We have often heard that charter schools will “save poor kids trapped in failing public schools.”
We have also often heard that NYC has the best charter schools in the nation because the city chooses the authorizers so carefully and monitors them frequently.
It is interesting, therefore, to look at the performance of the charter sector on the absurdly hard Common Core tests, where most kids across the state of New York allegedly “failed.”
Here is a link to the charter scores, as reported by the New York City Charter Schools Center.
Unfortunately, the Center can’t stop boasting about how many ways the charters “beat” public schools, an obnoxious habit those folks have, when they should be interested in collaboration with public schools towards a common goal.
If you scroll down to the list of charter schools and their scores, you will find they are spread out all over the place.
Some are high, some are very low. Most are in the middle.
Some saw their 2012 proficiency rates drop more than those of public schools, as much as 50-60%.
Deborah Kenny’s much-celebrated Harlem Village Academy Leadership Charter School, for example, fell from a proficiency rate of 86.5% to 33.7%, a drop of 52.8%. (Now I understand why my interview with Katie Couric–lasting 30 minutes–never was aired. She is on the board of Kenny’s HVA, as is publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch.)
I don’t mean to pick on charter schools as such. I just think it is ridiculous that they are seen as a systemic answer to the problems of public education when they enroll so few students, have high teacher attrition, and have the freedom to exclude or push out kids they don’t want. Some have high test scores, some have low scores, but they are a distraction from the needs and problems of a city with 1.1 million public school students. I wish they were all successful. I wish all the public schools were successful. What these rotten scores show is that what we are doing now (No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top) doesn’t work.
The status quo has failed.
We need education with a human face. 1.1 million of them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The NY City Charter Schools Center analysis is absolutely useless as it does not match for demographics. How did the charter vs. public schools do when matching by LEP, free lunch, free and reduced lunch, and special needs percentages?
Those things don’t matter to charters when it comes to the rhetoric – only excellence in teaching matters and eliminates all barriers.
Funny how their enrollment numbers belie the rhetoric that they do believe those things impact education and that those are hard conditions to change through teaching and are expensive to change.
I’ve yet to see a charter go the route of enrolling as many special education students as possible (they get more money per student) and then claiming excellence in teaching will cover them – they seem to know that the numbers will hurt them more than the additional money will help them (unless they’re a school intent on tanking in a few years and taking as much money as possible before they’re shut down based on numbers).
M:
I have not seen any State by State data on enrollments of Public Schools versus Charter Schools I did look at Joe Nathans data for Minnesota and his data shows that if anything the Charters are serving a more diverse population and one that contains as much poverty and special needs as the Public Schools.
Click to access FINAL-Charter-K-12-Enrollment-Trends-2012.pdf
If you have data that supports your claims of selectivity it would be helpful.
Joe Nathan works for a charter corporation. I would look at state data instead.
Diane:
Do you have a link?
A link for what? You could read the GAO study of charters, showing that they underenroll special-education students; you could go to Bruce Baker’s blog, posted here many times, http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com, where he has demonstrated time and again that charters in NYC and New Jersey do not have the same enrollments of ELLs, special education, and other high-needs students. They also have high rates of attrition. Do your own research, I am busy.
Completely agree that Charter schools are not the solution for our public school system. The infatuation with charters needs to cease immediately. I believe that Charters were seen as a solution during a time when parents had no other choices and felt trapped in a complex public school system that did not listen to the parent voice. I also believe the data that an overwhelming majority of parents want to send their kids to their neighborhood public school. Yet parents are rarely treated as equal partners in any education system. It is very difficult for a parent to learn the various “agendas” in the politics of schools and they basically “give up” and hope for the best. Unfortunately, that attitude does not help our kids’ futures. When our new Superintendent started in our district two years ago, I sent her an email that charter schools are so “2000-late”. I suppose she agreed and now all public schools in our district are offering a variety of “academies” for parents and students to choose a school that interests them and they are not “charters”. I also firmly disagree with “lottery enrollments” but cannot seem to find a better strategy. A recent presentation to our Board outlined the pros/cons about “Open Enrollment/Parent Choice” policies and maybe more discussion will help move us to a better enrollment solution. I am certainly keeping the faith and will not “give up”. Thank you for sharing so much information from across our nation about the challenges in our education system. Reading your blog affirms that I made the right decision to keep my kids in our neighborhood public school. Thanks!
Education With A Human Face is a very big solution and a world away from reducing those 1.1 million to numbers rather than lively narratives filled with hope and promise.
Diane:
I am having trouble finding comparable recent numbers. The numbers for 2007 suggest that Joe’s numbers are not somehow tainted by the fact that he works for a Charter Corporation.
See: http://www.auditor.leg.state.mn.us/ped/pedrep/charterschools.pdf Table 1.3
I don’t have time to dissect his conclusions now – but if there was a district where the charters were more diverse than the public schools we’d have heard loads about it by now. And if they were outperforming the public schools even with them having the perceived advantage – then it’d be a miracle.
Given that I figured I wouldn’t be the only one to question such a miracle I sought out some who had done this analysis already.
I read a decent bit aside from Joe Nathan from different news outlets and scholars that have done studies in Minneapolis. There is no doubt that the charters do enroll more minorities than public schools.
That does come at the cost of the schools being more segregated than ever before – http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/06/1052094/-Is-Segregation-The-New-School-Choice
And what do we get for that segregation? Assuming that the charters aren’t even trying to cream the lowest needs special education students and LEP students – in these conclusions the charters did worse more than 37% of the time and did better than the average public school only about 17% of the time (that’s based on more recent numbers than 2007 – I simply don’t the time to try to dissect the methodology for a 6 year old report) – http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/statepressreleases/Minnesota.pdf
So let’s use a piece of his information – he wants to compare the charters that are largely in very segregated areas (almost all in urban inner city areas) and then compares them to the LEP numbers of the rest of the state. It’s TRUE if there were charters all over the state this would be apples to apples – it isn’t – it would be if he compared the charters only to the public schools in the areas where they serve the same student populations.
He compares the special education numbers, and schools where the special education numbers are higher, do worse and excuses the charter schools – and does the same for poverty numbers and LEP numbers.
Color me less than impressed.
Meanwhile, we have proof that charters are indeed self-selecting their special education students everywhere and I’d suspect that the public schools are probably getting the most severely disabled students while charters are taking less of their “fair share” as not all special needs children are created equal- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/19/charter-schools-disabilities-_n_1610744.html – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/01/minnesota-school-of-scien_n_1729305.html .
We have more racial segregation, student outcomes are about the same or worse than public schools in Minnesota, and yet we’re funding a system that is not utilizing resources well. All charters are succeeding in doing is lowering the cost of education on the backs of their teachers while doing the same or worse in most cases and in the same breath creating more segregation (which is legal because parents “choose” it even though racial segregation patterns have existed for decades and was one thing we’re supposed to be trying to change).
Why do I want to listen to Joe Nathan on this? Because he’s so unbiased and the results are so great for Minnesota?
Edit: I choose to post anonymously so I can’t edit my posts after – where I linked the credo study I meant to say that nationally the charters have less than stellar results.
My main point being, comparing charter school populations to the rest of the state which is not as diverse paints an unfair picture of public schools using percentages because of where charters are concentrated vs. the lack of diversity in the entire state.
In special education, because no area attracts special education students in particular, a statewide generalization is appropriate.
Overall, we’re not seeing proof that the charters are the answer – but we are seeing that they tend to favor themselves over the communities they serve and tend to exacerbate differences. I am not convinced by Joe Nathan’s “data”.
M:
Are you saying Joe Nathan’s data is bogus or are you saying Minnesota data is different from other States? In either case data would help the discussion.
The GAO reports Diane mentioned are useful but as one commentator stated are confusing. Also given the relatively small size of Charter Schools and the need for special services for Special Ed, I am not sure it is reasonable to expect Charter Schools to enroll the same proportion.
One final question. Are Special Education students subject to the same State testing requirements as the rest of the Student body or does it vary State by State?
M, it bears noting that Joe Nathan is a really nice and smart guy who has been promoting charters for the past 25 or so years. So, nice and bright and kind as he is, he is not an independent source for data about charters.
I agree with Diane on this one – I was trying to meet Bernie halfway but in all honesty that the source is so biased would be enough for me to disregard him.
Because of the general population make-up, and how charters are positioned in the state, makes it so that the comparison is inappropriate – I can’t say how it is against every other state.
Special education students have different expectations in different states. Some states offer alternative diplomas, some don’t. Some states offer alternative assessments, some don’t.
There are far better sources for info on charter schools than a charter school proponent. When they throw up “better than public school” numbers, you can usually find some finagling with how the data is framed and not accepting the percentages presented as objective – Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.
Nathan while I’m sure is a good person, takes an approach here that makes it sound like the public schools are creaming students and that the charters are struggling to close the achievement gap. How he frames the data accomplishes that and I don’t believe it coincidental he would choose to compare schools that serve specific urban areas with much more language diversity and much more poverty, to overall state schools which includes a lot more suburban and rural schools that are not as diverse in language (though rural tends to be poor as well but not necessarily have as many minorities).
The claim falls apart under even remote scrutiny. You have to look at comparing groups that are similar to even begin to make a fair comparison and usually that’s where you end up with charters being sometimes a bit better but usually worse than public schools.
M & Diane:
Joe Nathan’s data is aligned with the data from the Minnesota DoE and I assume it is coming from the same data source. Unless either of you have data that indicates otherwise, his data should be accepted for Minnesota. It may or may not parallel the data for other States. It is good that you think highly of Joe as a person, but frankly it is immaterial. The data is either accurate or it is not. It is easy to accuse someone of “finagling” data. It is harder to show that you are not simply throwing out an accusation because the data is inconvenient. When you make such accusations about finagling of data, you really need to support them.
Joe Nathan:
Can you point us to the specific sources used to compile the trend data on your web site?
Why don’t you read Professor Myron Orfield’s charter studies?
2008 and 2012.
Diane:
Thanks for pointing them out. I have started going through them. You are right they certainly put a different cast on Joe Nathan’s data by disaggregating the District data down to the school level and identifying how integrated the schools are and the trend over time. It certainly raises the thorny issue of parental choice and integration.
I will contact Joe Nathan for his response to Orfield’s 2008, 2012 and 2013 papers..
I didn’t say he fudged the data, I said how he frames the data is what gives a false impression. I’m done with this – you seem to be either being deliberately obtuse or insistent that a dyed-in-the-wool charter supporter is delivering to you unbiased information without corroborating it in any other way.
I’ll side with Diane – do your own research – I’m not going to continue throwing myself at Minnesota until you’re satisfied that Joe Nathan didn’t frame the data from 2007 in ways that make charters sound better than public schools.
And because I hate to play the game of “I’m taking my ball and going home” – http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/27000.html
Minnesota is 86% White – the charters are by and large minority and nowhere near reflective of having only 14% of minorities that are crammed into 5% of their segregated school system.
Unless you want to make the case that most white people are immigrants that don’t speak English and are equally poor when 11% of Minnesota’s total population is below the poverty level and 10% don’t speak English.
Do you still want to make the case that charters serve a population as diverse as the rest of the state – or in the case of Minnesota – more white everywhere except in the inner cities where charters are. Minnesota’s population is not equally diverse and has far more white people than people of color in the rest of the United States.
M:
Diane pointed me to Orfield’s papers. I have looked through them. They clearly show that District level data needs to be disaggregated down to the school level – which I believe is your point. Orfield’s analysis is compelling. I can see counterarguments especially around the notion of parental choice but I want to hear Joe’s take of Orfield’s analysis.