Charter Schools?

What’s with the push for Charter Schools? Parents and politicians love them—they tend to be quieter, well-disciplined places compared to public schools.

Why? Charters do one thing well-they create a space where learning can occur by controlling who they admit and tossing out those who don’t pass muster. In this way they’re like private schools and religious schools. The public schools must take all comers; the good, bad and the indifferent. OK, but are the Charters better? Do they produce better test results? Not really, if we look at the research literature.

Given the difficulties in comparing public schools (they take all comers and can’t kick out the “rotten apples” to charter schools (they pick who they want and toss out students who are not working out) it is imperative to look at the independent research (omitting both the pro charter research and the pro teacher union research) in this area:

On average, charter schools are not performing as well as their traditional public-school peers, according to a new study(2009) that is being called the first national assessment of these school-choice options. The study, conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, compared the reading and math state achievement test scores of students in charter schools in 15 states and the District of Columbia—amounting to 70 percent of U.S. charter school students—to those of their virtual "twins" in regular schools who shared with them certain characteristics. The research found that 37 percent of charter schools posted math gains that were significantly below what students would have seen if they had enrolled in local traditional public schools. And 46 percent of charter schools posted math gains that were statistically indistinguishable from the average growth among their traditional public-school companions. That means that only 17 percent of charter schools have growth in math scores that exceeds that of their traditional public-school equivalents by a significant amount.

In reading, charter students on average realized a growth that was less than their public-school counterparts but was not as statistically significant as differences in math achievement, researchers said.

Moreover, a (August, 2006) study by National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) found that charter school students performed worse than public school students in both the reading and math parts on the highly authoritative National Assessment of Education Progress test. Moreover, the US Department of Education in November 2004 notes that charter schools did poorly compared to public schools in 5 case studies.
People can quibble with all the studies to date but the notion that charter schools are superior to public school has not been “proven” by any means, in fact the opposite seems to be the case.

With the growth of the charters, we’re heading for a two-track public school system—the charters for the well-behaved and the public schools for the rest. Here’s an experiment that’s worth trying: take a so-called failing school, keep the existing teachers and principals but select the students who can enter. My bet is that this new school will be a model school in a year’s time.

The Charter school movement gives us all a certain amount of amnesia as to what the real problems is: We’re still left with a whole host of students –the so-called “dead wood’ of the public school system. These are the people who don't finish and get a high school diploma, in other words, drop -outs. Or they finish and they are barely literate ...or they finish and have outstanding behavior "issues". What’s the plan for them? Prison, Crime, Drugs or ???

Recently the New York Times had a front page story about a Bronx elementary school that decided to segregate their classes according to sex—boys and girls. This was an experiment to address sagging test scores and behavioral problems. To date, there is no evidence that the segregation by sex is improving matters. It brought back a personal memory of my own days teaching in a Bronx elementary school 50 years earlier.

When I taught in 50 years ago the issues were poverty, disruptive behavior, poverty and poverty --the class roster I started with in September was almost totally different when June rolled around. I don’t think much has changed in the interim.

You can separate the boys from the girls all you want, dress the kids in suits and ties and what not but as long as public schools in the Bronx must take in all comers and cannot easily toss someone out (as in Charters, religious schools, etc) you’re are going to have disruptive, crazy behavior problems which defeat school learning. And the crazy behavior comes from a crazy village with lousy housing, lousy or no jobs and overwhelmed and absent parents.

A good jobs program will do a 100 times more good than a good sex segregation program.