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How Good Are Charter Schools For the Public School System?
theodp writes "'You go to these charters,' gushed Bill Gates in 2010, 'and you sit and talk to these kids about how engaged they are with adults and how much they read and what they think about and how they do projects together.' Four years later, Gates is tapping his Foundation to bring charter schools to Washington State, doling out grants that included $4.25 million for HP CEO Meg Whitman's Summit Public Schools. So what's not to like? Plenty, according to Salon's The Truth About Charter Schools, in which Jeff Bryant delves into the dark side of the charter movement, including allegations of abuse, corruption, lousy instruction, and worse results. Also troubling Bryant is that the children of the charter world's biggest cheerleaders seem never to attend these schools ('A family like mine should not use up the inner-city capacity of these great schools,' was Bill Gates' excuse). Bryant also cites Rethinking Schools' Stan Karp, who argues that Charter Schools Are Undermining the Future of Public Education, functioning more like deregulated 'enterprise zones' than models of reform, providing subsidized spaces for a few at the expense of the many. 'Our country has already had more than enough experience with separate and unequal school systems,' Karp writes. 'The counterfeit claim that charter privatization is part of a new 'civil rights movement', addressing the deep and historic inequality that surrounds our schools, is belied by the real impact of rapid charter growth in cities across the country. At the level of state and federal education policy, charters are providing a reform cover for eroding the public school system and an investment opportunity for those who see education as a business rather than a fundamental institution of democratic civic life. It's time to put the brakes on charter expansion and refocus public policy on providing excellent public schools for all.'"
If charter schools are allowed to operate, then they shouldn't benefit from special privileges that public schools don't have. They should have to accept any students in the area (regardless of academic level, just like the public schools). They also should be required to have all students take the standardized tests (instead of finding reasons to exclude children who they know won't do as well, so the school looks better ranked in comparison).
If charter schools aren't cheating and they are showing an improvement that is one thing. But too often they are cheating to make themselves look better compared to public schools.
Yep, we're just churning out bright, qualified students one right after the other.
Geez, our present system is an utter failure in most of the US. I would posit that pretty much anything is worth trying, in an effort to start trying to reign in cost, and get more results from our efforts.
There is one thing, however, which I don't know how we can fix, at least not from a legislative or policy standpoint, and that is the lack of parental participation.
So many parents think of the schools as a dumping ground for their progeny for day long child care. They don't participate except to raise hell with the administrators they their little Bobby or LaTonya is accused of mis-behavior (MY child would never...), or if they need to be held back due to lack of progress.
Do they even hold kids back anymore?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
And exactly what is wrong with people that can afford to help their children get a better education doing so? Should not every parent try to provide the best life skills and education for their offspring that they are able to provide?
Are you advocating that people who have these means...sacrifice the lives of their children, send them for a poor education merely to prove a social "point"?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If charter schools bleed off all of the kids from homes where learning and education are prized, whose parents are going to be involved, and all that's left in the public school are the kids rounded up by the truancy officer, it's not going to go well.
Since we're talking about public schools here, the question has to be one of balance of benefit to society. Can those parents make a significant difference in a sea of indifference, or would everyone be better served if they at least made sure their children were well-educated instead of being dragged down by the public school system?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They're called enterprise schools in my district, but the one that I was involved in was a big success. We had a plan, which was to bring E.D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge curriculum to middle school students, to prepare them for high school and beyond. We wanted the entire school to be an honors school. Students had to have a B average to get in. The school district went along with the plan, and we opened the school in 1998, and my daughter was in the first class. The NAACP warned us that they would be watching us closely because they suspected that we were creating the school only for middle class white kids. What happened surprised them and us. Middle class white kids ended up being a minority in the school. The biggest ethnic group came from lower class hispanic families who saw the school as an opportunity for their children with good grades to get ahead. We also had a number of black and asian kids from poorer neighborhoods. The district was more than happy to bus the kids from all over the city to the school. The NAACP quietly shuffled off. I think they were actually disappointed.
The school was a success, but it required the interest of parents, administrators and teachers who agreed with the vision, diligent oversight, and a district that entusiastically cooperated. If any of the above elements are missing you have a potential disaster on your hands.
Proverbs 21:19
...sacrifice the lives of their children, send them for a poor education merely to prove a social "point"?
The point is people who have a stake in the public school system are motivated to maintain a quality public school system. People who don't often have other motives.
What else is there to grade schools on?
Having standardized tests is useful, as long as you don't take the results of those tests as the be all and end all. To use test results as the only way of judging schools is to fall prey to the MBA mentality - if there isn't a simplistic metric then it doesn't exist. Think of how that mentality has affected so many businesses.
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
The fact is that our education system in the US is outdated and terrible (as Sir Ken Robinson has brilliantly and repeatedly explained - example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U). It needs improvement in many, many ways.
HOWEVER, just throwing more, and more, and even more money at the system (as endorsed by teachers' unions and government bureaucrats everywhere) hasn't solved anything. The city of Minneapolis spends nearly $21,000 per student per year (http://www.better-ed.org/20911-minneapolis-public-schools-avg-spending-student). With an average class size of 26 (actually pretty good), that's $546,000/year/classroom*....which is rather obscene, particularly when you consider their abysmal graduation rates.
So yes, I might agree that charter schools are not individually the solution, but we have to try SOMETHING different, and accomplishing change in small charter school 'hothouses' (where the parents are essentially volunteering their kids for an experience that is HOPEFULLY better than the norm) is far more possible than in the shitty public school system that is overwhelmed and ossified with bureaucracy, teachers' unions, and a cultural aversion to substantive change. The hope is that these changes, if they're successful, might actually percolate back into the stultified public schools.
And no, I don't think schools should be held to the same standards as a commercial business - they are intrinsically and substantively different. But there is an analogy to a refining company: schools are processing raw materials (our children) in an effort to make them finished products (fundamentally-educated adults). The difference is that schools can't simply throw out the dross, but are compelled to reprocess and reprocess until there's something useful there, fighting the 80/20 rule all the way to the bottom of Zeno's dichotomy paradox.
*let's dissect that, shall we?
Let's pay the teacher ~$120,000 year - so their total cost is ~$146,000/year - that rounds out our numbers, and I don't think any teacher would argue with that salary. So $400k/year left.
Lease rates for commercial, furnished offices in Minneapolis: let's use high-end, as we want our schools to be nicer than most office places: $304/psqft/year. We'll use a generous 40x40 room for the 'classroom' to account for other, shared spaces like gymnasium, cafeteria, etc., and ignore that - as the building builders and owners, the actual triple-net cost should be far less than half that (note, they don't pay property taxes, either...) - $50,000/year; $350k per year left.
Let's spend $100k PER YEAR PER CLASSROOM on 'stuff' - materials, dvd rentals, books, shared costs of projectors, smartboards. $250k per year left.
So in waste/bureaucracy, you could hand each student nearly $10,000 PER YEAR.
-Styopa
The more I learn about charter schools, the more it seems that they obviously are not supposed to be a permanent solution. The institution itself is seems explicitly designed to produce a scattershot of ideas and methods, some of which might fail spectacularly, and some of which might succeed spectacularly. While it is troubling that we as a society are learning which ideas work at the expense of our children, that doesn't mean we should just throw away what we've learned. I'm not talking about whether or not to keep charter schools around. I'm talking about taking some of the more successful methods and implementing them in our public schools. It concerns me that every time I hear about how awful charter schools are supposed to be, the speaker acts as though the best solution would be to nuke them and pretend the whole experiment never happened.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
What does it do to the public school system? Who cares? The only question is what does it do to the students. Schools exist for the benefit of the students -- not for the benefit of the school system.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
The problem is way too complicated for just simple test scores.
Education Success is spread out across these factors. I think prioritized in this order.
Involvement of the parents - Parents are largest aspect to a child's education. If the parent doesn't care about the child education he will most likely not bother with education.
Overall Environment - how safe the child feels. Does the environment encourage learning. Or is it about who is the toughest.
Child's genetic traits - Now almost everyone has some sort of learning disability, this isn't about that, but for children with higher level that can prevent learning.
Child's own ambition - Now if the kid doesn't want to learn he won't
Finally...
Quality of the school and teachers - Granted extreme incompetence will make things worse, but with the most middle rung teacher, who is teaching because they are afraid to taking more math classes in College, and doesn't know what else to do with their life. Still won't do too much harm if they do their jobs.
Charter Schools/Private look impressive because it gets the students with parent who care enough to get them into charter schools, and creates a better environment for them to learn, not because of the school, but because the kid is in a school with other kids who want to learn.
Other then focusing on schools, we need to change the focus.
1. Reduce Crime and Crack Down HARD on Gang activities. Big cities and small towns, needs to be sure the child is in an environment where they feel safe and doesn't need to join a group of people just for protection.
2. Media campaign targeted at parents, showing them that even though they got by chances are your kids won't.
3. Encourage the media to show educated people in a good light, not the anti-social nerds.
After that then we can focus on what the teachers and schools are doing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You would figure most people on Slashdot would have a good enough understanding of math and statistics to know that just because testing scores may not be perfect, there are plenty of practices that can make them very useful.
We can do pre-tests and post-tests so teachers aren't penalized for having students that were already poor performers. A teacher could be rated as outstanding even if his students are testing under the standards as long as their improvement was above expectations. The government has access to enough information to adjust test scores based on socio-economic factors. If 75% of a teacher's students are on food stamps, and the data shows students on food stamps generally underperform, then the performance metrics can take that into account.
The statistics world already has wonderful tools like standard deviations to determine if results are either expected deviations or are actually meaningful. And while the simple ones taught in STAT 101 aren't good enough for most uses, there are far better techniques that governments could pay very qualified statistics Phds to perform on teacher metrics.
And even though these metrics will still not be perfect, does that stop the private world from trying to rate employee performance? Sometimes a person is put on a doomed project and it is too hard to determine if they did a great job while everyone around them failed. But when people actually care about performance they understand that sometimes life can be unfair and that should not be an excuse for a shoddy product.
And our schools are certainly a shoddy product as they stand today.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Exactly. My kids are in a charter school and it's *much* better than the local school district. Not only is the education better, but the environment is much better - the kids wear uniforms (no it's not like a military school) and there's a strong emphasis on respect and courtesy. Test scores are consistently better than the public schools. The kids in the charter school are easily two years ahead of the public school kids.
All we hear around here is that the charter schools are "stealing money" from the public school district, but from my point of view I pay my taxes and I want the best education for my kids. The school has open enrollment and is available to anyone.
All of which may explain why the school has a loooong waiting list.
You've managed to teach yourself some some subjects - good for you. Now, what about the rest of the students?
For the relatively SMALL subset of moderately intelligent students who are self organized AND self motivated AND who have living situations with enough stability and support to allow the student to thrive in an independent academic environment this is all that's needed.
For everyone else, not so much.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
What else is there to grade schools on?
The people that criticize standardized testing are usually opposed to any accountability whatsoever. We are not going to fix our schools until we can fix the politics. Public schools are more politicized than any other institution in America. Teachers unions are the single biggest donors to the Democratic party, and 20% of the delegates to the last Democratic Convention were members. Democrats will do anything to support the unions, and the Republicans will do anything to oppose them. Neither party is concerned about actually educating the kids. Charter schools are just a pawn in the game. Democratic politicians generally oppose them, and Republican politicians generally support them. Neither cares about any actual evidence about whether they are effective or not.
How the hell are kids in Japan/China/whereever "beating" our children in school?
Oh right, rigorous testing.
China? Who knows. They only give international test results from Shanghai, and given the accuracy of statistics from the Chinese government, I wouldn't particularly trust those.
Japan? They do pretty well, but not as well as Finland. So let's look at some Finnish practices.
Finland does not give their kids standardized tests.
It is not mandatory to give students grades until they are in the 8th grade.
Finland has no private schools.
Finnish schools don't assign homework, because it is assumed that mastery is attained in the classroom.
Compulsory school in Finland doesn't begin until children are 7 years old.
Your statement that California pends over 10k/student is incorrect. Most schools are funded on what is called the revenue limit. It varies by school district from nearly 10k to about half of that. A very few school districts are funded on what is called basic aid and are considerably richer and spend 13 to 15k per student. Teacher salaries vary widely from roughly 32k to 90k+ depending on the district. Salary is only part of the cost to the district to hire a teacher. Districts also pay benefits, retirement, workers' compensation insurance, medicare, social security (district option - some are in; some not), state and federal payroll taxes, etc.
Other costs that the district must bear are facility costs, which are always considerably higher for high schools than elementary schools; transportation costs, property and liability insurance, utilities, etc.
Since the implementation of class size reduction funding, class sizes are generally 22-24, not the 30 you allege.
Now to your list:
1. In my experience this is simply not true. Public schools generally have much better computer equipment that charter schools. I have never seen a charter high school with any decent laboratory science teachers, labs, or materials.
The rest of your list of items 2-10 are individual subject areas that the district board of trustees can fund to a greater or lesser levels depending on that amount of money they have and their priorities. However, they must provide a Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) for ALL of their students. That means that the district must pay for athletic equipment, uniforms, including cheerleader uniforms, field trips, books, and all of the other things you list, without charging the students and their families. If they tell your daughter or son that she or he must pay for cheerleader or athletic uniforms, they are in violation of California law and you should contact your local ACLU chapter, as they are very active in seeing that FAPE is enforced.
Another huge cost that public schools incur that charter schools largely dodge by one means or another is special education. California schools are required to provide a Free and Appropriate Public Education to even the most profoundly developmentally disabled student through age 22. One child can cost a district as much as $250,000 per year, not counting legal costs if the parents are litigious, which many special ed parents are.
As to your last question, school district budgets are public documents. Most districts post them on their websites. Inaddition, each district is required by law to have an annual, independent financial audit, which is also a public document. If you want to know where the money goes, it is easy to find out.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.