Massachusetts is preparing to lift the cap on charter schools, the assumption being that they have cracked the code to educating the neediest children. The Boston Globe has been cheerleading for the charter sector, along with the usual hedge funders and philanthropists.
Only problem, says Edushyster, is facts.
“At the heart of our great debate about how much greater charter schools are than the long-suffering public schools that they are outperforming by every conceivable measure lies a great assumption: that charters represent the best way to propel urban students through the pipeline of college readiness. Except that the pipeline turns out to be of an exceptionally narrow gauge. Take Match Charter Public School, from which six boys graduated last year. You read that correctly, reader. That number was six. Which is the same number of boys who graduated from Codman Academy Charter Public School in 2013. But that’s still a bigger number than four, the number of boys who graduated from City on a Hill Charter Public School last year.”
And she adds:
“The point, reader, is that we know, down to our vestigial organs, that charter schools are doing a much better job of preparing the city’s students for college because we are secretly in love with Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh and hence hangeth upon his every word. Except that a recent study called Charter Schools and the Road to College Readiness, commissioned by the Boston Foundation and paid for by the New Schools Venture Fund, found that male and female students who attend Boston’s six charter high schools are no more likely to graduate than their public school peers. (See p. 24). Which is not what the researchers were expecting to find, and certainly not what Scot Lehigh was expecting to write about. Which is no doubt why he didn’t.”
Sadly, the legislature is set to increase funding for the charters even as the much-maligned Boston public schools are experiencing remarkable success. “The irony is, of course, that the beleaguered Boston Public Schools are sending more students to college than at any time in the city’s history. Or they were. As the city grapples with the deep budget cuts that operating two separate school systems will entail, the *extra* programs that help lots of kids in places like Boston get to college and stay there are likely to be the first to go.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Same old story, different state. I bet they reported their graduation rates at near 100%. They always do, but never provide the number, or the number who were there in the 9th grade and finished 12th. These corpratists are hell bent on destroying teacher unions and taking over public tax money. Two large costs in running a school business: teacher salary/benefits and building operation costs. They get the legislators to design a law which requires the state to provide free space in existing schools, thus no building or maintenence costs. And if they do not have to hire union teachers, or even trained licensed teachers, they can reduce those costs. With the virtual schools, no teachers needed at all, just a few one time program/lesson developers and then just keep re-running the same old programs. And then have your legislative buddies pass a law exempting your public charter school operation from having to report accounting and even get an exemption from those tests–this is already being pushed in may areas. Remember, this gates fellow is the one whose software cannot keep hackers out of it.
“Same old story, different state. I bet they reported their graduation rates at near 100%. They always do, but never provide the number, or the number who were there in the 9th grade and finished 12th.”
Agreed. That is amazing to me, to get away with that. Arne Duncan does it.
You know, with all the promotion of STEM, we might want to focus in on how many of the people saying “100%!” graduation rates when they lost half the class somewhere between 9 and 12th grades are apparently, inumerate. We may need some STEM classes for the adults.
Why should mere facts get in the way of the heart-warming narrative of adorable children miraculously saved from the clutches of evil public school teachers by TFA temps and altruistic billionaires?
In the immortal words of Ronald Reagan,”Facts are stupid things.”
And we thought Nixon and Watergate were bad.
An unbiased source would point out the study’s findings that “Charter school attendance has large effects on the likelihood that applicants meet graduation competency standards (16%), and…large and statistically significant gains in the likelihood that charter applicants earn scores at a level deemed Proficient or Advanced.”
*Please* go look at the chart on page 17 of the study. And remember, these are comparing lottery winners to losers, so we’re talking about the same population of kids doing *much* better at the charters than the district schools.
What this author chooses to talk about is one small detail, which is that the graduation rate of these students isn’t different. Except it is (4% higher). So how can she say it isn’t? She’s referring to the “on-time” graduation rate. As the study authors point out, many of the charter students don’t graduate in the year they might have originally because of retention.
If your news source combs through 56 pages of data, ignoring lots of data contrary to your worldview, to find one fact that can be misrepresented so that it matches what you want to hear, you’re not getting news and you’re not being informed. This is your own version of Fox News.
JPR, you’re actually comparing this column to Fox “News”?!?!
Really? It sounds more like you might be projecting: ironically it is YOUR writing and your pathetic attempts to spin the unspinable, that most resembles the Murdoch-Ailes propaganda machine, both today, with the “slick gibberish” you’ve authored here, and consistently throughout your time as a (paid?) troll for privatization interests.
In fact, given your proclivity to always concoct some seemingly smart sounding but shallow and obtuse posting, desperately trying to make The Privatizers (your clients?) look “good” despite the clear and indisputable facts, I thought your initials must have stood for “Just PR”.
Puget Sound Parent,
You attack me instead of discussing the issue and then call me shallow and obtuse? Where’s the substance in your post? Did you read the study? Do you care at all about the actual issues here, or are you just here to attack straw men you’ve constructed (all of what you guess about me is incorrect).
Obviously, I read this blog, so I have a great desire to be informed from all sides of this debate. It just disappoints me when someone spins something so far from what it says as to mean the opposite, and that’s what happened here. Those who just read the headline and the blog post without reading the study will continue to be woefully misinformed. This “echo chamber”, wherein this study reinforces your point of view because it has been misrepresented to you, is what I equate with Fox News.
Steve K,
You make a good point about the limitations of lottery winner/loser comparisons, but did you look at the performance differences? They are huge. Do you think that *all* can be attributed to peer effects? That doesn’t seem credible to me. Also “applicants” in that quote meant to college. Finally, do you have any data regarding students being sent back from charters? The same “fact” is widely known in my area, but is just unsubstantiated rumor. The data is readily available to the district to publish, but they have declined to because it doesn’t support their rhetoric.
Gordon,
You say “if charters could show better ways and back that up with real results, everyone would applaud and jump on the bandwagon”.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s true. This crowd has a rationalization for everything, and it’s clear that anything accomplished by charters is to be denigrated or ignored. The marginalization of this study by pulling a single sentence out of it is a perfect example.
And you are that “unbiased” source?
By the way, comparing lottery winners and losers isn’t comparable. Just the fact that students are in a lottery suggests that they come from more functional families. So the winners are placed in an environment where EVERYONE was in a lottery. The lottery “losers” were placed in an environment where most were not (suggesting a more unpredictable environment). I’ve had the same marginal student in a class where kids are serious and another where kids are “less ambitious.” Peer influences mean a lot and I received differing performance based on atmosphere. The composition of the student body is a huge factor.
You’ve actually pegged the biggest reason that functional parents apply to charters. It’s the fact that the kids are better as a whole than the traditional public schools before they even enter the school. When my stepbrother did school observations in grad school in Chicago, he asked parents “Why a charter?” Their usual and most common answer: “To keep my kids away from other kids that are bad influences.” Not because the teachers were better or the instructional method was different. Merely a means of segregating one type of households from another.
Also, your stating that charter applicants have higher proficiency than those who don’t apply? That in itself is a selection bias. And many don’t graduate from the charter at all. They get sent back to public school. In Michigan, we get new students after the fall and spring count days every year. They always came from Something-Something Academy. Always nice kids but always academically regressive.
But we can agree on one thing: Charter and Public school comparisons are likely invalid. Because they service different populations as a whole.
FYI, your username shows up as “Steve K” when this page is viewed on a web browser, but as “Puget Sound Parent” when viewed within the ios WordPress app.
Also, it’s a study by the New Schools Venture Fund. Obviously, a biased source. It fits the model of commissioning your own research to get the conclusions you want.
” As the study authors point out, many of the charter students don’t graduate in the year they might have originally because of retention.”
Of course, that never happens in public schools.
So, some ‘exceptional’ charter schools are doing better than district schools because they headhunt good teachers from public schools? Oh wait, wait… that doesn’t make sense because teachers got to be bad guys in the reformers’ narrative… And speaking of graduation rate, it’s relatively easy for some researchers to inflate(or manipulate) the statistics by mixing up on-time graduation with delayed graduation rate.
“Sadly, the legislature is set to increase funding for the charters even as the much-maligned Boston public schools are experiencing remarkable success”
“Much-maligned” is right, and that goes for all public schools. The flip side of being “much-maligned” of course, is they get no credit for the good work they’re doing because of our national media/politician love affair with charter schools.
If one just looks at the media coverage of public schools versus charter schools it is amazing. It is overwhelmingly negative towards public schools, and politicians join right in. That’s why I don’t buy the claim of “we’re agnostics!” No, you’re not.
There is a flip side to the promotion of charter schools, and it’s what happens to public schools in that environment. They’re either maligned or abandoned. We’ll pay for that hostility or neglect, down the road.
You guys are all “in ed” so you may not know how crazy some of this reads to an outsider, but I’ll give you an example.
I read again and again from ed reformers and other charter promoters that public schools “must learn” from charter schools. The assumption must be that charter schools could learn nothing, ever, from a public school. There is NO public school that does anything better than any charter school. I’m ordered to accept that. Well, I don’t.
No where outside of this ed reform-dominated silo would that be accepted. It’s ridiculous.
If I started pronouncing that public hospitals “must learn” from private hospitals, and didn’t even entertain the idea that “learning” could work both ways, that would be ridiculed because it’s obviously biased and blind and skewed toward private hospitals. Yet I read it again and again from ed reformers.
Actually, for many of us, the assumption is that educators of all kinds can learn from each other.
We don’t just believe that, we encourage it.
We’ll have a session next week with students from district & charter public schools, charter & district high school faculty, and college faculty to discuss college expectations and strategies that high school teachers have identified that help students succeed.
Joe,
That’s great and what we should all be focused on. Unfortunately, we’ve tried many times to do similar things in my area without success. Lots of people want to participate, but they’re afraid of offending their peers or even retaliation.
JPR – we’ve spent a lot of time making clear in print and in person that we value both district & charter public schools. We’re blessed with a teacher’s union president & supt who are a strong advocate of district public schools and willing to work together with others. we’re trying to encourage more of this around the country.
Advice welcome about what you think would encourage this.
Facts are facts no matter where one finds them. IF charters could show better ways and back that up with real results, everyone would applaud and jump on the bandwagon. However – “tain’t so”.
I was in education and have been involved in it for over half a century and NEVER has there been a time when educators were not looking for better, more effective ways of teaching. Often, as Dr. Ravitch pointed out repeatedly, these were called fads, they came and went. AND as she has also pointed out, this is the worst fad of all in that it has the potential of destroying the public schools which have helped raise this nation to one of the greatest, if not THE greatest in history.
How can people who have never been there, done that, possibly know what it is like to work in a classroom. Not to equate them, that would be ridiculous, but a parallel example is our military which have been in battle and will not talk about it. Words cannot describe what they went through. Again, in like MANNER, not in substance, teachers are on the battle lines, with or without “superiors” who know what they may or may not understand what they are doing. Teachers have faced incredible battles to help their students.
I am aware of one teacher who quit because she could not face the stories that her students came and told her of what was happening to them at home and in their lives. This in an upper middle class environment, Imagine what it must be like for students who do not believe that they will live to be 19, 19.
Those on the outside who have not been there, done that, cannot possibly understand. For them it is a philosophical issue, NOT based on the real world.
Well. I plodded through the fetid “study”. Nauseating. Who writes this stuff? I looked, and on page 55, – Surprise! – economists all. Milton Friedman would be proud.
How can we give any credence to such immoral people, people who want to privatize our public schools for profit, and nothing more.
Only a charter could call a school that graduates six students “over-subscribed”.
A few additional facts:
Codman graduated 6 young men and 14 young women in 2013. The school had a total of 190 students, grades 1-2, and grades 9-12. So it is a very small school.
Codman also is an independent charter, started by a progressive group of educators who are sharing space with a local medical clinic, thus helping youngsters and their families.
Codman Academy’s director reports that it has 26% students with special needs this year. That compares, according to the director, to Boston Latin School, 1% special ed; Boston Latin Academy, 2% special education and Boston’s third exam school, O’Bryant, 3% special education). Codman does not use standardized tests to determine who is admitted, unlike Boston Latin Academy Boston Latin School, and O’Bryant.
Personally I think it’s inconsistent with the idea of public education to use exams to screen out students – whether it’s being done by a magnet school or by some New Orleans charters.