EduShyster interviews Joanne Golann, a doctoral student and researcher in sociology at Princeton who spent 15 months in a no-excuses charter school, studying its culture. After participating daily in the life of the school, interviewing students, teachers, and administrators. She notes that the no-excuses charter is a model of strict obedience and conformity that is widespread and focused on test scores. Teachers impose the model because it assures them control. If they let go, chaos might ensue. They can’t take that risk.
EduShyster asked Golann to sum up her findings, and she said:
“I found that in trying to prepare students for college, the school failed to teach students the skills and behaviors to help them succeed in college. In a tightly regulated environment, students learned to monitor themselves, hold back their opinions, and defer to authority. These are very different skills than the ones middle-class kids learn—to take initiative, be assertive, and negotiate with authority. Colleges expect students to take charge of their learning and to advocate for themselves. One of the students I talk about in the article learned to restrain herself to get through, to hold herself back and not speak her mind. She ended up winning the most-improved student award in 8th grade for her changed behavior…,
“If we create an educational marketplace where success is measured by student test scores, perhaps it is not altogether surprising that we end up with a rigid school model that produces these test scores. What we don’t get is a model that teaches students how to speak up or even a model that leaves students feeling like they have had a positive school experience. While charter schools were originally seen as a way to innovate, a way for communities to develop schools that might better fit their students and families, what’s come to dominate the charter field are charter management organizations and this no-excuses model. For example, in Boston, one study found that 71% of the urban charter schools subscribe to the no-excuses model. Of the high-achieving urban charters, almost all are no-excuses schools. They’ve expanded rapidly because of the support of foundations and the US Department of Education. Some $500 million in private foundation money has gone into replicating these schools….
EduShyster ended the interview by quoting the last line of Golann’s paper:
“EduShyster: The last line of your paper is really powerful. In fact, I’d like to take this opportunity to read it aloud so that we can all go forth pondering the essential point you make. *If teachers and administrators committed as much effort to learning about students’ families and neighborhoods as they dedicate to raising test scores or managing behavior, they might discover new ways of instruction and management to get kids to and through college, and perhaps more importantly, prepare them to ‘be the change,’ as one Dream Academy leader described.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As a former teacher at a “No Excuses” school, it took my several years to repair my soul after leaving. These places are so unhealthy. Not pedagogically sound, and completely cult like.
Cult thinking administered by the Naked Emperors club.
Did Ms. Golann do any field work in the traditional public schools the kids at the charter school were zoned for? Or are we just supposed to pretend that that side of the equation doesn’t exist, along with the fact that students are at the charter because their parents chose to enroll them there?
Tim, you are right that parents have a choice. Their choice, I suppose, is awful. One side has to keep every student and can’t devise clever ways to get a population that can withstand the ridiculous demands and conformity required of a no-excuses charter. The other can hyper-focus on test scores to “prove their worth.” These are poor choices.
As a community college instructor, I get kids from all different types of schools. Since I teach history, many of the assignments are based upon persuasive writing with the use of evidence to support whatever position the writer takes. My small sample observation?
Charter grads can’t even form an opinion because they believe they struggle with the independence they receive to think as they want. They want a “correct” answer. Can they perform some academic skills well. Sure. But they lack the ability to think and organize.
Regular old public school kids have lots of opinions. Since they aren’t drilled relentlessly, they sometimes struggle with some academic aspects. But they can think.
This is why school choice is a false philosophy. Parents are usually choosing for non-academic reasons. School safety, segregated populations (weed out troublemakers) and other factors that create good test scores. But test scores don’t measure thinking, motivation and organization. In fact, many charter students I’ve had fall way behind because they don’t have the ability to self-monitor their schedules. Being in a controlled atmosphere can prevent students from having soft skills that are crucial to making it through life.
And many students are NOT in the charter despite their parents choosing to enroll them. Because the no-excuses charter preferred not to teach any child who couldn’t learn via their no-excuses method! Which most likely leaves them teaching ONLY the students who could have learned far more without the no-excuses method.
If no-excuses was so wonderful, there would be private schools chomping at the bit to make sure their 5 year old students never stopped keeping their hands at their sides or folded at all times and tracked the teacher with their eyes at all times.
Steve K. Thank you for your comments which confirm what I suspected. The No Excuses model excels at conformity and behavior management. If this does not translate to self management and determination, they will falter in the real messy world where critical thinking and problem solving are necessary. In NYC, not one Success Academy graduate made it into the selective magnet schools in the city. My diverse public school district managed to get many minority students complete college successfully. That is why we should look at ways to promote integration in public schools, although hyper-segregated neighborhoods make it difficult. When students attend schools together, they learn to appreciate differences, pursue interests and get a good foundation in academics including the arts. This approach allows students to learn and grow to the best of their abilities in all domains. This is the promise a good public education.
Sure, Tim: her research was supposed to encompass the entirety of K-12 education because: 1) folks like you can’t stand to hear about the reality of no excuses charters and what they do to get their pseudo-miracles; and 2) there’s such a dearth of research on neighborhood public K-12 schools.
Can you elaborate, Tim, on what the “other side of the equation” is in your view?
You’re absolutely right, Tim: there’s been no field work whatsoever done in public schools over the years, especially those many billionaire-supported ones that make all those “miracle” claims of redressing long-standing racial and class-based academic disparities.
It’s long overdue that we go after all those hyperbolic claims the public schools make, the lack of auditing they enjoy, the well-financed propaganda machine that touts them at the expense of those poor over-regulated charter schools you so diligently represent here.
markstextterminal, the other side of the equation is that the kids attending the “no excuses” charter school where the researcher did her field work are most likely zoned for schools that neither the researcher or anyone pontificating here (including me) would send their own kids to in a million years. If “part of the ethnographic tradition is to try to understand a lived experience by putting yourself there,” it seems like an examination of those zoned schools (not traditional public schools in general) and why the parents chose to send their child elsewhere would be relevant.
Similarly, Steve K, these parents are probably skeptical that their zoned school, given what is often a dismal track record, is going to turn out self-starting creative authentic learners ready to question society and grab life by the balls. Maybe they are looking for something simpler, like giving their child a foundation of literacy and numeracy. To be clear, this sort of difference of opinion can be found at any point along the socioeconomic spectrum: the existence of $50,000/year private schools as disparate as Calhoun and Horace Mann proves that.
The good news, from your POV? If charters are truly capable of producing only drones who can’t chew gum without being told how, then they won’t be long for this world.
OK, Tim, let’s assume that’s the case, that the No-Excuses charters are all there to save children in neighborhoods where the public schools are under-resourced, the classes are too large, and discipline is a problem as a result.
Why should No-Excuses be *the* default model to Save The Children from their Awful Public School when there are so many educational models out there? If there has to be an alternative, why No-Excuses? Why a form of training – because let’s face it, that’s not “education,” it’s training – that strips children of ANY autonomy, as if that’s the best way to prepare adults who can function in the Real World? “If charters are truly capable of producing only drones who can’t chew gum without being told how, then they won’t be long for this world:” so we should throw millions of dollars at schools that produce this kind of college student and adult and that’s your reaction? Shrug your shoulders?
Those millions of dollars are being diverted from the traditional public schools. The under-resourced schools are now struggling with fewer resources than ever: you can’t run two schools, with two physical plants, two sets of teachers, two sets of administrators, for the cost of one. Doesn’t add up. What happens to the children who remain in TPS? What happens to the kids who “fail out” of No-Excuses charters and are sent back to TPS – without the money that the charters have already spent? Should ALL schools in lower-SES neighborhoods just be converted to a No-Excuses model?
Research, by its nature, tends to be highly focused; each project looks at a single facet of something. Golan’s research was focused on No-Excuses charters. There is plenty of other research, both formal studies and ethnographic in nature, in traditional K-12 education. Should she have waited until she’d done the same in TPS before publishing her results? That’s not remotely realistic, and that’s not how publishing research works.
crunchydeb,
Charter-going students aren’t diverting funds from their neighborhood schools any more than the kids for whom the NYC DOE pays $700 million in private school tuition; the kids who attend a “progressive” unzoned lottery TPS like the Brooklyn New School or Castle Bridge; the kids who attend selective “gifted and talented” schools; or the kids whose parents win the lottery and can now afford a $1.5 million two-bedroom apartment in the zone for PS 321. And contrary to what you’ve heard, in New York State payments to charter schools are made every two months–if a kid leaves a charter, the money stops following her shortly thereafter.
Also contrary to what you’ve heard, the lowest class sizes in New York City are generally found at its lowest-performing schools (which is as it should be). It’s true that schools in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and hypersegregation face extreme challenges to mainintaing an appropriate learning environment. However, many parents have a different opinion of “restorative practices” than those who advocate for it, probably none of whom send their own kids to high-needs schools.
I’m not shrugging my shoulders or being flippant: if these anecdotes pile up and serious research reveals that charter schools in New York State are producing students who can’t think critically or function on their own, eventually parents will stop sending their children there, they will close, and you can all breathe a big sigh of relief. “Neighborhood schools!” now, forever, and always:
https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20160502/riverdale/assemblyman-tried-block-minorities-from-attending-riverdale-school-suit
crunchydeb, Tim WANTS those public schools to suffer because the goal is to drive certain students — the cheapest ones — into the no-excuses charters. That’s illegal to only educated the cheapest ones. That’s why you need no-excuses — because Tim understands that no excuses provides the charter school with every excuse in the book to get rid of kids who they don’t want to teach.
That’s is why I am disappointed with Ms. Golann’s research. Without the data as to how many of the starting Kindergarten students in the “no excuses” charters leave over the years, we don’t know whether very large cohorts of students are just thrown in the trash. And yes, Tim wants us to be clear that there are parents happy their kids don’t have to be in the same class with unworthy students who take resources from their kids. Unethical charter school operators are allowed to get away with appealing to that desire and profiting handsomely from it! Many of those parents don’t want the no excuses school — they want what the charter school is (hint hint wink wink) really giving them — a school away from the students who charter school operators happily target for removal to the trash if their parents also want them in the charter school.
The biggest ‘no excuses’ charter chain in NYC has CHANGED it’s policies when they have school with lots of middle class white kids. No excuses is relegated to the dust bin and only pulled out if some of the low-scoring kids don’t recognize that they need to be gone. Shorter days! No humiliation! As long as you are in a school with lots of white middle class students, No excuses becomes no excuses light. Because no excuses does nothing to teach kids — it is the means in which unethical schools rid themselves of kids. And Tim knows that as long as his beloved charters have the franchise to get rid of any kids they want – no oversight necessary – and you underfund public schools so that they have no resources to deal with the many charter school dropouts – there will always be a market for them. And market trumps ethics every single time. If a a few or a lot of kids have to suffer so a charter school operator can gain, well, that’s the breaks, last least in Tim’s eyes.
I am saddened that educational scholars like Ms. Golann aren’t looking at the obvious. Who STAYS at those no-excuses charters? The ones that supposedly are getting high test scores are also the ones who lost high numbers of students! Their attrition rates are usually appalling.
The sad part is that the students who remain would very likely have achieved just as much without the no-excuses discipline. What the no-excuses discipline does is simply get rid of any child who distracts from learning AND gets rid of any child who struggles to learn via the one method those no-excuses schools know how to teach.
If no-excuses discipline worked, then the students would be STAYING at the school, not leaving! There is no need for it.
Instead, every public school should be funded enough so that disruptive students can be sent out of the classroom and accommodated elsewhere IN THE SCHOOL. It might mean those kids are working on computers or one on one, or just sitting there twiddling their thumbs. But they are told that they are welcome to rejoin their class anytime they want, as long as they don’t act out. Free movement, but as soon as they act out, back they go to the rooms where the disruptive kids go and are attended to (with social workers if necessary).
Every public school ALSO has separate classrooms where kids who struggle with the material are given one-on-one attention — the same kind of tutoring that rich kids get.
Some students (but very few) might always need to be in a classroom away from other students. But most of the students who do well in no-excuses charters would do just as well — and likely thrive — in classes that were similar to what rich kids get in private schools.
I just wish researchers would look at the real attrition rates at those no-excuses charters that get high test scores. The only way to do that is to track what happens to the randomly selected Kindergarten students over the course of 4 or 5 years and see how many leave. For middle school, it is seeing how many students entering directly out of elementary school make it to 8th grade in 3 years. What little information that is available now certainly points to many many students leaving those schools.
Good point, NYC public school parent. These strivers would enhance the public school population, and it would be a lot more cost effective than sending funds to set up a new site with all the costs connected to that. Of course, a select few would be unable to reap the tax benefits and profit associated with charters.
If you read on the ed reform side it’s amazing how often they start with the assumption that charter schools are better.
This is flat-out not true in my state, but it doesn’t matter. They are constantly promoting the idea that public schools “must learn” from charters and charters “must” be expanded.
Pure bias against public schools. No connection at all to “data” or results.
“I found that in trying to prepare students for college, the school failed to teach students the skills and behaviors to help them succeed in college.
Actually, in many colleges, you can be quite successful by simply giving the authority figures (professors) what they want. And doing well on tests, which is a key part of that, is even more important in college than in K-12.
And even after college you can be quite successful working at a company by “deferring to authority” (your boss) — in many companies, actually more successful than someone who questions the way things are being done.
There is a good reason to encourage students to question authority that has nothing to do with “success in college” (or beyond) Hint: it has something to do with democracy.
My children attend public schools that use PBIS:
https://www.pbis.org/
I am wondering what other people on this blog think about it. It certainly isn’t like the no-excuses horror stories I read about, but I do feel like it is a step in that direction.
I am horrified by the ubiquity of PBIS. And even worse, most park district summer camps now use it too to be in sync with the schools.
We have a public schools that uses draconian discipline. Because Ohio has a form of open enrollment all they’re doing is pushing children who can’t function in that environment to other public schools.
They won an award from the US Dept of ED for increased test scores and I was thinking “they’re rewarding these people gaming the stats”.
PBIS tends to offer positive rewards for what are generally expected levels of decorum. Here’s a special treat Johnny, thank you for not disrupting class today. Like all education fads, it does not live up to its hype and tends to fizzle out over time.
My school has implemented two effective programs for dealing with acute and chronic misbehavior. We have a floating time-out room, supervised by a different teacher each period, that we can send a student to in the event they are disruptive and/or uncooperative. It is cost free because it staffed by teachers in lieu of a study hall duty. It takes a lot of stress out of the job knowing if you send a kid out they will not be sent back for the remainder of the period. It is not punitive, but provides a quitter, less crowded, and less distracted where they can complete school work. Our school district also teamed up with a couple of other local districts and formed an alternative learning program for high school students that just can’t seem to comply with the normal structure of a school day. It is a great example of the concept of shared services working at its best.
The powers that be tried to introduce the B-PISS nonsense at the high school at which I worked and the faculty said NO!
The next year brought in a new principal, a buddy of the supe and the B-PISS was instituted against faculty wishes.
I despise PBIS. A system of carrots and sticks, really no different from training a puppy to pee outside thru smacks on the bottom and “Who’s a GOOD doggie?!?!” I think it’s not unreasonable to expect that humans are capable of responding to something better. As soon as I could manage it, I ditched it in my own classroom and my students didn’t even notice the lack of paper coupons (“Cougar Paws”? *barf*) and tacky plastic made-in-China tokens, and we had a much happier classroom.
Here is some interesting information about charter schools attrition rates from the New York City Independent Budget Office*. This is real data based analysis by an independent agency instead of conjectures as is the usual practice in this blog. This is a must read for all those who deserve real information.
http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/2014attritioncharterpublic.html
* The Independent Budget Office (IBO) is a publicly funded agency that provides nonpartisan information about New York City’s budget to the public and their elected officials.
IBO presents its budgetary reviews, economic forecasts, and policy analyses in the form of reports, testimony, memos, letters, and presentations. IBO also produces guides to understanding the budget and provides online access to key revenue and spending data from past years.
It’s not apples to apples though, Raj. Charter schools are “choice” schools. When children move and they’re in a zoned school they change schools. They wouldn’t have to do that in an urban charter.
I would expect charter schools to have fewer transfers.
Raj, you’re missing a major point. Attrition rate is only part of the argument. The other part is the question regarding backfilling those seats. Traditional public schools have ebbs and flows. Students can enroll at any time.
This is an important distinction. Charters have gateway grades and won’t accept mid-year transfers in most cases. So Public schools might lose students but they are required to accept at any time. Charters are not.
The more important question is what happens to graduating year sizes. When I see University Yes Prep lose 60% of its graduating class from 9th to 12th grade and then not replace those students that left, that suggests a form of skimming. At the very least, they are only keeping those that are suited to their style of education. The rest are shed. And when a student doesn’t return for 10th grade, they aren’t allowing a new 10th grader to take that seat.
That’s a big difference. It isn’t solely about retention. It’s about reverse engineering the desired student body.
Raj, you are using the wrong IBO report. That one is from 2014.
The IBO report you should be using is THIS one!!
Click to access school-indicators-for-new-york-city-charter-schools-2013-2014-school-year-july-2015.pdf
Page 9.
Note that the attrition rate of the entering 5 year olds at 53 charter schools is a whopping 49.5%.
Charter schools lose AT LEAST half of their entering Kindergarten students by 5th grade.
49.5% is the average. I dare you to see if the highest performing charter school — the ones whose test scores surpass the other charter schools in that group — lose a large number of their students when compared to the charter schools with mediocre scores.
If you call yourself a researcher, you would be extremely curious as to whether there was a correlation between huge percentages (50%!) of the entering Kindergarten students leaving and high test scores a few years later.
If you prefer not to know whether parents motivated to seek out a charter school are mysteriously then “motivated” to leave that charter school when it is high performing far more frequently then parents leave lower performing charter schools, then I understand your dilemma. But you should not be associated with any academic institution. Because if you teach your students to ignore the fact that a supposedly amazing charter school loses huge numbers of at-risk kids, then you have no business teaching, period.
Chiara,
Here some more for your perusal.
“Urban areas are defined by having some higher level of population and population density. Since 1950s the U.S. Census has used a definition of “Urbanized Areas” as a central core or city and its adjacent, closely settled territory which have a combined total population of 50,000 or more. Supplementing this, is the suggestion that an “Urban Area” has a density of over 1,000 per square mile.”
Click to access Urban%20Charter%20School%20Study%20Report%20on%2041%20Regions.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/upshot/a-suburban-urban-divide-in-charter-school-success-rates.html
Steve K, please don’t be fooled that high performing charters backfill seats with randomly selected students.
If they don’t want a kid who is a low-income minority child, they will give them their own version of a test in which they decide that a child who successfully completed Kindergarten is not “academically ready” for 1st grade. They tell the parent that they can’t enroll their child unless they are willing to have the child repeat a year. No child is allowed to join first grade unless the charter school deems that child is already working at whatever level they decide a first grader needs to be at.
One parent publicly announced that his child was forced to repeat a year. The test was so unscientific that it turned out this same child then skipped 2 years ahead soon after. Somehow I suspect this “test” was more about the child’s non-white parentage. Seems as if lots of children of color aren’t allowed to join their rightful grade if they want one of those “backfill” spots. At least, not unless they prove they are academically advanced to the point that those charter schools insist they need to be at age 6. Somehow I bet very few white middle class parents are told that they don’t get a backfill spot unless they agree their child is a failure who needs to repeat Kindergarten first.
Maybe Raj would be interested in finding out how many white kids at high-performing charters are told they can’t join their rightful grade if they want a backfilled spot and compare it to the number of minority kids – especially the low-income ones — being told the same thing. But I’m sure he would find the answer distasteful.
Raj, you have to make up your mind. Is it about “choice” or is it about “public”?
Either these schools are predicated on parents wanting a school that is vastly different than a public school so NOT suited to “systemic scaling” OR it is about schools that serve everyone.
You can’t switch the frame when it serves your purposes.
Charter can’t be both special snowflakes and eradicate public systems. Something has to give. Decide. If you want to be compared to public schools then you can’t have special snowflake status.
NYC public school parent: I will assume your point about a 49.5% attrition rate at 53 charter schools from K to 5th is accurate if it is not challenged by the above rheephorm rheesearcher.
Silence in this case is not simply compliance but full frontal agreement.
I await the response, if any…
😎
KrazyTA those numbers are from the IBO themselves on page 9 on the report that I linked to. 49.5% of the 5 year olds who “randomly” won the lottery at 53 charter schools were no longer in the school by 5th grade. (Another untold many of them had been held back and over and over again in the process of trying to get them to leave before the testing years and were overage in their grade despite their only education being that supposedly good charter that kept failing to teach them).
What is most interesting is that it seems that the IBO is afraid to release each of those 53 charter schools individual attrition rate of their starting Kindergarten cohort. The IBO seemed to feel it was very necessary to “protect” the charters in that group that had terrible attrition rates so that charters that lose as many of 75% of their starting 5 year olds are not named and charters that only lose 25% of their starting Kindergarten kids look much worse than they are. Why?
The reason we know that the IBO was desperate to HIDE those attrition rates is because they went out of their way NOT to hide how those charter school kids performed on state tests years later! Because after all, overall, the “average” performance of charter schools was mediocre and the IBO couldn’t tar the “good” charters with the mediocre performances of the “bad” ones. So the IBO made sure to publish the individual test performance of each charter school and rank them.
That’s the kind of research Raj appreciates! Make sure to individually rank the test performance scores of each charter school separately. But make sure to HIDE the individual attrition rate of those charter schools in a huge average that includes 53 of them. That way we never have to know what role a got to go list has on having a high-scoring charter school! After all, he doesn’t want other charter schools to “steal” the “secret sauce” of high performing ones and start writing their own got to go lists.
It’s weird that Raj calls himself a “researcher” and yet has absolutely no interest in answering a basic question:
Do the charter schools with the highest performing at-risk kids ALSO lose disproportionate numbers of their starting Kindergarten kids by 5th grade when compared to other charter schools with far lower test scores? Is the “secret sauce” to having a high performing charter school putting as many of the low-performing at-risk Kindergarten lottery winners on got to go lists and suspending them over and over again?
Raj, I turn that over to you. Do you believe that charter schools like KIPP (in NYC) just has a bad administration that needs to be fired because they aren’t getting the high test scores that Success Academy students get? Or do you think the fact that Success Academy has an attrition rate at least twice as high as KIPP’s might have a little something to do with their high test scores? If you blame it all on the ineptness of the KIPP administrators, at least you will be consistent.
NYC public school parent: I understand that the 49.5% etc. info in your first sentence of your 5:32 PM comment came from the IBO report you mention in your comment of 2:42 PM.
Writing online can be treacherously misleading, so I preface this by saying I mean this as a simple statement without a hint of disrespect: I understand because I read what you actually wrote. Too often on this blog and elsewhere, the apologists for corporate education reform avoid dealing with what others or themselves actually said or did, and simply offer up proof by assertion and refutation by distortion and self-serving promises for the future and miracle results—and when that fails, there’s always the sneer, jeer and smear.
I much appreciate you holding their feet to the fire by asking them, in polite but plain and simple English, basic questions such as where they get their data and how they use it.
If I may, your approach reminds me of something by the late W. Edwards Deming.
From a speech given in 1992, beginning a section called “Numerical goals” (THE ESSENTIAL DEMING: LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLES FROM THE FATHER OF QUALITY, 2013, Joyce Orsini, ed., p. 55):
[start]
A numerical goal is a number drawn out of the sky. A numerical goal outside the control limit cannot be accomplished without changing the system. A numerical goal accomplishes nothing. What counts is by what method. Three words. If you can accomplish a goal without a method, they why weren’t you doing it last year? There’s only one possible answer: you were goofing off. May the numerical goal be achieved? Yes. We can make almost anything happen. But what about the cost? What about the loss? Anybody can achieve almost anything by distortion and faking, redefinition of terms, running up costs.
[end]
When, in various forms and guises, you raise issues relevant to his last sentence, you drive purveyors of self-styled “education reform” not just to distraction but to deflection and avoidance, not to mention (faux?) outrage and anger.
They can’t stand the heat but they refuse to get out of the kitchen.
That’s on them, not on you.
Thank you for your comments.
Keep writing. I’ll keep reading.
😎
Chiara, good point I haven’t heard expressed just this way before:
“Raj, you have to make up your mind. Is it about “choice” or is it about “public”?
“Either these schools are predicated on parents wanting a school that is vastly different than a public school so NOT suited to “systemic scaling” OR it is about schools that serve everyone.”
I would add that there is no viable economic model that can serve both purposes on a public budget. Pooling public monies allows economies of scale.
Given sufficient funds, a system sharing administration and facilities can stretch to accommodate a fairly wide variety of student needs. The further one divvies up pooled monies into separate systems, the less they are ‘pooled’.
Charters have been supported in large part by the fiction that centralized public admin is so full of –graft &corruption/ union-inflated salaries/ expensive catering to politically-correct frivolities– that a diaspora of publicly-supported independents.can serve multiple needs more efficiently. Common-sense alone makes this a highly dubious proposition, & results reflect the predictable. Publicly-supported independents have only a few options for survival.
They can pirate easier/ cheaper-to-teach students from the central system, counting on them (w/ family support) to reach similar achievement given cheaper teachers/ admin. They can draw mediocre students from the system & depend on cheaper-to-teach scripted test-prep curriculum so as to appear to be achieving sufficiently (this will most likely require the cheap-to-administer ‘no excuses’ approach described in Diane’s post). By offering safe [not violent] environment & smaller classes, they can accept anyone into a cut-rate facility w/low-pd low-qual staff using scripted lessons or even virtual laptop-w/-monitoring methods (ditto ‘no-excuses’).
All of those options depend on maintaining some expensive vestige of the formerly-central system to accept their rejects. Most will need support from outside the system, to whom they will owe profits and growth, which means acquiring for-profit bus mgt, forming franchise chains and finding new markets– i.e., cutting costs further to ‘scale up’– which means a choice between becoming more selective/ arbitrarily punitive, progressive lowering of quality, or a combination of the two. And they will require ever-increasing money from the public as a result of their own graft/ corruption (encouraged by the ‘veil of corporate privacy’) and their failures to attract sufficient enrollment.
It seems to me the system is economically untenable at a glance. The only thing propping it up is the promise of ever-increasing flow of public money., which eventually (20 yrs?) gets noticed & cut back. Which reveals charterization/ privatization– ‘school choice’– as a temporary bandaid and a shell game.
bethree5, your description is spot on. Charters are now exactly like the health insurance companies in an unregulated market.
States with poor insurance company oversight used to let health insurance companies drop any patient who actually needed expensive treatment. Got cancer or a child born with severe medical needs? Next year you don’t get a renewal. Or better yet, all the healthy customers get an offer for their special plan that has normal rates and the people with cancer are only offered the plan where their rates increased thousands per month! The idea was that if you made those sick patients feel enough “misery” in their pocketbook, they would leave. (Just like charter schools’ make the undesirable kids feel enough misery until they leave.) Technically “legal” but morally corrupt. Meanwhile, the states might offer their own health insurance but since they had to accept even the most expensive patients, it was far more expensive, driving all the healthy patients right to those private and morally bankrupt private health insurers who made a very nice profit from them.
The system worked because there were enough healthy patients who just “loved” their health insurance that wasn’t really health insurance at all. But since they never had real medical needs, they were happy because the insurance company always covered the cheap medical care they needed. As long as they didn’t ask much from their insurance company, they were fine.
The same thing is true in charter schools. Parents love them until it turns out their kid is the one on the got-to-go list! Look at all the lawsuits. Those were parents who pro-charter unethical people like Raj and Tim are very well aware CHOSE the charter school, but the charter school did not “choose” their child!
See, for the unethical people who post here, “choice” is only for the worthy children, just like insurance companies know that “choice” is only for the healthy patients. It all sounds fine until you realize that those unethical people are more than happy to victimize the most vulnerable children and most vulnerable patients because it is more profitable. And they justify that victimization by saying that some parents or some patients are happy! See, sometimes the few (or many) children with expensive needs need to be sacrificed so that other healthy and inexpensive children can be served.
That’s why they aren’t promoting PUBLIC no-excuses schools. The profits from kicking out the expensive kids must go to the private organizations that underwrite their faux research.
For all the great comments I thank you all.
All I did was to bring to the discussion a reliable data source (although not the latest one). I have not tried to provide my opinion, just wanted to promote a good discussion based on reliable facts. Now I can clearly see how people read, think and understand and then try to write about the subject.
After following this blog and its evolution for more than a year, I still think that charters have a place in this society, just like home schooling, private schools, public schools and religious schools. Every one of them makes a valuable contribution to the great society of ours.
I strongly believe that charter schools sole function is not to destroy public schools, but to enhance them by bringing in new ideas and concepts. Please be advised that I am neither a promoter nor a destroyer of charter schools. I support all schools in general and am seriously involved as a volunteer in my local school district.
Thanks again for the good discussion. I have learnt a great deal.
Raj, I notice you said “charter schools have a place” but you didn’t say anything about needing to regulate them so that they aren’t mysteriously losing large cohorts of (unwanted) children whose parents did choose them. Your obvious disinterest in why a high-performing charter school would lose so many more students than one with mediocre results speaks for itself. See no evil, right?
I think health insurance companies have a place. But not if they are allowed to get rid of all expensive enrollees who “choose” them but turn out not to be the kind of enrollee that the health insurance company finds worthy of being a member. And the fact that a health insurance might be able to find sneaky ways to “discourage” that patient from enrolling again doesn’t make it okay because hey, there are very healthy patients being served.
You seem to be promoting a system where public schools just take the expensive students that charters don’t want to teach and educates them with limited money in order to drive out the cheapest students into “better” charter schools. When that happens with health insurance — when “public” health insurance becomes the fallback for the patients that private health insurance companies know cut into their profits — then the goal is not better education. The goal is to socialize the cost of educating the expensive kids and privatize the profits of educating the cheapest kids. I find it shocking that you seem to be so very determined to avoid looking at that.
In your world, the health insurance company that gets rid of all patients who need serious health care is a star! Look how healthy their members are! And if they aren’t, well off they go so that other healthy patients can enroll in their spot. It’s all about “choice” as long as that choice profits the people who run the health insurance companies! No regulation needed and long as you also grant those private insurance companies the “choice” to drop any student they want. Just like you grant that right to charter schools by your determination to avoid researching the huge numbers of “choosers” who mysteriously disappear.
Aany pretense that you aren’t a “promoter” of charter schools when you refuse to acknowledge the data that cherry-picking is going on is dishonest on your part.
As I have mentioned before, there are a substantial group of parents in my district who want this type of instruction/discipline. It DOES tend to break out along “class lines”- it is predominantly lower income parents who seek more of this, in my experience based on what I hear that group say.
We have about half lower and low income families, and I would estimate that it’s about a quarter of parents who push for MORE of this, not less.
Obviously this is not a scientific sample nor is my district a proxy for a “norm” or anything, but I do think public schools have to deal with reality and the reality is a lot of parents think schools should be silent with constant drilling of “the basics” and children walking in lines in the hallway, etc. I have parents tell me they know their child has a “tough” (good) teacher because the classroom is silent. They consider this a plus.
This whole thing interests me because I’ve had 4 thru one public school and the “advanced” group in the middle school (English and math) do more discussion and analysis than the “regular” group – I’ve had children in both groups. The “advanced” group is definitely more free-form with more teacher discretion. The advanced English class will have a “theme” (for example) and related reading and the teacher chooses the theme and reading(s).
From that it seems like “more discussion and analysis” and “more discretion by teachers” IS considered “better” instruction so it makes sense to me to ask why the “regular” group get more rote learning and rules.
It makes more sense to ask why the “regular” group is NOT more free-form with more teacher discretion. Why the “regular” students do NOT get an English class with a “theme” (for example) and related reading and the teacher chooses the theme and reading(s).
The simple but politically incorrect answer is that the “regular” groups do not have the self-discipline and maturity to be more free-form or less rigid. It tends to be much more about group dynamics, than individual behaviors. Those “regular” group behaviors can severely restrict the types of activities that a teacher can engage them in. These group behaviors remove some of the most effective and creative “tools” from our “toolboxes”. Like it or not, that is the way it is.
There are classes I have where I literally cannot ask them to quietly read a paragraph or two prior to a discussion. So, 5 minutes of silent reading gets removed from teacher toolbox.
This is not to say that any individual student from the “regular” group could not be successful in the “advanced” group. My general beef regarding this type of tracking (ability grouping) is that it can exclude some students for the wrong reasons.
I also loved that the researcher raised this:
“I think the model really reduces teacher discretion. It’s made to replace or substitute for teacher discretion. ‘
What work systems are designed to do is exactly that- they reduce discretion. They “dummy-proof” a given task and make the task reproducible by anyone.
One of the things data does is reduce discretion and that’s why there’s an argument that it’s “fairer”- it was one of the original justifications for “data-driven” policing. They would heavily police “hot spots” based not on race or income but on data. Ed reformers are essentially relying on the same argument- people show bias so we have to make them rely on data which is objective, not subjective. It didn’t work that well with policing.
And of course, Chiara, when they “dummy-proof” the educational tasks and reduce teacher discretion, they can hire minimally-trained TFA teachers and others who will be expected to follow a very strict script.
They wind up being cheaper to hire, so the charters spend less money on staffing. No unions, few experienced teachers hanging around for years and expecting raises.
Hey, it’s all good, right? 😦
And you are correct. The whole “data-driven” movement didn’t work so well with policing.
The problem is that the researcher missed an important point:
The system isn’t “dummy-proof”. It just dumps out the kids who don’t respond to it. And keeps the kids who would probably respond to a much more sound educational policy. What truly sickening is then those “reformers” act as if the many kids who are dumped no longer exist.
Chiara, Zorba, and NYC public school parent: all examples of Campbell’s Law.
And since policing was mentioned…
One of a number of stories from the latter part of 2014, LATimes.
“LAPD deployed ‘ghost cars’ to meet staffing standards, report finds.”
[start excerpt]
Los Angeles police deliberately falsified records to make it appear that officers were patrolling city streets when they were not, an investigation by the LAPD’s independent watchdog has found.
The deception occurred in at least five of the department’s 21 patrol divisions, according to the Police Commission’s inspector general, who released a report Friday on the “ghost car” phenomenon. Officers working desk jobs, handing out equipment in stations or performing other duties were logged into squad car computers to make it appear they were on patrol.
The findings bolstered allegations union officials have made in recent months that patrol commanders around the city were using the scheme to mask the fact that they did not have enough officers on patrol to meet staffing levels set by department brass.
“This has been going on for years,” said veteran Officer Mark Cronin, a director in the Police Protective League, which represents rank-and-file cops. “It is more prevalent in some areas, but it’s happening throughout the city… There is this intentional misperception being put out there that there are more officers on the street than are actually there.”
[end excerpt]
Link: http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-lapd-ghost-cars-20141011-story.html
And regarding the last sentence of NYC public school parent: if the rheephormsters don’t collect data on those students, then they in effect DON’T EXIST.
It’s a simple, and cruel, as that.
Thank y’all for your comments.
😎
I’d be interested in hearing folks’ thoughts about a viewpoint I’ve come across in the sociology of childhood literature–with respect to no-excuses schooling. I’m not defending no-excuses; I agree with others on the blog that it’s soul-killing for teachers and constraining for kids. But there may be a bigger, less tractable problem lurking in the background:
The sociologist Annette Lareau (Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, 2003) found that working class homes tend to provide children with strong discipline and a strong sense that authority is to be heeded. Lareau found that this background left kids distinctly unprepared for the “collegial” relationships to authority promoted in progressive schooling. Middle class kids, on the other hand, were brought up with more flexible, less defensive attitudes toward formal authority and so tended to thrive.
Lareau suggests that this disconnect carries on into adulthood–that the incompatible culture of schools may not only underserve working class kids, but that it also corresponds to cultural attitudes in universities and mainstream workplaces–leaving a lifelong class-cultural chasm.
If this is true, could it explain why no-excuses schools are popular in inner-city communities…because their approach to authority is _consistent_ with what working class kids experience at home & elsewhere outside school? If so, how might we help poorer kids make the transition to social relations more consistent with middle-class expectations?
You can’t really expect kids to respect adults and peers in school when they themselves are not respected at home by parent or parents and siblings. Abuse is abuse at home and at no excuses schools.
But recognizing that implies that the mission of all charters serving poor and inner city kids should have a theraputic foundation. Think Summerhill. From a humanist point of view test scores don’t matter.
That might be pretty expensive to educate properly kids who’s parents think “ass whuppin’ ” and ‘hittin upside de head’ is a good way to bring up children. It used to be called in the old, old day, ‘beating the devil out of a child’ and is the absolute least attractive aspect of Calvinism.
Think Ted Cruz, if you like. Or any Democrat trying to shush the debate on global warming. Like it or not, it is the very same thing. ‘Shut up and sit quietly.’ Or in well-developed socialism, “Comply or Die.” Bernie and Ted the same in essence? Yes.
Freedom is a better way.
Russell –great post. Maybe *genuine* cultural sensitivity means providing strong discipline.
Russell Miller, I am still not convinced that it is “no excuses” that is so popular. What is popular is a school where parents believe their children will feel safe and will learn. That’s why “no excuses” ONLY works in low-income communities where the only “choice” is a public school that has to serve a huge percentage of at-risk kids without the resources to do so properly.
The other issue is that billionaire hedge funders adore the idea of having low-income minority kids educated in the types of schools they’d never send their own kids to. So they underwrite those schools while making huge political donations to politicians who promise to CUT the budgets of public schools! Thus low-income parents have a choice: an underfunded public school that has to take every kid, or a “no excuses” charter school that will offer catered lunches and all the bells and whistles that the expensive private schools get. The only “catch” is that your child needs to be well-behaved and be able to work at or (ideally) above grade level without having any learning issues or needing any teaching that can’t be taught in 2 months of “training”. Even when they don’t like “no-excuses”, parents like the other things — who wouldn’t, given that choice? Especially as the public school gets a disproportionate number of expensive kids with high needs who are thrown out of charter schools (oops, I mean “made to feel misery until they voluntarily “choose” to leave”)
If “no excuses” was really popular, then parents would not be LEAVING those schools. And the dirty little secret of the no-excuses community is that their bought and paid researchers have no interest in how many students leave. Why?
SK NOTES Chartreuse Academy… Read interview and article…
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Can you clarify? I tried google w/no results.
Charter chains like Success Academy have turned the notion of school “choice” upside down. It is the charters that are choosing which parents and students they will serve. Their application process, pre-testing screening, no-excuses discipline, and irresponsible suspension policies are all used to whittle their student population down to the exact students that they choose to “teach”.