My problem with the charter school discussion is that it is frequently framed in the context of "this charter school is better than this public school." Frankly, these comparisons are bullshit. Public schools are given a task that charter schools would never have to even imagine. Public schools must educate ALL children in their districts. Charter schools have the luxury of choosing who attends their schools and who stays after they have been admitted. It is an apples to oranges comparison.
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.
You're wrong. Charter schools do NOT get to select, at least not in Minnesota (and states that allow selectiveness are being dumb).
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.
Hopefully not, but a charter can't forcibly compel an abusive parent to send his/her child there. You'd hope that wasn't the case, but ever since the Founding Fathers flipped their shit over taxation without representation, we've built a country that favors the ambitious and fortunate 94 percent of the time.
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.
I was going to write basically the exact same thing. The comparison isn't fair.
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.
While the comparison isn't perfectly apples to apples, I don't think it is fair to rule out the possibility that charter schools might do a better job of serving students with so-called "good parents". If it is the case, why is that a bad thing?
Do we not want schools that serve the needs of many different groups?
The problem with this is funding. The state funds charter schools. Are we supposed to have separate schools for kids who's parents care more? Those schools would take funding away from other kids. I think the money should be spent on the schools serving the most kids so it has the biggest impact.
This isn't a comparison between luxury items like ski resorts. Shouldn't we hold the education of the next generation to a higher standard? Shouldn't children have equal access to good schools, regardless of the quality of their parents?
The funny thing is that this isn't the case even in the world of public education. In my hometown, students must go to the school that serves the part of town where they live. What happens is that families will move around town to get their student into the public school that serves their needs best.
No, the point is that when you make a comparison as unfair as this one, you're doing something unjust.
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.
I said that it wasn't a perfect comparison - "isn't perfectly apples to apples" - because having been a teacher, I understand how important involved parents are for students and I didn't want to minimize that fact.
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.
I view the different types of schools (Charter, Public, Private, Homeschool) as being types of apples (Granny Smith, Fuji, Pink Lady). They are all varieties of schools/apples, but each has different qualities that make them unique.
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.
If educating the masses at a public school is so much more difficult, then why do we even try that?
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.
"If educating the masses at a public school is so much more difficult, then why do we even try that?"
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:
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.
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,
"all providers of education are on notice that they can lose revenue if they don't meet learner needs."
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.
It if pretty unfair to characterize private school as being some sort of bastion where elites get away from the "uneducated serf class". My private school experience (both attending, and then teaching at one) has shown me that many private school students come from working class families that are anything but elite.
The same students do better at charter schools than when they go to a public school though. So it's not just selection bias. Getting away from the masses that have no interest in education is just as important in some places.
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.
Selection bias. The poor performers that move schools do so because they have involved parents, and involved parents are the #1 indicator of success in school.
It's not just selection bias, though. Charters, having distinctive education styles, will be more appropriate for some students and less appropriate for others. The other layer of "selection bias", then, is that parents/children will be more inclined to charters that seem more suitable for their own needs.
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.
Not just selection bias. Look up how some of them are selected, through lottery. Involved parents sign up kids for the lottery and they end up going to either school randomly. The kids getting into charter schools show more improvement than those going to public schools. Both groups probably outperform their peers in their individual schools.
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.
Ideally we would help ALL students improve, but isn't it better that we give the kids with more involved parents a fighting chance by letting them opt into a more rigorous school?
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.
I went to a charter school during my last two years of high school and it was probably one of the most important choices I have made to date. The charter school I went to used a lottery based system that got students in. This was kind of a negative thing in my opinion. For me the traditional public educational process was in a way meaningless. I have always been self-taught and the charter school I went to allowed me to. In high school things were kind of going downhill for me until I made the decision of going to a charter school.
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 article explains fairly well what this study does to counter your point. The charter advantage seems to be fairly narrow: urban overcrowded areas. However, in those areas there does seem to be an advantage and it appears to be due to longer hours.
My twin children spent seven years in Minnesota charter schools - one at one school, six at another, ultimately graduating high school. Overall, the experience was extremely positive. The reason is obvious to me... there is no single "right" way to educate a child. Every child is different, and has different needs. Techniques that work well for one student can work poorly for another, or even be counterproductive. Charters allow more technique flexibility and focus than mainstream 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.)
Charter schools that have a specific educational approach will attract a certain kind of teacher. At the charter my kids attended, teachers would either come and be gone in a year (they didn't get it), or they would become totally devoted to the cause, to the point where it would be difficult for another school to lure them away even if they tried.
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.
Only looking at schools with lotteries can let you control for the student bias.
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.
That gets into state-by-state law. In Minnesota, all charters have lotteries (and those that can't "sell out" and completely fill their classrooms will probably have financial problems).
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.
What's wrong with creating schools that serve one group of students well, and don't serve other students? It seems like a win for some, and neutral for everyone else.
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"?
Allow the students and parents to be selective, not the schools. This supports market segmentation (a good way to look at it), but doesn't introduce actual unfairness.
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.
The publicly-funded system doesn't segment the market. Individual pieces of it do. The public schools will continue to service all segments, but some segments will have other options.
If you're satisfied with a pareto win, why don't we go back to an absolute monarchy? After all no other system could be better for the monarch!
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...)
I'm don't understand - how does the existence of alternatives prevent improvement? Could you clarify this point?
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Sweden#Free_school... says that Swedish free schools (the equivalent of charter schools) are not allowed to discriminate among students, or require any sort of admission exam. How does this fit with what you were saying?
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.
What I'm saying is that allowing money to follow students (which Sweden does) prevents politically favored schools from being allocated a disproportionate amount of resources.
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?
But if you create charter schools and DON'T allow them to choose their students (but let students choose them - the MN system), and you DON'T fund them over and above the mainstream schools (the MN system)... well, then your "social injustice" argument comes up kind of thin. The schools can't select, and the schools don't get extra resources, so any bias is entirely due to the will of parents/students to pursue alternatives, and the extra flexibility of the charters.
What this DOES result in is at best marginal increases in test scores, but significantly happier parents, students, and teachers.
I'm not sure what point of mine you think you're arguing against. I'm arguing against letting the schools decide which students to accept. Which is emphatically not the MN system, and leads to a different result.
"What's wrong with creating schools that serve one group of students well, and don't serve other students?"
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.]
Toward the end, there is an interesting passage--maybe questions like "do charter schools work" or "are charter schools better" are missing the point. Maybe the existence of charter schools is about freedom to choose.
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.
As we fight to improve the quality of education in urban areas, it is critical that we pay attention to the results we're getting. That is the point, after all.
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.
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
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.
Access to quality education is not a right in this country, but attendance is required for a variety of reasons. Most of them related to creating and maintaining a functioning society. The more lofty goals of compulsory public education are about giving every child the skills to have a chance at a decent life.
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.
Test scores and college-acceptance rates seem like odd metrics for judging the success of K-12 education - surely the goal is loftier than just slotting kids into a college. You can optimize a process for "winning" college admissions much more easily than you can optimize a process for developing a basic intellectual toolkit and the organizational skills and self-discipline required to apply it.
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 can't help but view charter schools as a means to further the social and class stratification of America.
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.
"Warren Buffett framed the problem for me once in a way that clarified how basic our most stubborn obstacles are. He said it would be easy to solve today's problems in urban education. 'Make private schools illegal,' he said, 'and assign every child to a public school by random lottery.' "
When your income is in the millions you can afford to send your kid to any school you want (and if you outlaw private schools, they can be send abroad).
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.
Look at it another way - charters provide involved but financially poor parents with the sort of focused alternatives formerly available only to the parents that could afford private schools.
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.
I have seen some examples of helpful reforms where I live. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."
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
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.
The article states that the study was released by The Boston Foundation [1] and MIT's School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative [2].
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.
I don't feel bad because I did read the article and I did see who funded it, and I still don't know the answer to my question. What does "The Boston Foundation" actually do?
The Boston Foundation is a community foundation, so they basically fund a lot of nonprofits in health, education, housing and other areas. They actually fund a lot of good nonprofits in the community and do a number of projects working with the public schools - their CEO argues that charters provide an external source of pressure to improve all schools.
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.