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U.S. Charter Schools Movement Gains Traction

Now, who else do you think will be invited into this series of conversations? Gerald Bracey? George Schmidt? Stephen Krashen? Joanne Yatvin? A teacher?

How is it a "debate" when only one position is represented?

MICHEL MARTIN, host: I'm Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News [sic].

Today, we’re going to begin a series of conversations that we plan to have throughout the summer about education. We want to talk about what's working and what isn't. We'll talk about the key trends that educators are talking about, everything from single-sex education to more focus on practical or so-called vocational education. And it might seem odd to talk about education in the summer, but this is the time of year when the people who run our nation's schools do their thinking about what's working and what’s not.

So we are going follow their lead. And so we’ve decided to start things off by dedicating today's entire program to a key part of the debate over education reform: charter schools. There are more than 4,700 charter schools across the country educating more than 1.4 million students. And the Obama administration wants to see more of them. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says the administration intends to use stimulus money earmarked for education as leverage to encourage states to embrace the charter movement.

So we decided to spend some time today looking at some examples of charter schools here in Washington, D.C., which is, for a variety of reasons, a hotbed of the movement. But to set the table, we've called the Washington Post's Jay Mathews, who’s been covering education for more than two decades. He’s written seven books and his latest, "Work Hard, Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created America’s Best Schools," is an account of the creation of the Knowledge Is Power Program, or the KIPP charter schools, which can now be found across the country. He’s here with me in our D.C. studio. Welcome, thank you for joining us.

Mr. JAY MATHEWS (Washington Post): Hi, Michel.

MARTIN: First a little history lesson. When did the idea of charter schools begin, and what exactly makes a charter school a charter school - and different from a traditional public school?

Mr. MATHEWS: The idea is about 21 years old, 1988. There was a professor in New York, plus the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Al Shanker, both came up with the idea that, you know, teachers as a group, the best teachers are always frustrated by the fact they've got great ideas but they get squashed. The principal doesn’t like it; the superintendent doesn’t like it. Why not put teachers, educators, in charge of their own schools? Let them execute their own ideas, independent public schools. So the first one started in Minnesota about 20 years ago, and now it's exploded.

This is really the most energetic, most popular part of the public education system now. We had no charter schools 20 years ago. We now, as you say, have 4,700. In many big cities, like the one we’re sitting in, Washington, D.C., the public charter schools are the best schools. Same with Boston, New York, Denver, Houston.

But as research has shown - we've got a new study out of Stanford recently - when you look at all charter schools and compare them to all regular public schools, same kind of kids, mostly kids from urban environments, in general the charter schools aren't doing any better than the regular public schools.

MARTIN: Let's just hold that thought for a minute and just set the table a little bit, and we will get back to that - to those latest findings, so that we can just put them in some sort of context. I wanted to ask - you said charter schools have been going on for 20 years now, so that’s too long to be a fad…

Mr. MATHEWS: Right.

MARTIN: …in education per se. Does it represent some kind of fundamental shift in thinking about education, or is this mainly a matter of how schools are run?

Mr. MATHEWS: No. It's really a fundamental shift. To have independent public schools is something we haven't had before. They are independent of school district rules. They can make up - they can hire people they want, fire people they want, have their own rules, have a longer school day, and that really creates a great gap between them and the regular public schools, who are, you know, fed by those rules. And also gives parents a lot more choice. We haven't had this much choice for parents who wanted to go to public schools in – in ever, ever. This is really new.

MARTIN: How does this - how does the charter school issue intersect with the voucher issue? Because all things in education become politicized at some point just because you have to allocate public resources,and that becomes sort of part of the political process. Is the charter school discussion separate from the voucher movement, or are the two of them connected in some way?

Mr. MATHEWS: Some - people who like vouchers tend to like charters, people who don’t like vouchers tend not to like charters, but they’re really very different. Vouchers is sort of, I think, moribund now. Vouchers are public scholarships. You get to go to a private school. There aren’t enough private schools, not enough spaces in private schools, whereas charter schools are growing by leaps and bounds, lots of efforts to do them. And to make it clear to your readers, these are public schools, so anybody can apply to them. And if there is enough room, you get to go in. If there isn’t enough, if there’s more applicants for a charter school than they have people, then they have to have a random lottery to decide who goes. So there aren’t any - in only rare cases are there prerequisites or things you have to do, hoops you have to jump over to get into a charter school.

MARTIN: So people who are familiar with flagship schools like, you know, Boston Latin or Bedford Stuy - or Bronx High School of Science, where there are entrance exams, this tends not be that.

Mr. MATHEWS: Absolutely cannot be that.

MARTIN: Cannot be that.

Mr. MATHEWS: There are some charter schools in some parts of the country that are in fairly high-class neighborhoods and thus, draw a lot of professional kids, children, and they have very high scores, they’re unusual. Pacific Collegiate in Santa Cruz is one of those. But most charter schools, the ones that we actually look at, are in inner cities, and they’re drawing, largely, low- income kids.

MARTIN: If you're just joining us, you're listening to TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm speaking with Washington Post education writer and author Jay Mathews. He is starting off our education series by giving us a primer on the charter school movement. Your most recent book is about the Knowledge Is Power Program, commonly known as KIPP. The program was funded by two teachers in the Teach For America program. It’s now the basis of more than 60 schools across the country. You consider these highly successful - in what way? When you say these are among the best schools, what parameters are you looking at?

Mr. MATHEWS: I look at schools in one parameter. Which schools are doing the best job in raising the achievement of kids? Which schools have kids coming in, as the KIPP schools do, at about the 30th percentile in the fifth grade, and they leave in the eighth grade at the 70th and the 80th percentile in math or reading. That rarely happens, but in some of these charter groups, particularly KIPP, they had made that happen, and it's really unleashing the power of great teachers. The two founders of KIPP, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, were these big, goofy Ivy League grads who discovered, when they started teaching in Houston, that they were just awful at it. You know, they thought they were God's gift to basketball and women and education, and they realized in the classroom just their smarts and their charm wasn't enough. And they ran into a woman named Harriet Ball(ph), who had grown up in the Houston ghetto, who knew how to teach naturally. She was a genius.

She taught them how to teach. Another teacher, in L.A. - Rafe Esquith - taught them how to expand and make their school part of the whole world, to bring kids on trips, show them the real world, and that produced this group of schools. And now it's not just KIPP. There’s this insurgency of young educators across the country who are very close to Secretary Duncan and President Obama, who are producing lots of charter schools like KIPP, and producing similar results by unleashing the creative power of great teachers and feeding that fire with the fuel of extra time in class. So KIPP schools go on nine hours a day. They have Saturday sessions, summer sessions. Adding great teachers creatively, and adding more time to that, and you get these amazing results.

MARTIN: There are two recurring criticisms of charter schools, and I want to take them separately. The first is that they suck up all the air. They divert attention and money from the broader, fundamental problems within the traditional school systems, which never really get addressed. And people say, well, they introduce competition - but they don’t, really, because people who are in the traditional public schools can't really leave. What do you say to that?

Mr. MATHEWS: It’s just nonsense. These are public schools. What they are doing, actually, is improving the overall mix of public school experiences we have. We’ve had the regular public schools for, you know, generations attempt to get better, particularly in the inner city. They haven’t. The charter schools in the inner city are the first signs we have, something that most people knew, that those kids are just as smart as suburban kids. You have to give them creative teaching, and you have to give them more time to learn. And what the charter schools are proving, that lesson is gradually leaking over into the regular public schools. It's taking a while because the people in the regular public schools have decided the charters are the enemy, which is really stupid and not productive.

MARTIN: The second criticism, and you alluded to this earlier, is that they don’t really produce the stated results. Yesterday, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes published a study that says that nationally, students in more than 80 percent of charter schools performed the same as or worse than students in traditional charter schools on math tests, and that there were wild variations in charter school performance depending on the state. In some states, the students outperformed students in traditional public schools, and some lagged behind; in others, virtually indistinguishable results. What do you – how do you interpret these findings?

Mr. MATHEWS: Well, I think this is what we found in all the data henceforth, these are - the charter schools come up, and they have some teachers have great ideas and some do not. What's interesting about what the president and Secretary Duncan are doing is they are saying we've got to unleash charter schools, have more of them, get the caps and growth off. And secondly, we've got to close, more quickly, the bad ones. As that Stanford study shows, about 37 percent of kids in charter schools are not doing as well as they would do in regular public schools.

It's easy to close charters, but we're not moving as fast in that direction as we could. And on the other end - what's really galvanized – and on the other end of that scale, the best charter schools, as I say, if you go in many big cities in this country, you'll find the best schools, defined by which schools are raising the achievement of kids the most, are charter schools. And that's, again, the result of good ideas being given the chance to grow.

MARTIN: And as you've mentioned a number of times, the Obama administration is of - squarely behind the charter movement, is encouraging states to look to these schools for innovation and for ideas. You've been covering these schools since they started, essentially. Just talk to me a little bit, for the minute and half that we have left, about what you've learned over the course of studying these schools. What - is there something that just completely changed your view about education, is there something that you kind of - just expanded your thoughts about how to think about education?

Mr. MATHEWS: Yeah, I stumbled into the charter movement in this city in 2001. Somebody told me there was this fifth grade starting in Anacostia called KIPP. I went down there and met the young woman - 30-year-old teacher named Susan Shefler(ph). She taught in the regular D.C. schools; she's going to start this fifth grade in Anacostia. And she explained to me, well, these are fifth- graders - this is in 2001 - but we're not going to call them fifth-graders, we're going to call them the Class of 2009. And her dad was there helping her put together the furniture for this school; we were in a church basement in Anacostia.

And Dad said to Susan, oh, yeah, I get it, that’s the year they're graduating from high school. And Susan, who is very firm about these things, said no, Dad, that is the year they are all going to college. And it occurred to me to have this young woman tell me that these 10-year-olds in Anacostia, whose families never gotten close to college, were all going to college, was a very remarkable thing to see. And that is what has fueled that charter and others. That school, the KEY Academy, the KIPP school, is now the highest-performing public school in D.C. It is performing higher than the middle-class schools in Northwest Washington, which are full of the parents - the children of professional parents.

MARTIN: So are they going to college?

Mr. MATHEWS: Indeed, 84 percent of that Class of 2009 are going to college this year.

MARTIN: And finally, we only have 30 seconds left. What things should we be looking at as we go forward, as we pursue this, these conversations about education over the course of this summer?

Mr. MATHEWS: Well, can we solve this split between regular public schools and charters, can the regular public schools understand that this is helping and sort of adopt some of these methods? And can we support the president in unleashing charters and getting rid of the bad ones? That's the direction we have to go.

MARTIN: Washington Post writer and author Jay Mathews. His most recent book is called "Work Hard, Play Nice." It's about the founding of one of the nation's best- known and most successful charter programs KIPP schools. He was kind enough to join us in our studios here in Washington, D.C. Thank you so much for joining us.

Mr. MATHEWS: Thank you, Michel.

— Tell Me More, with Jay Mathews
National Public Radio
2009-06-16


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