Finally, a report from a completely non-political, non-ideological source about charter schools. The report, co-sponsored by the Spencer Foundation and Public Agenda, lays out the facts and the issues. Different sides may take heart from different aspects of the report.
Certain factual findings stand out:
“Nationally, there is very little evidence that charter and traditional public schools differ meaningfully in their average impact on students’ standardized test performance.”
“In some states charter schools have had positive impacts on student learning, in other states they have had negative impacts, while in others charters have had no differential impact compared with traditional public schools.”
“Charters schools enroll proportionately fewer special education students than traditional public schools do”
“Charter school students are less likely to be English-language learners than traditional public school students”
Charters receive less public funding than public schools, but spend more on administration than public schools.
I don’t really care what conclusions it reaches about charter schools (because it will be endlessly disputed) I am just thrilled that I finally saw something that considers the effects of “choice” on existing public schools.
That all by itself is huge to me. About time someone considered public schools in this incredibly one-sided “debate”.
Thank you for highlighting this report which I will refer to copiously in other educational venues and blogs. I just have a minor quibble: I am really getting tired of the term, “traditional public school.” In the hands of the Rheeformers, it is used in a derisive and pejorative manner. I would prefer the use of district schools or real public schools, instead of traditional public schools. A couple of other put-down terms of the reformers/privatizers are status quo and entrenched bureaucracies.
Joe, the term “traditional public schools” is not my term. I say “public schools,” in contrast to “privately managed charters.”
Sorry, Diane, I was not referring to you but to the report which used the term traditional public schools.
Joe, I knew you were referring to the terminology in the report. The genius of reformster lingo is that it creeps into everyone’s frame of reference, which is exactly what the PR-inspired rhetoric is supposed to do.
Fully half of the reason we have “researchers” is not to answer questions like “are charter schools better than public schools?” but to come up with new questions.
This “debate” is infuriating to me because so many of them accept the initial assumption of the ed reform “movement” that charter schools will either have a beneficial or neutral effect on existing public schools. That is a REALLY narrow debate, and it’s conducted wholly on their terms.
This study asks an additional question, one that doesn’t assume public schools are without value and systemic effects shouldn’t even be considered.
There’s downside to risk. It’s insane not to even consider it. There is no change that includes only “neutral” or “beneficial” possibilities, PARTICULARLY if it’s market-based, as ed reform is. There’s another possibility and that is “net negative”.
Does this: “In some states charter schools have had positive impacts on student learning” take into account this: “Charters schools enroll proportionately fewer special education students than traditional public schools do” and this: “Charter school students are less likely to be English-language learners than traditional public school students”? If they’re only looking at test scores (a piss poor measure of “impact” in any case), then it matters if those test scores only improved at charters in some schools because they excluded special ed kids and ELLs.
Too, and further to that question, what happened to the public schools that took the greater percentage?
Are they doing more with less? If so, should that be recognize and then mitigated in some way?
Why doesn’t the effect on public schools matter to policymakers and lawmakers? How can it NOT matter?
The Spencer Foundation’s main reason to exist seems to be to encourage the study of education. That puts them in an adversarial position with much of the media, and a significant percentage of mayors in urban areas, who automatically resent the existence of elected school boards. Their top ten list of things for media to ask about charters is not likely to be taken very seriously by most of the media. But if it is taken seriously by any of them……it has value.
This report is suspect to me because it leaves out Denver which has a very high percentage of charter schools (I have to admit I have lost track of the exact number because the district no longer lists charters separately). More are about to be approved at this Thursday’s board meeting. What is it about Denver that makes it invisible?
Agree.
Despite the promise of their original premise, Charter schools are not the panacea the public was sold.
In Buffalo, Business First rated the Erie County schools. The two Charter High Schools which the Buffalo News touted as exceptional were rated near the bottom of the list right along with some of the other Buffalo High Schools (City Honors, in Buffalo, was rated #1).
I know the teachers at these charters schools work hard, just like the teachers in the public schools. It just goes to show that it isn’t the school, it’s the population which attends the building. A charter can’t work any more miracles than a public school if the base population lives in poverty. City Honors attracts the brightest and best the city has to offer. If their child is not accepted to this elite program, those with the means send their children to private schools which, (along with the “upscale” suburban schools) round out the majority of the top ten (to twenty). The bottom schools do the best they can with the rest of the kids.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the current approach to education is doomed to fail. Just a little common sense makes one realize that there are limits to the miracles teachers and schools can accomplish in this country’s impoverished inner cities.
It’s time to go back to the drawing board and rethink strategies. Only idiots would keep beating a dead horse. Perhaps the people in charge are not career ready after all.
The whole report seems like a generic overview of charter schools that begs the question, “Are charter schools worth the disruption?” It is also difficult to determine the validity of the information provided since there is no standard way to collect data from various charter chains and independent charters. Who knows how reliable self reporting is? It was interesting to note that under innovation, their conclusion was that charters are not particularly innovative. Among the items of “innovation” were uniforms. I would never consider uniforms an “innovation.” The most revealing part of the report to me was the numerous questions at the end which highlight the difficulty in getting real information from this hybrid public-private entity. Also, when they discussed the community, there was no mention of all the community resistance by urban areas where residents were forced into sending their children to a charter school. It would seem to me that protests in cities such as New Orleans, Newark and Detroit are worth mentioning in a balanced view of community input.
Retired teacher, there are things I would have added to the report, like the fraud and racketeering that deregulation has allowed. But it is good to have a report like this saying plainly that there is no academic (test score) advantage to charters. Our trolls on this blog constantly challenge this assertion. Maybe they will quiet down for a while.
I agree. It is a step in the right direction, but there are omissions that should be considered. There is no mention of the non-profit that turns into hidden profit through fiscal manipulation and lack of transparency. There is also no mention of all the waste and fraud in charters which seriously impact the amount of money down the drain for students. The public should consider this information too.
If you look in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, front page yesterday, Monday, there was a group of charters…..which fired their very accomplished leader……..with total lack of explanation. There will be no follow up in St. Louis…….Rhonda Broussard, the visionary who founded the cluster of charter schools where students receive instruction in other languages, will no longer be president of St. Louis Language Immersion Schools. The ten questions would be good to ask……they will not be. Nor will any others. It reminds me of when the special education student who had `12 bullets fired into him the same week the president of the school board was helping him bring a five million dollar lawsuit……St. Louis has an amazing capacity for simply pretending nothing happened.
“Parents, students protest ouster of founder from St. Louis Language Immersion Schools…… ” title of a follow up…..I told the st. Louis readers that I would inform the nation that my prediction was wrong……they do seem to think something funny is going on.
“Nationally, there is very little evidence that charter and traditional public schools differ meaningfully in their average impact on students’ standardized test performance.”
“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.” Noel Wilson channeling Foucault
“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.”
What will it take to break free from the echo chamber of “testing”, the “circle”?
If Wilson hasn’t PROVED that any result/information gleaned from the process is
“vain and illusory”, does the “power” of marketing demonstrate the correlation
between “test scores” and being able to think “critically”?
Do the actions (choices) of the culture at large, demonstrate the correlation between
being “educated” and being able to think critically?
Charters couldn’t exist WITHOUT customers captured by marketing.
“Charters receive less public funding than public schools, but spend more on administration than public schools.”
This may not be true in CT –
http://jonathanpelto.com/category/education-funding/
Personally I could care less about the test scores. WE ALL know that test scores do not equate with education. Strictured thinking has made them appear to be so but there are FAR more important things than test scores, IQs, even doctorates.
Tony Bennett, Indiana’s past superintendent of education had a doctorate but was an uneducated man in my opinion. Donald Rumsfeld had a high IQ but was a disaster, etc etc.
Integrity, TOTAL education – the search for “truths” et al in my book are FAR more important than even just academic prowess.
i think that sometimes we are a victim of our own success, we pushed, pushed well, successfully academics and grades as important and now that has come to bite us. People who came through that think that that is the sum total of education. Academics are a means to an end, education, but are NOT the sum total. Education is a continual process – eternal searching, expanding parameters of perception, not an end which one ever completes.
Even the claim “there is no difference in test scores” implies that test scores somehow mean something about the quality of education.
But it’s hard not to fall into these sorts of verbal traps.
“Reformers” really have been very clever (and largely successful) in the way they have framed the conversation.
Even with what they call themselves (and what I have repeated albeit with quotes): “reformers”
The questions they suggest for future research are pretty good. They try to maintain an unbiased position; whether they are successful or not requires closer scrutiny than I applied.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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Just saw this in the news in Indiana:
http://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2015/06/07/surprise-charter-school-loan-program-raises-new-questions/28493699/
This is no surprise. Simply changing the name of the school and doing the same old thing makes no difference. Their new name should be (as per George Carlin) INDOCTRINATION CENTER WHERE CHILDREN ARE STRIPPED OF THEIR INDIVIDUALITY AND TURNED INTO OBEDIENT SOLE DEAD CONFORMIST MEMBERS OF THE AMERICAN CONSUMER CULTURE……….ACADEMY
Testing the efficacy of charter schools based on results on standardized tests is an oxymoron. There is no choice if the outcome must be the same–requiring every student of the same age to “possess” the same knowledge and skills. Standards may be valid for factory production lines or when dealing with with inanimate matter. But they have no place in learning environments that deal with individuals (not raw material) possessing vastly different developmental skills, aptitudes, and interests.
Would the public accept standards that say that every 5th grader must be the same height, same weight, be able to run the mile in the same time, or lift the same weight? Of course not. It’s obvious that humans are all physically different and it would be unrealistic to demand them to be the same. So why is it valid to expect their minds to operate in the same way at the same age…especially since each experience in a person’s life alters their brain. Differences in human brains are powers of ten greater than differences in physical characteristics…how can people who still support standards ignore these facts?
Judith Yero,
I would prefer not to judge schools by test scores. But their advocates claim that they will get higher test scores, so it is useful to see if their claims are accurate. I oppose most charters not because of test scores but because I see no reason to revert to a dual school system, with one group of schools free to choose and exclude students, and the other highly regulated and required to accept all. What’s the point?
We must consistently stand against test scores for any reason. Their claims lack validity right or wrong.
I must have been channeling you. I just made the same argument on another thread. 🙂