For more than two decades, we have heard that charter schools will “save” poor kids from “failing public schools.”
Most comparisons show that charter schools and public schools get about the same test scores if they serve the same demographics. When charter schools exclude English learners and students with severe disabilities and push out students with low test scores, or exclude students with behavioral issues, it is likely to boost their test scores artificially.
Nicole Blalock, who holds a Ph.D. and is a postdoctoral scholar at Arizona State University, compared the performance of charter schools and public schools on NAEP 2013.
She acknowledged the problems inherent in comparing the two sectors. Both are diverse, and demographic controls are not available.
Nonetheless, she identified some states where charter performance is better, and some where public school performance is better.
The result, as you might expect: Mixed.
Bottom line: charters are no panacea.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Agreed, charters are no panacea. Meanwhile, there is growing collaboration among district & charters here
http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/blog/joe-nathan/encouraging-responses-increasing-minnesota-charter-public-school-enrollment
A number of district & charter educators are learning they can act like some colleges and universities, which both try to attract & retain students, and recognize that they can have a strong program for all their students by working together. The link above gives examples.
More shameless plugging of things to increase the corporate charter revenue pool? Mr. Nathan, I’m sometimes impressed by your seemingly tireless energy to plug the private sector takeover of education, but then I remember you’re a NPIC employee whose salary is derived from the dismantling of public institutions.
Actually, part of our work is to help improve district public schools. We have a positive working relationship with a number of district school teachers, administrators and union leaders. Among other things, we’re helping them develop & offer more courses in which high school students earn high school & college credit.
Just this week I wrote a column urging two local boards to listen to the union presidents who are urging that district teachers be allowed to create new, non-charter options with districts.
http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/blog/joe-nathan/encouraging-responses-increasing-minnesota-charter-public-school-enrollment
“Charters ARE the Cure All for our schools!”
“Charters take failing students and turn them into future Ivy Leaguers.”
“Charters get results that just cannot be obtained in a public school!”
THE CHARTER/PRIVATIZER PUSHERS, CIRCA 1993
“Charters are no silver bullet.”
“Agreed, charters are no panacea.”
“It wouldn’t be realistic to expect immediate results from charters. We need more money, more time and more charters!” (Snicker, hee hee.)
THE CHARTER/PRIVATIZER PUSHERS, CIRCA 2013
Give us a break, Joseph. This is just a change in tactics with the language to match.
Now that you’re safely “in the door” and you’ve accomplished your first goal of sucking away funds for public school, you’re now trying to “normalize” your presence.
It’s pretty transparent, Joseph.
We may be mere public education defenders, working without pay for something we believe in, but we can are actually able to see the game that you, and your other well-funded shills, are playing.
Good old Joe Nathan, always closing, like any salesman. Tell them whatever you need to, at any time, if it will close the sale.
ABC: Always be closing, Joe. Always be closing. That’s you. And that’s why guys like you should be selling. Not teaching:
Here’s the study I’d like to see. Maybe one of you can get a Gates grant 🙂
I’d like to see a study of the effect on existing public schools when charters are introduced (those schools that aren’t closed or close).
I’d like to see them use Cleveland, because Cleveland has had charters for so long and they double down on ed reform every year.
It would be really useful to public school parents, because we were sold ed reform on the premise that it would improve EXISTING public schools (through either competition or charters acting as “R and D” for public schools).
One of the things I really resent about ed reformers is there doesn’t seem to be any consideration of how these plans work out for the schools that were there when they arrived. My governor is an ed reformer and he’s abandoned public schools. His entire state board is composed of charter and voucher promoters. Who is looking out for the public school kids in these cities and districts? What about their schools? As far as I can tell, as an outsider, the only entity advocating for my kid’s school is the teachers union.
How did that happen? How did the majority of kids end up with no advocates in government? That’s crazy.
What was shocking to me about the Bennett emails that were released in Indiana (and this is also true of the emails that the ACLU sued and got released in NJ) was not that Bennett was worried about the charter school scores.
What was shocking was the that the entire focus was on charter schools. These folks work for a state agency. They’re supposed to be working for all schools. There’s no concern for or even mention of the public school scores in Indiana. What happened to the public schools in the districts where they pushed charters in Indiana? How are those schools doing?
Reading the emails in NJ one would think there are no public schools in Newark.
This is not what was sold to public school parents. They never would have bought it if it had been sold like that.
If hiring an ed reformer in a public school district means existing public schools are abandoned and ignored, public school parents should know that.
That’s the study I’d like to see. How are PUBLIC schools doing under ed reform? Not that I’ll get a study like that 🙂
They want to get rid of public schools.
You are quite correct to keep bringing up the fact that elected oficials should be working for all students and to not be working to increase the privateers coffers.
Overall, very astute comments from you, thanks!!
My comment from a prior post on the insanity that is using test scores for evaluating students, schools and districts:
Again considering the complete invalidities involved in the processes involved in any standardized test and educational standards why we continue to discuss these invalidities is beyond me.
Get at the heart of the problem folks, every time someone brings this up it should be strongly emphasized just how absurd and harming these practices are. To quote Wilson:
“It requires an enormous suspension of rational thinking to believe that the best way to describe the complexity of any human achievement, any person’s skill in a complex field of human endeavour, is with a number that is determined by the number of test items they got correct. Yet so conditioned are we that it takes a few moments of strict logical reflection to appreciate the absurdity of this.”
Or look at the absurdity of these educational malpractices this way:
The proliferation of educational assessments, evaluations and canned programs belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
Our current neglect of instructional issues are the result of assessment policies that waste resources to do the wrong things, e.g., canned curriculum and standardized testing, right. Instructional central planning and student control doesn’t – can’t – work. But, that never stops people trying.
The result is that each effort to control the uncontrollable does further damage, provoking more efforts to get things in order. So the function of administration becomes control rather than creation of resources. When Peter Drucker lamented that so much of management consists in making it difficult for people to work, he meant it literally. Inherent in obsessive command and control is the assumption that human beings can’t be trusted on their own to do what’s needed. Hierarchy and tight supervision are required to tell them what to do. So, fear-driven, hierarchical organizations turn people into untrustworthy opportunists. Doing the right thing instructionally requires less centralized assessment, less emphasis on evaluation and less fussy interference, not more. The way to improve controls is to eliminate most and reduce all.
Now to beging to understand those invalidities read the following summary. Better still read and understand what Wilson has proven about those invalidities:
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Does a positive peer impact artificially boost test scores, or do students genuinely learn better if they are surrounded by strong students?
Are the two mutually exclusive?
To be truly either/or, you must equate test score growth as “genuinely learn[ing] better.” But what if it isn’t? Do you have some new evidence that suggests that it is?
They are not mutually exclusive, but present problems given the title of this blog. If restricting admission to good students results in those students getting a better education, not allowing good students to gather together makes their education worse. Neither is a better education for all students, each is a better education for some students.
I suppose if we only looked through the prism of peer effect, we might develop a limited perspective such as one you brought forth.
There is also a spectrum of peer effect to look at (Too much? Too little? Is there a just right?). In addition, there is the negative peer effect to consider. In other words, does the gathering of the strong and parentally involved hurt all/some more than it helps all/some?
It doesn’t necessarily “present problems.” It might. It might not. It might be a wash. It might be the best of all possible worlds. Or it might help the few and hurt the many. It might be as significant as having a plant in the classroom.
I look to Dr. Ravitch’s expertise here. She argues that there is a strong peer impact on education that explains some of the differences in outcomes between charter schools and traditional public schools.
I also know that my middle son longed for a community of scholars when choosing a university to attend. I certainly believe that having other strong students around him has enhanced his education.
Don’t most parents want their children to be around a community of scholars?
I would mostly agree with your statement and Ravitch, I guess–as long as you factored in the whole spectrum of peer effect.
Actually I don’t think that most parents, and certainly most students do want to be around a community of scholars. The terms “nerd”, “egg head”, “know it all”, “poindexter”, and “bookworm” are not terms meant to express admiration.
Here is another test: any problem identifying which will get a student more status
1) the football player recruited to be the quarterback at Alabama or
2) a top ten scorer on the USAMO?
Or this
1) winning the Heisman
2) winning the Putnam
I see that you have framed this question before on other threads. The other posters have done a decent job giving it perspective. Do you feel they have not? Is that why you have reposted a version of it here?
I notice that you also ignored the negative outcomes of peer effect on those threads as well. Why?
BTW, many have argued that there is a peer impact. But the word “strong” is never coupled with it. Does Ravitch use it that way? If so, could you find it for me?
Dr. Ravitch has been concerned that the screening provided by applying to lotteries will advantage Peter to pay Paul, and has offered peer effects as an explanation for higher test performance in pared studies that compare students chosen to attend charter schools to students not chosen. If there was actually a negative peer effect, charter schools would have to be seen as being very impressive for overcoming that disadvantage (not to mention elite privates like the lab schools and Philips Exeter)
I use the term “strong” to reflect the fact that a students academic abilities come from a variety of sources. Students can substitute hard work for inherent ability, and family background can enhance or detract from a students ability to do well in school settings. Strong seems to me to be a more accurate and neutral word than, say, smart or intelligent. What word would you have me use?
Having operated a charter, I can anecdotally tell you that your beam of focus leaves much out.
There are negative outcomes to peer effect. And you have used the word strong to modify “peer effect.”
No doubt I leave many things out of a single comment. The world is a complicated place.
I have no doubt that there are negative aspects to being among your intellectual peers, yet I think the positives out way the negatives. That is why we moved my middle son out of the high school for his mathematics and science classes as quickly as possible and now pay a considerable amount so that he can attend a university with many strong students. I don’t think that I am unique in believing that this is important.
Howard Gardner explaining way back in the 90s “why even the best students in the best schools don’t understand,” said “Most people remain five-year-olds or Aristotelians even though they studied physics” (1992, pg. 7)
Whatever role we see for technology, we all do generally agree that schools fail because of the gap between what we expect them to do, and what we’ve actually designed them to do. Standardized testing, and moreover the purposes to which it is put, is the nemesis of authentic learning—not simply vinegar to its oil, more like a cancer in need of white corpuscles to protect learning from deformation and certain death. Gardner (among many others) has demonstrated the utter and complete failure of the tell and test model to build the kind of critical thinking skills required to connect the dots once we leave the classroom. No amount of technology will ever change this until we rethink and reframe schooling itself, in fact they may only entrench the problems. But to abandon the public social element of schools is to deny the essentially socially situated condition of learning itself.
“But to abandon the public social element of schools is to deny the essentially socially situated condition of learning itself.”
Well said, sir!!
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