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The Road Not Traveled: Tracking Charter Schools Movement
This is worth reading for the fine rebuttals to Merrow's hot air. These are posted after his remarks. I'd ask Merrow how many of the 1,300 schools of education he condemns he's actually observed--or how many of the charter schools he embraces he's observed.
by John Merrow
On the back page of Education Week this week is my essay about charter schools, including a trip down memory lane back to the meeting in Minnesota in 1988 where the dream took shape. I hope all of you will go over to Ed Week’s website to read it (subscription required), but, before you do, bear with me because the ground keeps shifting under this movement, even as many things remain the same.
I'd like to raise two issues: 1) quality control and 2) persistent opposition.
Charter Schools & The Roads Diverging
For one thing, the Obama Administration is embracing charter schools (or 'chartered schools') with great enthusiasm. Now, it's true that Education Secretary Arne Duncan adds a qualification, saying that they support 'good charter schools,' but that strikes me as, for the moment anyway, an empty distinction, largely because of an absence of ways of measuring quality.
It's true that egregiously bad charters get shut down, but mediocre ones keep plugging along, doing just as much damage to kids as mediocre public schools. But what the charter school proponents don’t seem to realize is that these mediocre institutions are also damaging 'the movement.' I've heard them (and you know who you are!) say that mediocre public schools aren't punished, as if that justifies not closing mediocre charter schools! It doesn't, precisely because the charter school advocates are claiming to be different.
I think that charter schools risk becoming like schools of education if they aren't careful. How many of the 1400 or so schools and colleges of education are excellent? I'd say 50 but, if you want to argue for 100, I'll go along with that. But are the 100 excellent ones doing anything to get rid of the 500-700 that are dreadful? If they are, it hasn't made my radar screen.
I think that, for the charter movement to succeed, it must take the lead on setting high standards and then enforcing them.
Is that realistic? Is it happening somewhere?
A second issue I didn't cover thoroughly in my Ed Week piece is the issue of opposition to charter schools. Everyone knows that unions have fought against charter schools because they’ve seen it in their self-interest (teachers in charter schools don’t have to belong to unions). But, guess what, local school boards have been as great a roadblock, and in some cases, even fiercer opponents. They go to court to keep charter schools from opening or expanding. Why? It's about money and control, as far as I can tell. But if the demand exists for charter schools, why wouldn't elected officials whose mandate is education be supportive?
Just yesterday in the neighboring town of Los Altos, California a county judge ruled against a charter school and in favor of the local school board. The charter school had sued because it wanted to expand to include 7th grade and needed space. Forget for a minute the particulars of that case and ask yourselves why it wanted a 7th grade? Could it be that parents of 6th graders wanted to keep their children in the charter school? And why is it that school boards are so hostile to success? Shouldn’t they be trying to figure out what that successful school was doing, so they could copy it? That was the hope of charter schools, that they'd be incubators.
If you and I both operate restaurants, and my restaurant is drawing a crowd and yours isn't, wouldn't you want to know why? Wouldn't you think seriously about changing some aspect of what you are doing? Or would you sue me?
What can be done to change school board behavior? Is it all about money and power? What am I missing? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Comments
Gene Glass says:
John: You packed more naivete into 620 words than any college Freshman I ever encountered: 1) Bad charters go out of business; 2) Arne Duncan only supports "good charter schools"; 3) only 50 or maybe 100 colleges of education are "excellent"; 4) unions and school boards are threatened by charter schools. Poppycock! There are plenty of really bad charter schools continuing to operate and the "virtual charter schools"--the latest invention of Bill Bennett and corporate America--are a joke. Arne Duncan wouldn't know a good charter school from a dreadful one; all he knows is that the Administration owes a debt to a couple of organizations that got out the vote for Obama and are making money off of the charter schools. And you don't know 50 colleges of education, let alone know them well enough to judge whether they meet your personal standards of excellence. And maybe those school boards and unions are really shocked at the sham schools popping up in the charter movement and, yes, would like to see them stopped for the sake of the students.
Mark Stern says:
Generally well-made points. Question: how do we begin to seriously evaluate what is quality education? Or, to be specific to this case, what is quality education in Charter Schools? Can we quantitavely, or even non-quantitavely, systematically and comparatively assess the quality of schools? The operational definitions used to asses quality should be the same with charter schools and non-public schools. Just having more students want to come to your school, or your store, does not mean the quality is there. I know of someone who was a very, very successful junk jewelry salesman. His by-words: "Junk easily outsells the quality stuff." Sadly, even in the case of restaurants, McDonald's will almost always get a lot more customers than that great quality restaurant up the street that does not saturate its patrons with junk food. Think about this, please, before saying that we know quality education when we see parents sending their children to X school or X and Y schools, etc., in ever-greater numbers.
Bill Mathis says:
John:
Please read the independent research on charter schools. Perhaps one of the reasons "the movement" is not taking off is that the peer-reviewed empirical evidence doesn't support their efficacy. As for the NYC charter study, go to epicpolicy.org for an analysis of this study by a Stanford professor. The research design was fatally flawed.
Monty Neill says:
The first thing that should not happen is to allow the definition of quality to be reduced to test scores -- for charters or any other school.
More immediately to your post, John: The example of a restaurant is terrible. Schools are (still, most of them) public spaces, part of our (endangered) social commons. Restaurants are private.
Public schools serve the common good through common ownership and decision making. That is one of its great contributions to society and to democracy, the other being the education of citizens. Both are often not done well. Both, but particularly the latter, become arguments for charters. However, the evidence is that charters are on average worse, based on test scores.
But the first issue pertains to democracy and the role of common spaces such as schools in maintaining a democracy, and in part to how to exercise that well in face of often problematic school boards, low voter participation, etc. But that discussion is rarely raised, drowned out by proposals to eliminate or greatly curtail the power of school boards, or to the effective replacement by corporations (charters).
It seems that as schools are increasingly defined in only instrumentalist and economic terms (I just read a truly awful 'vision statement' for MA's schools). The ideas of schooling for democracy heads toward disappearance. The marketization of control over education is the parallel phenomenon leading to the elimination of schooling as democracy. There are those (e.g., Fred Hess) who pretty much equate the market with society and thus marketization with democracy. I find him quite unpersuasive, in part because ‘free market election day' is about dollars not one person one vote. (Yes, I know money greatly impacts elections.)
In sum, we need to look at both the educational quality of charters and whether they produce real improvement (they don't, as a whole). Even if they did, that would still not address the question of the privatization of effective control of public space. Even is one is willing to trade better outcomes for loss of democratic control, how much better (by what measures) should they be to give up what sort of democratic control? That is not a way to frame it I would support, since I am not supportive of further erosion to democracy, but framing it that way might lead to further questioning of the role of charters in a nominally democratic society.
A final note - I agree there are excellent and truly innovative charters. A few pose no harm to democracy and could spur innovation, something that has not been built into the system.
— John Merrow
Taking Note
2009-12-01
http://learningmatters.tv/blog/op-ed/the-road-not-traveled-tracking-charter-schools-movement/3489/
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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