Glenn Sacks is a teacher in Los Angeles and co-chair of the UTLA at James Monroe High School. The title of the article is “Charter Schools’ Success Is an Illusion.” The following article appeared in the Wall Street Journal. This is remarkable because the WSJ is relentlessly pro-charter, pro-voucher, anti-union, and anti-public school. It publishes article after article celebrating the successes of school choice. For it to open its pages to a teacher critical of charters is amazing. Thanks to the relentless Sara Stevenson, former librarian at the O. Henry Middle School in Austin for bringing this article to my attention. Congratulations, Glenn Sacks!
I teach at James Monroe High, a public school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. More than 80% of my students passed the 2019 Advanced Placement U.S. Government and Politics exam. This far exceeds the national (55%) and California average (52%). All my students are minorities, most are low-income, and few of their parents are educated. Almost all come from immigrant families, some here illegally.
I’m proud of them. Their success is my success. But my success is an illusion.
The reason my scores are higher this year is because I moved from Monroe’s residential school—a traditional public school—to its magnet school. I didn’t get better; the academic ability of my cohort of students got better. Research shows that throughout the district magnet students’ performance was better than those at other types of schools, and better than the state average.
Our magnet accepts everybody, as any public school does, but its students outperform residential students in practically all areas, including standardized tests, participation in extracurricular activities, and college admissions and scholarships. What separates them from the residential school’s students is self-selection—they applied to a magnet.
Yet that’s a big difference. The pursuit of a school of choice is evidence of a student’s and a family’s commitment to education. Parents understand how important this is. A recent study of New York City’s public high-school system found parents were more concerned about the quality of a school’s students than the quality of the school itself.
The selection effect that makes me appear more successful than I am also makes charter schools appear more successful than they are. Charter proponents’ claims that they “outperform” traditional public schools are based almost entirely on their test scores and college admissions rates.
Each spring, pro-charter websites are filled with standardized-test-score and college-acceptance hype, contrasting charters’ “success” with traditional public schools’ scores and rates, as if they were competing on a level playing field. KIPP, the largest nonprofit charter network in the country, boasts: “Our alumni enroll in college at rates above the national average. They graduate from college . . . at three times the rate of their peers from similar socioeconomic backgrounds.”
Some charter advocates acknowledge the selection effect. “There’s a level of institutional hypocrisy here,” Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute said in 2013. “Charter advocates say, ‘No, no, no, we don’t believe in [selective admissions],’ but when you see a successful charter school, it’s filled with families who are a good fit and who want to be there, and that’s not possible when you have a random assortment of kids.”
Gordon Lafer of the University of Oregon, who conducted an extensive study of charter schools, found that charters also benefit because they “exercise recruitment, admission, and expulsion policies that often screen out the students who would be the neediest and most expensive to serve—who then turn to district schools.” An American Civil Liberties Union study of California charters and a nationwide Reuters investigation found widespread admission policies helping charters to exclude low-performing students.
Charter skimming is apparent in the public school classroom. Each year in the residential school, I lost a few students because they had been accepted to charters. Almost all of them were top-tier students.
At the same time, we received students midyear who struggled in charters and were bounced back to public schools. Yet students who flunk out of a public school midyear rarely can go to a charter school. If a charter decides to replace a student at all, it will be with someone from its waiting list.
I don’t blame charter parents for wanting to do what they feel is best for their children. And I’m sure many charter advocates mean well. Every teacher has daydreamed about having classes filled with motivated, high-performing students. Charters are that daydream come to life.
If charters aren’t the solution, what is? Our schools are understaffed and underfunded, and teachers are stretched very thin. We could do much more for our students if we had sufficient support staff and smaller classes.
Moreover, funding issues have cost schools many programs that were successful in connecting with students who were otherwise disinterested and disengaged. My principal wistfully recounts them, including an airline-mechanics program we had with the local airport, where our students repaired actual aircraft and trained to become airline mechanics. Teachers who run surviving programs are always in a struggle for funding.
The real solution to America’s educational problems lies not in expanding charters or other educational fads, but in properly supporting the schools we already have.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I suspect the WSJ may have published this because it unwittingly supports their position. Charters are for the strivers. Why shouldn’t we have magnet, selective enrollment, charter, etc. schools for the “bright”, “gifted”, “talented” and “motivated” kids so they don’t have to be distracted by “those kids” who “don’t care” about education (and whose families don’t either)? Most of us on this forum could explain why selectivity is a bad thing, but nonetheless it resonates with the “bootstraps” mentality of America in general and the WSJ readership in particular.
Until we can convince average Americans that diversity and inclusion are good for everyone (including the “strivers”), there’s going to be a demand to get the “good” kids away from the “bad” ones. It’s a tough sell.
Dienne, unfortunately, there are people who are rich and powerful who believe that charters are a model for the nation, not for a select few. They have no clue what to do with those the charters don’t want. I have had this debate many times. That is why they are so eager to declare NOLA a success.
Well, yes, we can have charters for “those kids” too. At least most of them. I mean, we have Great Hearts and BASIS for the smart white/Asian kids, KIPP, Noble, etc. for the motivated minority kids, and some other charters for the others. The worst of the worst is what public school is for.
BASIS is a good example because it doesn’t lie about what it is. It does not have any interest in teaching the severely at-risk students who are “stuck” in failing schools.
It is for high performing students. What is interesting is that BASIS never tried to mislead the public that it was something it was not — i.e. a charter that was turning all “average” students into high performing scholars.
Can you imagine if BASIS could hire the same co-opted researchers to do studies that said its high attrition rate was simply because so many BASIS parents who won the lottery and enrolled their kids simply “changed their mind” and decided that they did not want their “average” child to become the high performing student that they were guaranteed to become if they remained at BASIS? Would white education reporters say “of course, lots of parents prefer their kids stay average or below average when they can have a free school where every average kid becomes high performing”?
I certainly suspect white education reporters would not question BASIS’ attrition rates if the parents who left were African-American and would definitely assume those parents wanted their average student to stay average or below average instead of becoming high-performing. That is what white education reporters always assume about African-American parents who leave high performing charters. But since at BASIS those children leaving are very often white and middle class, and there is no way the reporter would accept such nonsense even if their paid shills in academic did a “study” that proved so many white parents hated good schools and wanted their own kids to remain average instead of high-achieving.
The reason there is no market for researchers to “prove” that BASIS’ success is because lots of white middle class parents don’t want their children to become high achieving and prefer they remain “average” or “below average” is because anyone doing such a study would be criticized and laughed at. Not taken seriously.
They know the white education reporters might start asking questions since these are white parents who the researcher claims wants their children to remain average instead of high performing. They would not simply accept it as the gospel truth like they do when the parents are African-American. Then the education reporters see no need to question a paid shill who says the students left because their parents didn’t want their kid to become the high performing scholar that every single child who attends this miracle-performing charter absolutely becomes.
dienne77 says:
“Until we can convince average Americans that diversity and inclusion are good for everyone (including the “strivers”), there’s going to be a demand to get the “good” kids away from the “bad” ones. It’s a tough sell.”
You should read the big NY Times article from 2 or 3 days ago that addressed this very issue. A working group of people from many different places (not just DOE employees) came up with the first idea of a proposal to increase diversity and inclusion in NYC public schools. It involved what should really be a no-brainer: Phasing out Mayor Bloomberg’s idea of “gifted and talented” — testing children at age 4 and deciding whether or not they are gifted and then keeping the children who are supposedly “gifted” in completely separate classrooms or sometimes entire schools for the next 6 years. The Bloomberg DOE developed a program that insured that those students would never – at any point during their elementary school from K- 5 — ever have to have a child who didn’t receive those same high scores in their class. It will absolutely ruin the “best” 4 year olds forever if there is even a single “average” or “below average” child in their classroom!
And you would not believe the outcry from the public. Apparently, it would not just ruin the experience of those “best” 4 year olds (as proven by their performance on that test) but it would ruin all NYC public schools if the DOE ends this program that isolates the 4 year olds who are gifted so they don’t have to sit next to any average or below average kids in their Kindergarten classes! Or first grade classes. Or 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th grade classes.
By the way, the majority of NYC public school parents approve of doing away with this wrongheaded program. But since most of the parents who agree are African-American and Latinx, their voices are never heard. Instead, the media continues to marvel at how a fraud like de Blasio who has done nothing whatsoever for any public school student or NYC resident (because universal pre-k and ending stop and frisk don’t count) could possibly be elected Mayor.
Notably, this was simply a proposal for how to start this process for 1.1 million students — there are already pilot programs beginning in some Districts that are the size of small cities.
The problem, of course, is that g&t programs that start at age 4 are no different than magnet schools or charter schools. They all select students. But at least the people who run public schools do try to be honest about it so the discussion isn’t completely warped by hateful propaganda.
Public Education and Public School Teachers are TWO of America’s gems. That’s why the deformers want to shut down Public Schools.
Charters are really about Jim Crow.
Enrollment in charters is not random by the nature of enrollment process which, in many cases, is a long complicated process. The more elaborate the application process the more like that the savvy, better educated families will persevere to complete it. For example, sometimes the applications may only be picked up at a specific time during the day. Others schools expect parents to volunteer at the school. Many charters do not provide transportation, and parents are expected to provide it. Each of these obstacles are part of an informal screening process that will likely exclude the poorest and most vulnerable students. If some non-conforming students make it through, then high attrition rates will further filter out those that are not higher achieving students. Charters have many informal ways in which they may “select” their students. It is no accident that they enroll fewer classified and ELL students that are more expensive to educate.
This is definitely the case.
This probably sounds ridiculous, but I have sometimes thought that the only way to address the dishonesty of charters is to open a highly funded public magnet right next to them but one that treats parents and kids with respect instead of demanding that students blow air bubbles or wear absolutely the one pair of socks that the charter demands or sit with their hands folded and never move.
I suspect that 90% of the parents in charters would choose a well-funded public school that excluded all the same kids that charters do.
It would force charters to do what they were designed to do if the only students left who weren’t in high performing magnet schools were truly the most disadvantaged and at-risk and they comprised the students who entered the lottery. It would be significantly harder for charters to cherry pick when the students they really want to teach have a choice that also excludes the kids they don’t want to teach.
I actually think many charters would probably close. They never really wanted to teach the truly at-risk struggling students with all kinds of issues that “failing” public schools could not address. More power to charters if they actually stayed open and did something good for those kids left in non-magnet public schools instead of only doing something good for the kids whose test scores did even more good for charter CEOs.
If memory is correct, charters were meant in the beginning to work with children who had difficulties in traditional schools, not for the “select” few.
I believe Dr. Ravtich approved of that but that was then, this is now.
ALL children should be educated, educated in its best meaning.
We USED to think education was to work toward bringing the individual child to his/her highest potential as a “HUMAN BEING”,.
How that has changed. Now children are to be prepared to be slaves, I use that term noting what is happening in the work place, to the corporations who provide jobs [ we are all in favor of that] but the basic premise of what are he here for/ who are we as human beings etc etc, the concern of humankind’s best thinkers has been turned on it’s head.
When humans are mere “its”, chattel for making others monetarily rich, we have more than lost our way.
We are building on sand when money is more important than people. Our present occupant of the White House leads the way with that “philosophy” and people sell their souls in order to exist, not to LIVE.
The original concept of charters was that they were for the kids who were unmotivated, turned off by school. They were supposed to find innovative ways to awaken a love of learning.
Now they take the kids they want, the ones likely to get high test scores.
Charters choose students. They begin with a group of students whose parents are motivated enough to look for a “better” school for their kids and enroll them in the lottery. But they aren’t satisfied with that enormous advantage that – as this writer points out – is very similar to what magnet public schools with lotteries have.
What makes charters truly reprehensible is these two things in which they differ from magnets:
First, charters simply shed each and every student they do not want to teach — the most “successful” charters use some of the most ugly and horrific methods that intentionally humiliates struggling Kindergarten, first and second graders and publicly demonize them and their parents if they dare to complain. They will fail a kid over and over again – How many kids are held back each year? — and say that it is entirely the child’s fault for not trying hard enough and make it clear to all that this child who they have publicly labeled a lazy failing student will not advance until they become a high performing scholar under the tutelage of their inexperienced 22 year old teacher who is never at fault (unless she gets caught on video publicly demonstrating the charter’s secret teaching methods).
And secondly, because they only care about enriching themselves, they absolutely deny that they ever try to get rid of students they don’t want to teach and go to great lengths to hire some of the most embarrassingly corrupt academics to do studies that are never peer reviewed in academic journals, but always “prove” that the students in their charter are exactly like the students in the failing school — exactly! — and the high rate of attrition in the highest performing urban charters is simply because such a huge percentage of African-American parents don’t want their kids in top performing schools that welcome them and really want to teach their kid. The fact that attrition rates in charters with mediocre results are a fraction of the attrition rates in the highest performing charters is clearly something that the researchers believe is not important because they are so certain it is because African-American parents are more likely to hate top performing charters than mediocre ones. No need to look further if you are a white researcher who just knows that African-American parents would clearly prefer a mediocre charter more than a high performing one.
The racism of the researchers (and their enabling education reporters) who do this is astonishing. No rich people are underwriting research to “prove” that public magnet schools are the answer to how to address the needs of students in failing public schools.
No NY Times journalist is writing front page articles marveling at how a single NYC magnet school that accepts kids by lottery is getting such extraordinary results that it proves that NYC DOE knows exactly how to turn all kids into scholars. But that is exactly what those reporters do when they report pro-charter propaganda as if it is legitimate research.
Public magnet schools seem to be run by people with some ethics. The people with ethics who work at charters are shed as quickly as the children they don’t want to teach. The ones who excel are the ones who are the most unethical. The more you prove you value the CEO’s love over what happens to children, the higher you climb in charters.
When I see high administrators in charters spouting what they know are misleading lies that harm so many children, it makes me realize how similar they are to people who work in the Trump White House. They have the exact same personality characteristics. I am sure Trump apologists, like the high paid charter shills, convince themselves that the harm they do is mitigated by the people they help. As long as the children or people they believe deserve to be helped at helped, they feel every lie is justified.
My guiding philosophy is that if you have to blatantly lie about your school in order to make it succeed, you are clearly not doing it for the kids in your school but for yourself. Because a school that told the truth can still help the same kids. But their top administrators would not be nearly as enriched as they are when they deceived.
“My guiding philosophy is that if you have to blatantly lie about your school in order to make it succeed, you are clearly not doing it for the kids in your school but for yourself.”
So true. That is why private charters spend so much money on advertising, rallies and anything else that will help get people through the door. But “choice” is ultimately about the schools doing the choosing through all their little screening hurdles and attrition.
I’m disappointed that Sacks did not call for more discipline in public schools. Chaos is one factor that drives “strivers” to charters and private schools. Sacks perpetuates the conspiracy of silence among teachers about the serious and often unchecked behavior problems that roil our schools.
Thank you Ponderosa for stating the obvious again. Social Emotional Learning is now taking over my elementary school. We used to focus on academics, then came Common Core and the worksheets about skills they were bored to death with. Their behavior became so difficult that we were told to revamp and focus on Yoga, Breathing, Second Steps, Break Areas, you name it. Of course the students are not “fixed” by any of this. Zero accountability on their part. Last year, three of my top students left.
Sunshine,
I think you make a critical point here in connecting bad curriculum with bad behavior. I do think the mutant brand of education that stems from NCLB –all pseudo-literacy and ill-conceived math all the time –spawns bad behavior. The essence of this dreary regime (Common Core is its latest incarnation) is not having kids learn about the world –which is interesting and important –but rather having them perform mental workouts which allegedly give them “skills”, but which are in reality quite profitless, not to mention tedious and headache-inducing. Kids hate it. And yes we should see the “social emotional learning” (SEL) trend (which is now hitting my school this year) as an effort to bandage over the damage done by this miserable mental workout regime, as well as the national jihad against doling out meaningful consequences. The SEL snake oil attempts to address the symptoms but not the cause –repellent curriculum and weak discipline.
I’m glad the charter schools are on their heels, but, lord, the public schools have a lot of self-examination to do themselves.
One fad after another. Students need and want content.
ponderosa (and Sunshine),
What does “call for more discipline in public schools” even mean?
Charters have “more discipline” and simply dump kids who don’t respond to “more discipline”.
I suppose if you think public schools should simply stop teaching any kids who don’t turn into well-behaved scholars with “more discipline”, it is a good idea.
There isn’t a “conspiracy of silence”. Instead, there are all kinds of false ideas promoted by charters that say that public schools should be able to get top results with all kids in large class sizes with much less money. Just like charters do.
There aren’t any studies that prove that “more discipline” (whatever you mean by that) turns students who act out wildly into well-behaved scholars. In fact, I believe most studies show the opposite.
Many people are trying to figure out the best way to address the needs of students whose severe disadvantages mean that simply giving them “more discipline” does not stop them from acting out.
If you ever read the private reports that charters release in order to smear and ruin the lives of young children whose parents complain about their treatment, you could cry. These children are clearly suffering and the more they are “disciplined” for it, the more they act out! They start out not being able to sit still or do math, are given harsh punishments, exhibit more anxiety and act out, are given even harsher discipline, feel even worse about themselves and act out even more.
You are correct that there needs to be a real discussion about how to address the needs of severely at-risk students. But it is very difficult to do when the discussion is ruined by the lies and propaganda of people who actually don’t care one bit about those students and insist that if public schools only used harsher discipline, they would all thrive. (I want to make it clear that I know that is NOT what you are saying, I’m just pointing out that the pro-charter propaganda spends a lot of effort to convince the public that it is just that easy.)
NYC,
I do think a better curriculum would help prevent a lot of misbehavior. I too dislike the idea of punishing kids who revolt against a wretched curriculum (which is what most schools have now. I’ve talked to kids from across the country and they’re all facing the same wretchedness and they all hate it: Common Core). Most kids will behave well with a caring adult and good curriculum.
But there will always be some who can do great damage to learning (and fellow students) unless the teacher has meaningful consequences to dole out –e.g. after school detention. And there needs to be even more serious consequences (e.g. suspension) for those to opt to skip detention. These tools are being taken away from teachers and this is eroding school quality.
ponderosa,
the problem is that “suspension” is not a tool that has shown to work!
It does remove the kid from the class but when the kid comes back apparently they are not suddenly better behaved if the underlying issue affecting their behavior isn’t addressed. And sometimes suspension just makes them worse.
So then you get into the question of whether public education has any obligation to those students at all. I think they do. But it would be far more meaningful if the discussion was about the various ways that can address their needs. Of course, that would require spending a lot more money and suspensions cost almost nothing. So the idea that suspensions work gets promoted as the easy fix when the issue is far more complicated.
And then we end up with charters that use suspensions on Kindergarten and young elementary school students by proclaiming that it is a great tool to use when it is a great tool to use to get those children out of the school.
NYC:
I’d like to see the studies that show suspension “does not work”. I’m dubious. You have them?
Suspension certainly works to the extent that a chronically disruptive student is not permitted to disrupt class for a few days. The rest of the students breathe a sigh of relief and get to learn more.
Suspension probably works to the extent that it signals to all the other students that misbehavior will not go unchecked. It inhibits others’ misbehaviors. Do those studies measure suspensions’ inhibiting effect on non-suspended students?
I suspect egregiously misbehaving kids who are NOT suspended might be harmed as much as, and maybe more than, those who are suspended insofar as their anti-social habits are given no check. How will they begin to learn that bullying or disrupting class or whatever is not OK?
As for your idea of “fixing” the offending student. I wish. But, short of retraining all teachers in psychiatry and social work, and renouncing academics to convert school to a full-day mental health facility (it’s already halfway there) this is not feasible. Believe me, many teachers DO try to “fix” damaged kids with TLC, etc. It’s usually far harder and time-intensive than it looks –far beyond the powers of us mortals.
You don’t have to have “suspension” to remove that kid from the classroom. If the charters weren’t promoting suspension — of 5 year olds no less! — as the solution, there could be a discussion of alternative methods that don’t mean that a student is entirely forbidden to be in the school.
You presented the false choice the ed reformers want the public to believe. Either you target suspension on all those supposedly “bad” kids (who are disproportionately African-American and not white), or you leave them in class and expect teachers to do the work of social workers and counselors themselves.
There are other options but as a country we are not allowed to have those discussions because the other solutions cost “too much money” and that money will be spent on kids instead of lavishly rewarding charter CEOs and their favorite administrators.
If I had unlimited money, I’d have a system that freed teachers who have a disruptive student to send him to a different classroom with lots of adults to address their particular needs. Maybe the student goes to the gym every hour or two to run around or play hard or punch a punching bag. Maybe they get to go outside and breathe fresh air (if this isn’t a polluted urban area) or they get to do yoga and meditate in that new classroom. Maybe they just get to scream at the top of their lungs to get our their frustrations. Maybe they get to do their lessons on a computer with a teacher standing by to answer questions because they find that they don’t experience extreme anxiety that way.
But the key point of that is that the student is always allowed back in the original class as long as he is not disruptive. That is the only requirement. “Thou shalt not disrupt the learning of other students in the class” and if the student can do that, he can remain in the class even if he sits with his head down or never turns in a stitch of homework. But the fact that he is sitting with his head down or not turning in any homework is also addressed by counselors – not teachers – who have plenty of time to work with the kid to find out what is going on. There are all kinds of ideas that aren’t tried when the false choice is: Suspend the kid or tell the teacher the kid must remain in the class regardless of his behavior and the teacher must be the social worker and counselor to figure out what is going on as well as turn him into a high performing scholar. That is the choice the charters claim works miracles. But it doesn’t.
Kudos to Glenn Sacks for addressing this uncomfortable topic, that Magnets, as well as Charters, should not be “the real solution to America’s educational problems.” I also teach in LAUSD and have seen a proliferation of Magnets to the point where I believe we have allowed individual “choice” to outweigh the needs of those students who are left behind at traditional Public schools. Charters aside, we have created a 2-tier education system. One for families who self-select, and one for families who don’t know any better. Why do most middle and high schools have a Magnet on the same campus? Why do we start now at 1st grade with so many Magnets? We should also be limiting the number of Magnets. If we defend our schools and students against Charters, as we should, we should also take a look at what our Magnets are doing to the common Public good.