Julian Vasquez Heilig is a leading authority on the subjects of equity and social justice. His blog is one of the brightest spots on the Internet because of his scholarship and creative use of graphics. He has been a prominent member in the California chapter of the NAACP.
In this post, he refutes the claim that charter schools in California produce results better than public schools. Despite their advantages, their academic results are about the same as public schools. The hype for them comes from their well-funded propaganda and lobbying operation.
He writes:
Even with the limited (and selection biased?) sample of comparison neighborhood public schools, charter school students nearly perform statistically the same as neighborhood school students. The differences are in the hundredths of a standard deviation in Central California and Southern California and tenths of a standard deviation in Bay Area and South Bay. By comparison, other education policies such as class size reduction and high quality Pre-K show 400% more overall impact on student success than charter schools.[5]Considering the data, charter schools are not having the instant impact that proponents purport….
The education policy discourse in the Trump and Obama eras has been focused on empowering schools choice while remaining silent about the purposeful inequality in financial resources that plague low-income schools in the United States. The latest research has identified the inequality and shown the positive impacts of properly funding schools. The problem is that the wealthy have improperly influenced the equalization mechanisms in each state and have stacked the deck against low-income districts, schools and students. We must substantially change the political conservation about education policy away from school choice to resource inequality if we are to offer a quality education to every student in the United States.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
charter schools in California, despite their advantages, will never produce academic results that are significantly better than public schools simply because you “cant get blood out of a turnip”.
Even with the ability to cherrypick children (and hide everything corporate charter schools do because of legislation that allows them to hide everything they do even how they spend and/or steal the public’s money), those specifically selected children who score better on academic tests and have better parent support for learning, would have performed about the same in the public schools. Motivated students with involved parents perform well even with the worst teachers.
Then there is the teacher factor. Public schools pay teachers more with more benefits than greed based private sector charter schools do. Public schools have lower teacher turnover rates. The teachers in public schools are required to be better prepared with better teacher training to earn a teaching certificate. And after the first five years when most new teachers leave and the most dedicated teachers stay, the performance of teachers continues to improve while high turnover and burn out rates in corporate charter schools ensure that those schools will never develop a strong professional teacher base.
For instance, back in the 1990s, one of the history teachers at the public high school where I taught English and journalism decided to discover if the students that had teachers with more than ten years of teaching experience did better on standardized state tests than teachers with less than ten years of experience.
When Bob finished crunching all the numbers from several years worth of annual state tests, he discovered that ALL the gains came from the teachers with more teaching experience and time in the classroom. I repeat, ALL the gains! And the less time a teacher had in the classroom, the poorer their students performed on those tests …. meaning the students actually lost ground or didn’t gain much from the previous annual test results before they were with the new teachers.
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Charter proponents cherry pick data in the same manner as they pick their students. Vasquez points out the unfair method Credo used to make its claim of charter success.
The most interesting point the post shows is the power of funding, something charter schools never discuss. Charter drain dissipates the quality of education in public schools. If the state wants to improve outcomes for students, it should invest in well funded, well resourced public schools. We do not need more schools, particularly useless cyber schools. We need to invest in the ones we already have, the ones that are accountable and transparent, the ones operated by professional educators.
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I believe there is a misunderstanding embedded in calls for equity in funding of public education that the achievement gap between the poor and other economic classes attending public schools is not only an economic issue. Zip codes matter–But!
But, the achievement gap, and Zip codes inequality, are also reflection of political power. 1% inequitable political power is our status quo because of our government’s housing policy has divided and isolated our working classes.
The great housing divide stems from post World War II solution to the then housing crisis. The 1950s Federal financed highway system; and government funding of FHA and GI Bill, combined to create walls of race and class isolation on a massive scale with redlining by race and industrial housing by track homes all in a row similar in size and price.
In 1953, when my family moved out of our urban city rental to our lower working class track suburb home ownership, we were isolated with only folks of similar income, as was the folks in the next track with higher price homes were isolated with professional class, another track for managerial and small business ownership class.
Federal government financed class-based track housing and isolated working classes of America as never before.
My lower working class track was racially segregated and I did not have classes with a non-white until Jr. high school. And, my high school only had one black student.
This is a diverse country with children growing up in neighborhood public schools isolation from that diversity. The “other” folks viewed from suburbia isolation are understood through family experiences and attitudes but mostly through television stereotypes.
The 1%’s wealth had great influence on the media and television And, through fear of the other, politicians in the pocket of the 1% exploiting fears of the working classes often influenced the working class to vote against their economic interest.
Desegregation of America’s housing and public schools has been on hold for 65 years. And, separate is still not equal. And, that is why money alone will not address the achievement gap. The isolation must be addressed too to achieve a more perforect union.
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Public school’s mural in support of LGBT community deemed ‘obscene’ by church — so the administrators painted it over – Alternet.orghttps://www.alternet.org/2019/05/public-schools-mural-in-support-of-lgbt-community-deemed-obscene-by-church-so-the-administrators-painted-it-over/
The ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State must get involved.
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Greetings, I never understood that since Charters are Choice why they aren’t compared to Magnet schools which they perform well below. C
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