Aaron Churchill of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, takes issue with Bill Phillis’s negative view of Ohio charter schools. He says that critics like Phillis compare charter schools to districts instead of to schools.
Fordham is a charter authorizer in a ohio.
Churchill writes:
“Charter school naysayers are quick with their “what’s wrong with” quips, and the criticism is at times deserved. Many of Ohio’s charter schools must be made “righter,” to help more students—especially our neediest kids—succeed in school. But by focusing–gleefully, it would seem–on only low-performing charter schools (and making a poor comparison, to boot), critics are blind to the shining examples of charter schools that provide a great education for students, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds and/or arrive at their school grade levels behind. And worse yet, they ignore the rot in their own backyards.
“Rather than wallowing in the dregs of charter and district schools, wouldn’t our time and energy be better used learning from exemplar schools, quickly rooting out the dismal ones, and pushing for constructive change in K-12 education, so that all Ohio’s kids have the knowledge and skills to face a different world than generations past?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Churchill says: “Both make the mistake of comparing the performance index scores of charter schools to school districts.” Is it really a mistake, aren’t charter schools like separate school districts unto themselves?
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Joe:
It is a simple unit of analysis issue. Phillis used the wrong set of data. If he had used the correct set of data, his general point would have still been valid, but it would not have been so graphic. Accuracy and precision are important, if you want to be taken seriously.
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Churchill does not discuss the well funded and well publicized war against traditional public schools, their teachers and their unions that seems to go on every day of the week across the nation.
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OMG this guy will be on education nation offerin what, exactly?
M. Night Shyamalan: The Confusion With Charter Schools – AOL On
http://on.aol.com/video/m–night-shyamalan–the-confusion-with-charter-schools-517928877
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It is, indeed, always good to learn from exemplary schools. And from exemplary teachers.
And that is why we do not need a totalitarian, top-down mandate like the Common Core–one that, in ELA, enforces an invariant testing of skills abstracted from any meaningful content or context on every teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer in the country. It is extremely important for teachers and curriculum coordinators and curriculum developers to be free to innovate, to adapt and adapt the best ideas and to reject the awful ones (e.g., ideas like turning all our public PreK-12 schools into test prep centers).
If you want reform, then give teachers the time and autonomy to do Japanese-style lesson study, to perform Do-Plan-Check-Act analyses. Empower them to innovate. Give them the resources to learn more of their subjects. You will find them eager students. That has been my experience. Most went into this business because they cared about, for example, writing or poetry or mathematics.
If you want free market solutions, then don’t tell everyone that they have to accept THIS set of “standards” until the Politburo meets again, in a few years, to draw up the next set.
Continuous improvement flows from the bottom up. You know what flows from the top down.
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Robert D. Shepherd: I enjoy your postings. Please keep them coming.
A brief follow up to your “Politburo” reference. I have gradually become very uneasy with the eerie similarities between the apparatchiks and unrealistic three/five-year plans and top-down management and Potemkin Villages and cult of the personality and such of the late and not lamented Soviet Union and some—SOME—of the leading sectors of the charterite/privatizer movement.
I repeat: SOME. Do you ever get that feeling yourself?
¿?
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Some? You’re far too kind.
Separating out the non-ideological opportunists and go-along-to-get-along types, I find the so-called reformers, despite their occasional “corporate nice” facade, to be universally mendacious, condescending, paternalistic and self-seeking.
Then again, what do I know? I’m just a classroom teacher who’s personally responsible for endangering America’s Global Competitiveness.
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You’re right Michael, we classroom teachers are “The Endangerers”.
We could make a TV series (Joanna could write the theme song), franchise it, market it, make a ton of money and then become true educational reformers spending millions upon millions on buying politicians to do our bidding.
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It’s interesting KTA that I had been describing the nefarious “reforms” as the Sovietization of education but changed it to the McDonaldization when I realized that some of our younger teachers would have no clue as to what Sovietization would mean.
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I have been calling the CCSSO the Common Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth. Commissariat from Stalinist Russia. Minitrue from Orwell’s 1984. Some will object that the Common Core is not a curriculum. However, as E.D. Hisrch, Jr., said on this blog a few weeks ago, the CCSS in math is a curricular outline. That’s actually better than what is the case with the CCSS in ELA. That amateurish document is a list of skills abstracted from any meaningful content or context. And since that list of skills is what is tested, and since those tests are high stakes, the list of skills has BECOME the curriculum to an enormous extent. That’s a disaster for education in the English language arts. The cost of that is curricular coherence, and it’s a very, very heavy cost. I have been examining a LOT of new CCSS-aligned ELA curricula. It reminds me of Monty Python’s “And now for something completely different.” That’s because every publisher begins every project, now, by making a list of the abstract skills from the CCSS in the left-hand column and a list of the lessons where these are “covered” in the right. The list of abstracted skills drives the curriculum development and narrows and distorts it. The the resulting curricula end up being incoherent–not sensibly sequenced or balanced or spiraled and never having the proper depth of meaningful (semantic) context. Everyone knows that the new assessments test skills abstracted from any content knowledge, and THAT is what drives curricular development and pedagogical practice, and that is a DISASTER for English language arts education.
And, to make matters worse, not only is the CCSS in ELA a list of skills abstracted from meaningful context, it is also an extremely amatuerishly put together list of skills. It is as though someone handed David Coleman the 1858 (?) first edition of Gray’s Anatomy and sent him to a cabin in the woods to write new “standards” for the medical profession. It’s astonishing to me that standards this poorly written, this poorly conceived have not been met by a resounding chorus of derision from those who actually know something about the teaching of English.
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That will happen, of course, as people begin working with these standards every day, as I do.
It is darkly humorous that this tiny group of folks was paid so very much money to come up with standards [sic] this amateurish. These look to me like what one would get if one gave the job to a freshman class of English education students and had those students act without any mentoring or guidance. The CCSS in ELA are incredibly uninformed, backward, barbarous.
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Seems to me, Churchill is making the same argument opponents of public schools spew out all the time. Talk about the kettle calling the pot black!
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Excuse me, but if choice and competition are the salvation of American education, then comparison is absolutely appropriate. It’s no different from choosing a car or restaurant. I look at the positive as well as the negative aspects of each choice and yes, compare them to reach a decision. Outside sources (Consumer Reports, Motor Trend, published reviews, friends’ recommendations) may inform my decisions. This is no different. Charter advocates can’t have it both ways.
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Sure they can have it both ways, because it’s their ways or the highways.
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Exactly. Whenever the entire charter sector is criticized, the immediate response from their supporters is “there are some good charter schools.”
But when public school advocates make the same argument, most charter advocates respond with the “public schools are failing kids” talking point.
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ST:
Data-wise, you are simply wrong. PR wise, you may be correct.
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You’ve got me confused, with your statement, Bernie. What do you mean by “data-wise you are simply wrong”. I’m not following. Thanks!
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Duane:
This is statistics 1. You should not compare, in this case rank, schools and districts. They are different units of analysis. As I mention elsewhere on this thread, the general conclusion may well not change but the details do.
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By the rereading all your comments together I see what you mean. I agree that to compare a school to a district is the ol apples and oranges thing and that we should be careful in our attempts to make such comparisons.
But I’m still not sure how your statement “fits” in with what ST said.
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As I read it, both Joe and ST were questioning the validity of Churchill’s criticism. Technically, as you acknowledge, Churchill is correct: It is an apples and oranges comparison. I have asked Churchill to provide a link to school level data so that I can try to compare apples to apples. Given the numbers and scores for the charter schools, I doubt that the overall conclusion that on average charter schools are doing worse on standardized test results than the equivalent public schools will change. But I will go with the data.
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http://www.npr.org/2013/09/27/225748846/diane-ravitch-rebukes-education-activists-reign-of-error
Don’t miss Diane on NPR!
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Thanks.
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I mentioned the same unit of analysis point when you quoted from the Bill Phillis’ post. Commenters and champions on both sides need to show some care when presenting empirical data.
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Perhaps if Mr. Churchill lived in Akron and was privy to Mr. Brennan’s legal machinations and political contributions to his buds in the Republican party (and is our largest home-grown, for-profit charter owner), he might feel a bit differently. Mr. Brennan’s schools fail with regularity but in our last budget he got a boost in funding. When the point of schooling is to profit a rich sugar daddy, it tends to jaundice your view of charters.
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I’m not an education professional but I am a public school parent and I’ve been following school reform in Ohio for about a decade. Increasingly I follow it in order to be prepared to attempt to protect my local school from harmful or reckless reforms.
It isn’t public school advocates who seek to label schools as “failing”, it’s ed reformers. My local public school isn’t, actually, “failing” (by the ed reform metric, which is standardized test scores) yet we’ve been subjected to every fad and gimmick to raise test scores that comes down the pike for over a decade now.
I would be thrilled if Governor Kasich, Arne Duncan and professional ed reform lobbyists like Michelle Rhee would stop labeling public schools as “failing”, unfortunately, I don’t have any influence in the dominant ed reform narrative.
Maybe the writer could persuade Kasich, Duncan and the rest to stop labeling all Ohio public schools as failing. We’ve been attacking traditional public schools for a decade now, and this approach doesn’t seem to be improving public schools or charter schools.
One more thing. We in the public were sold school reform based on the promise that this particular market based approach would benefit BOTH public schools and charter schools. After more than a decade I can state that ed reform has not helped my local public school but has instead harmed my local public school. Charter schools in Ohio aren’t doing too well either.
If ed reform isn’t helping public schools improve and it isn’t helping charter schools improve, why in the heck are we still following this lock-step path more than a decade later? Are Ohio public schools better after 16 years of this? Wasn’t that the point of this whole movement?
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The link to the “performance index” rankings — Ohio’s student achievement metric — is here: http://education.ohio.gov/lists_and_rankings. The spreadsheet tab “PI Rankings – Schools” ranks all 3,000 plus schools (district/charter) in OH. Note, several of Ohio’s public school districts’ (e.g., Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati) buildings have “NR” as their PI rankings; these districts’ results are still under review, as the Auditor of State’s investigation into “data-scrubbing” is still ongoing. Still, one can simply sort the PI scores, and then sort by school org. type — community (i.e., charter) or public school (“district”). You’ll find lots of both type of schools at the bottom.
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You know, Arne Duncan said again recently that parents are “voting with their feet” to attend charter schools. What ed reformers ignore is that the vast majority of children in Ohio (and nationally, actually) attend existing, traditional public schools.
I would ask, again, (and I’ve been asking this for more than a decade) what ed reform has accomplished to improve existing public schools? We’ve had a one-sided debate for more than a decade in this state that has focused exclusively on “choice”. The narrow terms of that debate lead to a result where public schools are only mentioned in terms of how badly they’re “failing” or how people are “trapped” in local schools or how public schools need to adopt charter school methods.
This is brutally unfair to the vast majority of public school students, and, incidentally, it’s also not true. The vast majority of Ohio public schools are not, in fact, “failing”. Traditional public schools are only mentioned when they’re labeled as failing or used as an example of how people are “voting with their feet”.
I would suggest that the terms of this debate benefit one narrow version of school reform, and, worse, either completely ignore or denigrate traditional public schools. That’s crazy. MOST kids attend traditional public schools. How does reform help them? Who in state or federal government is acting as an advocate for the vast majority of Ohio public school children?
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How can the Fordham Institute, a a so-called education reform policy think tank , also be a charter school authorizer? Whatever happened to any sense of conflict of interest?
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The irony here is that in the state of Pennsylvania, former Education Secretary Ron Tomalis made an effort to change the evaluation standards of charter schools to compare them with districts (local education agencies). This effort was made in an effort to improve the scores of charter schools across the Commonwealth. It seems they were trailing public schools in a majority of situation. So, the Fordham Institute wants them compared with schools, while PA Governor Tom Corbett and friends would like them compared with districts. I wonder when these folks will just realize that they DON’T compare!
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Diane,
Terry Ryan now in Idaho, posted an opinion piece in Albertson Foundation’s Idaho Ed News about you and your new book! Thought you would be interested.
http://www.idahoednews.org/voices/new-book-doesnt-tell-the-true-story/
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Terry Ryan worked for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute as its charter school director in Ohio for many years. A very nice guy, but his mission is to propagandize for charters and to rationalize the poor performance of charters in Ohio, while glossing over the greed and rapaciousness of the state’s charter leaders (White Hat and ECOT).
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