Blue Mass Group

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Repurposing Charter Schools

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Purposes 5 and 6 seem a little odd, since Ed Reform established MCAS, which, at least indirectly, held teachers and administrators accountable. Purpose 4, in part, reflects the intentions of Shanker and Budde, though it also references Purpose 1 and 2’s opportunity for innovation.  The editors of the Boston Globe tend to skip the idea of opportunity and equate charter schools with innovation. “Alternative school structure and management” may or may not have been intended to take a shot at teacher unions, but for many, including the Globe editors that’s what the phrase means.

When charter schools were implemented, there was no research to support their efficacy. Minnesota instituted the first U.S. charter school in 1991 At best, the charter school idea was a hypothesis; at worst, it was stark ideology guiding education policy. Charter schools were untested, but Friedman’s idea of free market competition with private schools could justify the idea of stimulating innovation in public schools. Although reports have proliferated and a research base has formed, we still know little about charter schools, and policy-making remains clouded by unwarranted assumptions.

The question of innovation is a case in point. When it comes to charter schools, I haven’t actually been able to locate anything that clearly demonstrates what qualifies as innovative In fact, I haven’t really been able to find much that distinguishes charter schools from public schools on the DESE site. The charter school page offers a list of charter school best practices that don’t seem all that innovative or that unique. While some charter school programs, such as that of the Pioneer Valley of the Performing Arts Charter School, offer a definite departure from regular public schools, other allegedly innovative curricula don’t differ qualitatively from existing public schools. Sturgis Charter Public School, for example, has a curriculum of  International Baccalaureate courses, but so does Commerce High School, one of Springfield’s less successful secondary schools. The Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter Public School offers character education (a subject with little basis in research), but so does my daughters’ non-charter elementary school.

Innovation implies originality. Where is the originality in charter schools? What are individual charter schools doing that individual public schools aren’t doing elsewhere? Why aren’t the best practices of regular public schools posted on the DESE website? Is it because only charter schools are statutorily purposed for doing so?

And what is the difference between the accountability to which public and charter schools are held? Like public schools, charter schools are held accountable by MCAS scores and No Child Left Behind. According to the DESE website, charters also follow a different systemthat requires proof of academic program success, organizational viability, faithfulness to the terms of the charter. Academically, public and charter schools are held equally accountable. As with any organization, public or private, schools are accountable to their stakeholders. Public schools are directly accountable to both state bureaucracy and local elected officials and indirectly accountable to parents. The same is true with charter schools. Accountability, however, is never perfect. Public school accountability is complicated by the community that hosts that school. Parents of students at the doomed Robert Hughes Academy were frustrated by the fact that there was no one local to hold the charter school accountable for its administration’s financial and test score malfeasance. (The state board of education, it should be noted, is closing the school). And as the mock epic of the Gloucester Community Arts Charter School suggests, unwilling host communities have concerns about state bureaucrats, sometimes with political agendas, thrusting charter schools upon them. Accountability is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.

 

What would a progressive charter school policy look like? By rejecting the foolish ideology and blind assumptions of educational reform and repurposing charter schools as the experiments they truly are. Charter schools were instituted under a number of false assumptions, and we have never really bothered to reconsider these assumptions. After more than 15 years of charter schools, we can’t say that they have fulfilled their purposes any better than regular public schools. Some individual charter schools have outperformed public schools on MCAS. Some certainly provide a safer, more focused community for learning than public school counterparts. If they are no better than most public schools, why increase their numbers? (The only progressive reason for allowing more charter schools is to allow students more educational options, but considering that Boston charter schools lose more than 50% of their students by senior year, it would seem that there are plenty of seats already available).

When it follows an empirical process, experimentation is policy-making. It is also the spirit of progressivism. For that reason, we should preserve existing charter schools, study them, and learn what we can from them. If they offer a better way of doing things, if they can stimulate regular public schools to innovate, let’s give them the chance to show it.  

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  1. When you consider Massachusetts’ de-facto education policy over the past 30 years, the gravitation towards charter schools make sense.

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    p>Generally, school performance is a product of the students attending them. The easiest way to get a good school is to make sure that good students are in that school. How? Primarily with property values — keeping your schools filled with the middle and upper class generally  makes them “good”. Likewise, the fewer middle to upper middle class you have in a school generally makes them “bad”.

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    p>There are individual exceptions, but given a set of demographics, it is possible to get a pretty good idea how that school will perform. From what I understand, people even use this to analyze MCAS scores — if a school that isn’t supposed to be doing well is doing well, they want to know why.

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    p>Of course, not all students in poor communities are bad students. It’s just that large number are, and this number overwhelms the school’s resources, it defines its reputation, and it makes people think it is a “bad school” or is “failing”.

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    p>Charter schools are a way to tranche the students left behind in poor communities without taking income into account. There is a self-selective application process which weeds out the unmotivated students/parents. What comes out of the process is a better caliber of students than what is left behind – the students/parents that care more wind up in charters.

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    p>The main problem with this educational policy is that the students left behind after all this tranching become harder and harder to deal with, particularly since educational dollars are generally not calculated on how difficult individual students are to educate (although they are calculated on a district level, the Foundation Budget still says that a class of 17 low-income kids costs the same to educate as a class of 25 high-income kids — since 50% more dollars are assigned to low-income students).

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    p>Unfortunately, across the state, most voters are generally satisfied with our educational policy. It works for them. People don’t mind having to pay more for a house in an “exclusive” community too. People generally don’t mind excluding others.

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    p>Of course, when they hear of these public schools in isolated communities getting scores of “state education aid” and still performing badly, they want to punish those schools, they want to take their money away. People love to hate and punish those they deem inferior.

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    p>Charter schools please almost everyone. Non-residents are happy that those “bad” public schools (and their nasty unions) are punished. Residents are happy to have an alternative without having to go into massive debt to move to another community.

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    p>But still, the students left behind are harder to educate, with fewer resources to educate them. Just like the students left behind in poor school districts. Will more charters solve that problem? Doubtful — at some point there will be nothing left to slice and dice in the public schools, anyone who wanted to go will have gone. What will be left behind will be impossible.

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    p>No one ever thinks about the impact of a few larger school systems churning out thousands of students yearly who are not capable of contributing to our state. The problem usually isn’t in their community, and the effects are not that immediate. However, there is a huge impact to the state’s economy. Not only do we have more people who are needy, but we have less people who contribute to our state’s economy. It’s just not that easy to see. It’s much easier to point and say “see, the more we spend on these people, the worse they do — so let’s stop spending money trying to teach them, let them fend for themselves”.

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    p>The city of Springfield spends over $300 million to educate about 25,000 students. That is what the state says it should spend — that is the Foundation Budget. $257 million of that money is paid by the state — the city can legally only collect about $180 million in property tax levy to fund all municipal operations, far less than what the state mandates is spent on education.

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    p>And for that $300 million, we have a school system that 99.5% of the state wants to avoid. Not because of a belief of bad teachers. Because of an over-concentation of needy students. We have a school system that no one wants to help, one that people just want to hate and punish.

    • As a society, we have yet to recognize the poverty as the greatest enemy of education.

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      p>Teaching in East Longmeadow, I know what you mean about people hating the poor and blaming and generally projecting anxieties onto Springfield. I’ve been at ELHS for 17 years, and I used to hear anti-Springfield bias from my students all the time. Calling Springfield the ghetto. Talking about taking their lives in their hands when they drive down a city street. I still see ignorance, but much less prejudice about Springfield these days. I don’t really know why that is. I used to be able to count on having more conservative kids in my class too.

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      p>When I was in grad school, I did some research on METCO students. I took the bus with the METCO kids one day. Having grown up in Granby, I had no idea what constituted a “bad” neighborhood. It was only when I talked to the students later that I knew what they considered a bad neighborhood (Eastern Avenue gang territory) and how you decided what made a bad neighborhood (you don’t go out at night).

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      p>I’m convinced that if we could we make urban schools appealing, cities would have more middle and upper income families.

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      p>It’s easier to blame individuals for failure than it is to recognize the complexity of our problems. Ed reform is based on a belief that schools fail because students and teachers lack incentives to do better. Poor people just don’t try hard enough.

      • The article in today’s Republican about charter schools seems to place focus squarely on one thing: unions:

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        p>When describing the difference between a charter school and a public school, the article says:

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        In the state’s 60 public charter schools, teachers are generally not in unions. Charter schools have more leeway in starting programs. Charter schools often have longer school days and longer school years, for example.

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        p>Earlier, it said:

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        In underperforming schools, superintendents are given authority to renegotiate a principal’s contract, reopen contracts with teacher unions and dismiss certain teachers or other employees with a year’s notice and a year’s time to improve or find another job in the district, according to The Boston Foundation analysis.

        In chronically underperforming schools or districts, the state could appoint a receiver and the education commissioner could suspend contract provisions without negotiations.

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        p>Shouldn’t they be describing the differences in educational terms instead of work rule terms? The motivation is pretty transparent, and the message is clear: they believe schools are failing in these districts all because of the unions.

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        p>Regarding making city schools appealing, that’s the conundrum. Would charters help or hurt? Let’s say a bunch of charter schools are created in Springfield. Would that attract more middle and upper income families to the city? I’m not convinced it would. It is a lottery process to get into these schools. I don’t think the results are known until the spring. How many people do you think would gamble like that? And skimming off those students from the public schools probably makes the public schools worse – more hand-wringing over the district will not attract anyone.

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        p>On the other hand, if the charters could offer something unique, something that can’t be had elsewhere, they could possibly entice families to live in the city. I wonder how many families whose children attend SABIS would leave the city without SABIS being there? I don’t know.

    • on student achievement.  But if what you say is true how do you explain the existence of 90/90/90 schools?  These are schools with 90% Free and Reduced Lunch students, 90% minority students and have 90% of the students meet state standards on statewide testing. High Performance in High Poverty Schools

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      p>More recent research by Harvard researcher Karin Chenoweth (“It’s Being Done”: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2007),) shows how these schools are achieving these results.  Oh, and by the way, these are Public Schools, not Charter or Private Schools.  Here is what Ms. Chenoweth has to say about the difference between these schools and what she calls run of the mill schools.

      What distinguishes the schools in your book from run-of-the-mill schools or from “crummy poor-kid schools,” as you call them?

      Their relentless focus on instruction. That’s what they talk about: What they need to teach and how to teach it. That’s the main conversation in the schools. In crummy poor-kid schools, the conversation is dominated by “If we had better kids we would have a better school.” I’ve heard versions of that I don’t know how many times. Run-of-the-mill schools just teach to the high-achieving kids. That’s the standard way schools are run. The rest of the students they just give assignments to, a lot of worksheets and such. Those schools may have some good teachers, but you can’t count on the school to pick up on weak teaching.

      Harvard Education Letter

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      p>Blaming the students or their life circumstances for the fact that they aren’t learning is a defeatist attitude and has no place in education.

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      p>As I’ve stated before, I’m in favor of any school that can and will help all students achieve at a high level.  The problem that I have with Charters is that they serve an exclusive population with very few special education students or English language learners.

      • First, I thank you for coming up with stuff I had to actually look up.

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        p>I accept your point that there are schools in impoverished communities that beat the odds. Deborah Meier has shown it can be done.

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        p>How to account for the some schools beat the odds? They are the exception, not the rule. The question to ask then is why aren’t the exceptions the rule? You seem to suggest that because some schools are exceptions they can all be exceptions.

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        Blaming the students or their life circumstances for the fact that they aren’t learning is a defeatist attitude and has no place in education.

        I don’t believe in “blaming” students for the fact they aren’t learning, but failing to realize that their life circumstances impacts their learning and failing to address the impact of those circumstances is defeating, not defeatist. See Berliner for some clear thinking no the subject.

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        p>I have reservations about Reeves’s 90/90/90 research because I can’t find any reference to his research being peer-reviewed reference, his works cited is very weak, and his 90/90/90 conceit is gimmicky. In spite of his profitability and membership in the AEI, however, I did find one of his Kappan articles that reassures me he isn’t driven by ideology.

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        p>I wouldn’t call Chenoweth’s work research, however. I found Gerald Bracey’s column on Chenoweth at HuffPo. Bracey’s a good thinker and critic. He writes,

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        One response of the poverty-is-no-excuse crowd is to find schools with high poverty enrollments or high minority enrollments or both, but which also have high test scores. This is not easy….

        I do not believe that demography is destiny. I do believe it’s much harder to get high achievement in high poverty schools than outfits like the Education Trust contend (with whom Chenoweth has been affiliated). In this instance, a number of the schools in Chenoweth’s group have advantages that give them an enormous leg up over the typical inner city school found in NYC, Detroit, DC., etc.

        If you grant Karin everything, you still have only 15 schools out of what, 15,000 impoverished schools? None of her schools are in NYC, LA, Philly, Chicago, Detroit or DC. Those are the schools I have in mind when I talk about the impact of poverty. The schools where teachers tell Kozol [Jonathan Kozol in The Shame of the Nation] that’s the first white kid I’ve seen in three years. Frankford, DE is only 27% black, 38% Latino and 34% white. East Millsboro, DE is 60% white. Only half are eligible for free and reduced price lunch.

        Most of of these schools are in towns. They’re not in places where kids walk out of school into drive-by shootings, druggies, homeless, whores, gangs… etc. (a Website for Millsboro, DE indicates it hasn’t had a murder in at least 5 years). Consider the two schools in Delaware. One is in a town of 750, the other a town of 2,500. The size of the town alone gives them a big leg up — and the schools are not big either. The people in the schools talk about the computers and Smartboards and stuff that I imagine kids and teachers in South Central and East Harlem don’t even know about. In DC a few years back, they found dozens of computers in a closet; this year there were thousands of textbooks in a building and apparently no intent, or no plan anyway, to deliver them to schools. And you’ve probably got a stability in both the teaching cadre and the kids that urban schools would kill for.

        • Hi,

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          p>I’m a longtime reader of BMG. This is my first time commenting. I hope I don’t blow it.

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          p>Deb Meier is an interesting example of someone running schools that beat the odds, since she often notes that while Central Park East produced excellent long-term outcomes for her students, their test scores weren’t anything to write home about.

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          p>Richard Rothstein of the Economics Policy Institute has researched the 90/90/90 schools. I highly recommend his book Class and Schools, which addresses the issue. In an interview with EducationNews.org, he said this:

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          a) As I mentioned above, I devote a chapter in Class and Schools to discussing claims that some schools “beat the odds” and get results from lower class children that are similar to those of the middle class. In this discussion, I specifically address the Mather School and other 90/90/90 schools, and show that the claims, in these cases, are false. For one thing, the level of achievement that 90 percent of children reach in these schools is not one with which any middle class family would be satisfied.

          b) Certainly some schools serving disadvantaged children are better than others, and we should praise these schools, study them, and try to imitate their techniques. The Mather School may well be one of them. Its results may be better than other schools and if so, we can acknowledge this without having to falsely claim that its results are so much better that it has “beat the odds,” and significantly overcome children’s social and economic disadvantages. Too much education commentary these days is based on “all or nothing” comparisons. We should seek to improve schools as much as we possibly can. If we do so, we should not consider that we have failed if such schools don’t accomplish the impossible.

          c) The Mather School is interesting for another reason. One cause, perhaps not the most important, but one cause of the Mather School’s results was its institution of an optometric clinic to treat the large numbers of low-income children who came to the school unable to see well-enough to succeed. In fact, the optometrist who founded that clinic, Dr. Antonia Orfield, has just published a book (Eyes for Learning) describing the importance of optometric treatment for low-income children, based partly on her experiences in the Mather School.

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          p>Rothstein is often accused of defeatism or of believing that poor children can’t learn, but that’s not his point at all. As his point c attests, he advocates broader public policies aimed at social and economic disadvantages that affect educational achievement. He was a driving force behind the Broader, Bolder Approach statement, an approach that Citizens for Public Schools also supports.

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          p>If you believe Rothstein’s research, as I do, then it’s disheartening to see what’s happening with this ed reform bill. I couldn’t agree more with Mark Bail: “If policy in every area of the government is developed in the manner as education, we’re in serious trouble.”  

          • Thanks to you and Jim Gosger (an alias, I think) this has been one of the most educational threads I have been part of (in a while).

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            p>I appreciate Jim using evidence, not anecdote, to support his argument. He got me reading. Your post gives me more to consider.

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            p>Long live wonks!

  2. could charter schools attract people to the city?

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    p>I tend to agree with you and think not. Prospective homebuyers would probably consider what else the city has to offer. There are some nice neighborhoods, I think. But what else is there that you can’t get driving in from EL, Longmeadow, Ludlow, or Wilbraham?

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