. She also helped organize a revolt in Austin against charter
schools a couple of years ago, which led to the replacement of the entire
school board in the next election, and cancelling the contracts with at least
some of the charter schools in the city. She's a friend whose opinions I
respect, certainly on an issue where she is vastly better educated than I, so
I was more inclined to listen to her, despite having a relatively strongly
held belief that charters and market-oriented solutions were the right way
forward for education.

She thoroughly convinced me, that at least in the case of IDEA (the company
that was contracted in Austin) charter schools were not superior, _especially_
for the students most in need of better schools.

Her arguments, backed by data (though I'd be hard pressed to find it again,
since it's been a couple of years), included pointing out that IDEA schools
had performed better specifically because they'd expelled and otherwise
removed from their student pool the students least likely to perform well.

This served two goals for the charter schools: It insured their standard test
performance would be better, and insured that the surrounding public schools
(which are required by law to accept those students IDEA had refused to teach)
performed more poorly on average, regardless of how well they teach.

Similarly, the special needs programs in public schools must accommodate
children that charter schools aren't required to accommodate, often through
exceptions and guidelines built into the charter program by the legislators
who have ideological reasons for wanting more privatization of schools,
received contributions from the very companies that will operate the charter
schools, and have every reason to see charter schools work, at least on paper.

In the case in Austin, there was a pretty wide variety of benefits the
charters received that the public schools they replaced did not. For example,
a large budget was provided to renovate schools for the charter; when those
same school buildings had been in service as public schools for decades, and
the budgets were woefully inadequate to keep it up to date. Students obviously
do better with better facilities.

I'm still open-minded about the possibility of alternative schools. I hate
public school, as I know it; always have, as I was very poorly served by
public schools (as a bright kid with a learning disability). But, when the
political/economic deck is stacked soundly in favor of the charter school, as
it was in the one case I really studied, if they perform about the same or
slightly better than public schools, I have to assume that the only benefit is
to the corporations making a profit on the schools.

My confidence in market solutions to problems like education has somewhat
waned in the face of evidence that the market tends to favor the best students
and forgets those that are challenging. I don't know what the right solution
is, but I'm mistrustful of the motivations of the charters I've seen.

------
zafka
This is a nice piece by a professional consultant. My bet is that his company
ESI consultants gets a fair amount of business from those invested in charter
schools.

