Gallup/PDK Poll, done each year, 1000 person sample.
1. In 2006: 53% favor charter schools, 34% oppose
In 2000: 42% favor charter schools, 47% oppose
2. In 2006: 36% favor vouchers, 60% oppose, lowest support since 2001
3. How would you grade public schools nationally?
21% “A” or “B”
68% “C” or “D” or “F” (mostly “C”)
4. Another interesting nugget from a new study coming out today from NCES using 2003 data: It says nationally, most charters perform about even with or slightly behind district schools. But in Massachusetts charter schools significantly outperform sending districts.
Would that convince anyone on fence about charters….that MA happens to have among the best charters in the nation?
I.e., can you say “I’m skeptical about the big picture nationally, but here they’re working very well, let’s fire up some more – at least in the inner-cities where 50% of kids drop out and only 10% get college degrees and there are long parent waiting lists, particularly among black families?”
Anyone? Bueller?
so treat my questions as just that.
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Can charter schools select their students, or must it be a pure lottery? How easy is it to kick out charter students for disciplinary, academic, or other reasons?
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I want evidence that comparing results of “average MA charter school” to “average MA public school” is a fair contest. After all, if one team gets to draft its players whereas the other team just gets whoever is local, and if one team gets to drop the lowest performers whereas the other team has to keep them around anyway, isn’t it reasonable to expect the former to outperform the latter? If so, how does this experiment change as the number of charter schools increases? Does it result in lower performance for the charters (having to choose from more students means lowering the mean) and lower performance for the publics (higher percentage of students are now the underperformers)?
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2. Expulsion can be appealed to school board and to DOE. On discipline, theoretically, it’s equally easy for charter and traditional public schools to expel. They tend to have the same rules. Realistically, it may be more common with charters to actually enforce – i.e., assault or bringing a knife to school might result in an expulsion versus a couple day suspension in another school. Big districts, like Boston, also have a thing called a “safety transfer” where a kid is transferred to another district school, so that’s sort of it’s own category.
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There’s very little “Academic explusion” I know of in any sort of school, district or charter. But some charters are less apt to socially promote a kid who is failing, or may set higher standards (in our school, a “D” is not passing), so strugglers may leave. On the other hand, some inner-city kids may be more apt to dropout in larger district schools, because they tend to be more chaotic.
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Elementary and middle charter schools have few students leave, because the parent controls the decision. Some high schools have higher attrition because the kid increasingly controls the decision, and may wonder why he should go to school til 4pm in a charter when his pals are done at 1.40pm.
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3. The apples-to-apples comparsions are very tough, as you correctly point out. Scholars try to control for “entering MCAS”, poverty, race, etc, but it’s still pretty hard to do a gold standard story.
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Furthermore, while you might think “charters drop their low performers”, the fact is that districts like Boston, Lynn, Lawrence, Springfield drop 50% of their kids before high school graduation. This just makes comparisons more complex.
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A gold standard study would use the built-in randomization of charter school lotteries. You’d track the gains of lottery winners versus lottery losers over time. That study has not yet been done, to my knowledge.
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The best “rough” apples to apples comparison might be charters versus pilots in Boston. Each has a random lottery (except for 2 pilot schools, which have auditions/essays/interviews to screen kids). Their demographics are almost identical, and both are small schools of choice. We think – but we don’t know – that they probably have similar starting points when they arrive at their new schools.
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In that comparsion, charters outperform pilots. But even that is admittedly imperfect.
There are many Americans with an outright love of poor quality services, and many fortunes were made catering to that reality.
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Unfortunately, with charter schools, the consumers are using MY tax money.
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I agree the comparison may be flawed, but not for the reasons you state.
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Characterizing the “average MA public school” as a team that just gets whoever is local isn’t really describing Massachusetts these days. Property values are overwhelmingly determined by the school systems, and because of that, there is a screening process that takes place way before those public schools get their students — anyone who doesn’t care about their kids’ educations enough to pay a lot more for their housing is pre-screened out of the best school districts. The talent pool is stacked from the beginning.
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Comparing the average public school student to the average charter school student isn’t fair either, because in most cases you’re comparing a student in a wealthier suburban town to one in an inner city — because most of the charter schools are in inner cities.
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I don’t even know if you can make a fair comparison. Comparing an average charter school student to an average student in the same community isn’t fair either, because the charter school student self-segregated himself to be with other students that care enough about education to want to go to a charter school.
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Perhaps the best comparison you could make would be to compare students in charter schools to students who didn’t make the lottery cut to get into those charter schools.
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I think there are definitely problems with charter schools, particularly draining funding and student talent from public school systems. However, I can’t ignore the benefit they have towards the students who choose them.
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The main problem with urban schools isn’t the teachers, it probably isn’t even the lack of funding. The main problem is that there is an overwhelming concentration of kids who don’t care about education in them.
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Would you send your kids to a classroom of 30 kids, 20 of which don’t value education (nor do their parents)? Would you feel that your child is getting a good education when the teacher spends more than half their time dealing with and worrying about those students?
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Charter schools allow parents to escape that problem.
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Unfortunately that doesn’t solve the problem that we have so many uncaring students concentrated in urban classrooms.
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The best solution would be to spread those uncaring students around. Maybe 1-2 per classroom, and if you’re lucky, the teacher can reach one of of every two of them. The problem is far easier to solve when it isn’t so concentrated.
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But that isn’t going to happen in this state without some radical changes in how we do things, especially with respect to property value, education funding, jobs, etc.
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We basically need to dismantle the economic differences between communities, to the point where every community has an equal share of all economic classes.
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Until that happens we will still have the feedback loop that exists today — people flee from one community to escape the poor, they drive up demand in another community, driving the poorest out of that community, and deeply entrenching the class lines further and further. And the educational opportunities, still largely funded locally (check the spending in wealthy communities — often times double the foundation budget), serve to reinforce the differences on a generational level.
And that’s just those with an opinion…who knows how many people said “no opinion”. Unless I know what definition pollsters/respondants were using for “charter school” I can’t make any sense of these numbers. In most of the country, “charter school” is defined as “a public school, but way better”.
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As for the national grading, hey, when you have politicians from both sides who abuse education for cheap political points, no surprise public education is disliked, much the same as public taxation.
“Don’t know/no opinion” is offered as an option, gets 13%.
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Good point about phraseology, but so long as they ask the same question the same way each year (this is an annual poll), then wouldn’t the TREND LINE be unassailable? I.e., you could dispute whether that many people truly support charters, but couldn’t dispute whether MORE people are supporting them?
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Is your opinion that public schools deserve an “A” or “B”?
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To help you answer, a fun fact: the national dropout rate is 30%. In inner-cities, 50% dropout rate.
My education prof would be proud, quack that he is.
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The case for F: Student success rate in our public schools is largely predicated on race and socioeconomic opportunity. There are large numbers of drop-outs, and international tests like the TIMMS show the US around 27(ish) in world rankings. Special education students often study distinctly modified curriculums. Teachers often do not hold the required degrees of education to teach.
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The case for A: Student success rate in our public schools is largely predicated on race and socioeconomic opportunity, (though correlations are higher between race/se opportunity and income and most societal rankings. There are large numbers of drop-outs, and international tests like the TIMMS show the US around 27(ish) in world rankings, comparing the general American student population with a sub-section of foreign students who are on “honours” academic tracks. And this without the serial suicides, teacher beatings, or breakdowns that plague Korea’s and Japan’s education systems.. Though present in unprecedented numbers in mainstream classes and schools, special education students often study distinctly modified curriculums. Teachers often do not hold the required degrees of education to teach as doing so would require most elementary teachers to get 4 Bachelor’s degrees.
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A’s breed complacence. But a B- is fair (Mass. gets a B+, btw).
When you say “success is predicated on race and SES”…
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Do you mean….
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A. Black and Hispanic kids are unlikely to do well no matter what type of school they attend?
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B. Black and Hispanic kids will do well in suburban public schools (around mostly high-achieving white kids) but poorly in inner-city public schools (around mostly low-achieving kids of same race)
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C. Something else? I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but am curious to understand your view.
Too many run-on sentences. I was trying to say that race and socio-econmic status affects success in public schools (standardized test scores) than it affects income and life expectancy. When the analysis includes the proper controls.
“Study of Test Scores Finds Charter Schools Lagging”
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“The study found that in 2003, fourth graders in traditional public schools scored an average of 4.2 points better in reading than comparable students in charter schools on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, often called the nations report card. Students in traditional schools scored an average of 4.7 points better in math than comparable students in charter schools.”
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“How to judge the relative performance of public, charter and private schools has been a touchy issue for the department since 2004, when it initially avoided publicizing results from the 2003 assessment that were largely unfavorable to charters.
The teachers union ferreted those results out of the departments Web site, showing that students in charters were largely trailing those in regular public schools. After the federation reported the scores, the department issued its own report confirming their accuracy.”
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” Tuesdays report, written by the Educational Testing Service, compared a nationally representative sample of 376,000 students at nearly 6,800 regular public schools with 6,500 students at 150 charter schools, controlling for race, socioeconomic status and other factors. The study did not look at students previous educational achievement.”