Jersey Jazzman gets irked by those who boast about the superior results of charter schools in Newark. He wrote a critical review of Dale Russakoff’s book The Prize, because she ignored basic data about charter schools and she wrote that the charter schools operated with a leaner administration and more services. Not true, says JJ, who in his real life is a teacher and a graduate student at Rutgers University named Mark Weber.
In this post, JJ lays out in easily comprehensible graphs, using state data, what the real comparisons are.
First, he compares the results of a highly-touted charter school in Newark to a suburban public school and shows that the charter school lags. But wait, you think, that’s not a fair comparison, and that is his point.
I don’t point this out to suggest either that Montclair’s schools are superior, or that TEAM/KIPP’s schools are inferior. Without adequately controlling for at least the observed variations in each district’s populations (and acknowledging that there are likely many unobserved variations), any comparison between the two systems is utterly pointless. My point here is that facile, a-contextual, cherry-picked factoids like these are completely meaningless, and that people who bring them up time and again show themselves to be fatuous.
Using state data, he demonstrates that Newark public schools spend more on instruction than the city’s charter schools; that NPS spends far more on student support services — guidance counselors, nurses, librarians, psychologists — than the charters; that NPS spends more on support personnel than charters; that NPS has lower administrative costs than ANY charter in Newark; that the costs of administrative salaries is lower in Newark public schools than most Newark charters.
Jersey Jazzman has a refreshing impatience with false claims. How long can “reformers” get by on propaganda?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
An object lesson for those that want an example of how ethical people use numbers & stats.
The opposite? Rheephorm math is legendary for their massaging and torturing of figures. Just two: John Deasy (until recently Supt. of LAUSD) bragged about raising the graduation rate to 12%—by conveniently redefining who was being counted; the actual figure was 2%. And of course, there’s Michelle Rhee’s totally unsubstantiated (and now withdrawn) boast that she took “her” students from the 13th to the 90th percentile, a claim so outrageously ludicrous that even one of her own fanboys gutted it.
I would be remiss to not remind people of others like Jersey Jazzman, like Bruce Baker and Gary Rubinstein and GFBrandenburg and Audrey-Amrein Beardsley, with a special nod to the redoubtable Mercedes Schneider aka deutsch29 aka KrazyMathLady, who uses her powers for good not evil.
Thank y’all for following Mark Twain’s advice:
“Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
For so many of us, color us gratified AND astonished.
😎
Thanks to Jersey Jazzman for uncovering facts and debunking the myth of charter success. What I found telling was the graph on total expenditures in which the Newark Public Schools were in the middle of the pack. Charters are by definition, inefficient entities because they splinter fixed costs that could be rolled into existing school budgets. This splintering of services costs taxpayers more. What also became clear from the analysis is that New Public Schools spend a lot more on direct services to students. Isn’t this why schools exist? If people want to spend a whole lot more for all the paper pushers at the top for no amazing results, by all means, keep authorizing charters. Billionaires love them because they make them more money and give them outrageous tax breaks.
Correction: Newark
If the Walton’s want the media to report how much money the discount retailer takes out of OUR communities, relative to the taxes they pay, we, the voters, should pay attention. If they expect the media to tell us that, the Walton’s know the best education for OUR kids, based on the low paying jobs that they create, for which the community and state pay the social costs, and the media complies, we should tell, both the media and the Walton’s, to go to h_ll.
Walton-funded non-profits that gurgle ed-speak should be discounted, in entirety, based on the amount of taxes they DON’T pay, for OUR kids’ educations.
Hiding behind paid think tanks and universities, who are compensated with the dollars of consumers, unfortunate enough to buy discount retail products, often made in nations with inadequate health and safety precautions, is what gutless jerks would do.