From Scot Lehigh’s column in the Boston Globe today comes this intriguing snippet:
Over the years, as he’s been thwarted on various aspects of his education agenda, I’ve prodded Mayor Menino to support more Commonwealth charters. After the mayor testified against raising the charter cap this week, I queried him about a new study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which shows Boston charter students making significantly larger learning gains than their counterparts in the traditional Boston schools.
“I’m not going to get into a debate about charters,” his honor grumped. “You like that study, I don’t like it, OK?”
But why doesn’t he like it? Beyond quipping “because you read it,” the mayor wouldn’t answer.
Inquiring minds want to know: why doesn’t Mayor Menino like the so-called CREDO study? Perhaps I can be of some assistance, Mr. Lehigh…
Mayor Menino Hates Walmart
Mayor Menino was a staunch opponent of Walmart’s plans to open shop in Boston. And he’s rightfully suspicious of the fact that Walmart money is paying for virtually every aspect of the campaign to eliminate the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts. In fact, the Walton Family Foundation, which is funded by Walmart profits, even paid for the CREDO study of which Lehigh is so enamored. (See page 2, “acknowledgments.”) As for whether the Waltons flew the CREDO expert into to testify at this week’s Statehouse “hearing,” I suppose we’ll never know…
The Mayor Actually Read the Study
I happen to know that Mayor Menino finds reading academic studies relaxing, and that he poured over the CREDO report. Menino found page 13 of particular interest, when the study’s authors acknowledge that Massachusetts charter schools enroll a smaller percentage of English Language Learners than the public schools. He understands that this is a particular issue in his city, where the percentage of students who are still learning English in the Boston Public Schools has risen from 19% to 30% just since 2009. And while the Mayor is a regular reader of Scot Lehigh so knows that charter schools are outstanding and are achieving miraculous results with the exact same kids who attend the public schools, Menino also knows that a full 1/3 of charters in Boston enroll virtually no English Language Learners at all.
The Mayor Is a Critic of CREDO’s Methodology
While some of his would-be replacements might not know the difference between “crudo” and CREDO, they don’t call Mayor Menino ‘the professor’ for nothing. Menino has serious methodological questions about CREDO’s approach of matching up real charter school students with fictional amalgamations of statistically similar students in the same area. For Menino the issue is one of control: he “gets” that while the CREDO study controls for the charter students’ individual characteristics, it can’t sort out whether attending school with an entirely English-speaking student body affects their performance, or whether it makes a difference that the charter students have parents who opted to enroll them in a charter school.
The Mayor Is Worried about the Future of His City
An avid student of education reform, Mayor Menino has observed with interest the experiments with charter schools in other cities. He sees that in many cities, the public school system has been reduced to the schools of last resort, with a far higher percentage of non-English speakers and special needs students than the charters with which they now compete for resources. Also, Mayor Menino is incredibly proud of the fact that under his watch, more students in Boston are attending college than ever before. He knows that Success Boston and other initiatives to help all of the city’s kids are unlikely to survive the coming era of budget slashing and public school closures that will inevitably result from the elimination of the cap on charter schools.
The Mayor Knows that TFA Recruits Don’t Vote
Menino is troubled by the fact that teachers at Boston’s charter schools are both whiter and younger than the teachers they are replacing. Transforming Beantown into Greentown is one thing, but Mayor Menino doesn’t share Scot Lehigh’s enthusiasm for replacing the city’s teaching force, diverse in age, race and experience, with fresh, young teachers who are en route to law school. He sees how high teacher turnover is at Boston’s charters and wonders about the long-term political implications of replacing the city’s teachers with smart temps. Do they even vote?
The Mayor Recognizes the Sound of a Cash Register When He Hears It
Mayor Menino is an old-school pol and he still remembers the days when local politicians padded their pockets with no-show public sector jobs. But these days Mayor Menino can’t help but observe that an awful lot of people seem to be getting rich in the name of helping young minority students achieve. And Menino would really like to know: what is up with all of the rich white people flocking to the boards of the city’s charter schools? Is it really a good idea for an entirely minority charter in Roxbury to be run by an all white cabal of bankers? And why does that particular member of the Board of Directors of UP Academy sound so familiar?
I should tell you that I take all the charter arguments, pro- and con, with a huge grain of salt. I feel like it’s just hard to have decent research one way or the other, for some of the reasons you cite: What’s your control group? And is it really a legitimate comparison? I don’t trust Lehigh or Stergios because they’re just a bit too eager.
1. Hating Walmart: This is an ad hominem argument. The funding source raises an eyebrow, but isn’t definitive.
2. % of ESL learners: This is your strongest point. Brings up the question: Why not have ESL be a particular “track” within schools? Do ESL students drag down the rest of the class? Does trying to keep up with native speakers lead to other classroom problems? How does mixing them up benefit either group?
3. Last resort: Again, should the otherwise-destined-for-success kids be held back by the needs of ESL and special needs kids? Again, might they be better off in different tracks, at least temporarily w/r/t ESL? I think that’s a genuinely difficult moral question, not one easily dispatched with snark.
3a. MIghtn’t it be better for ESL kids to go to a charter??
4. TFA recruits don’t vote, future lawyers: Whatever. That’s just lame ad hominem, at best tangential and largely irrelevant to the question of what’s best for kids. Try another argument – this one is ugly.
5. White board members, etc. Well, depends on what the folks in that community want, doesn’t it? Are charters popular in non-white areas? Again, an ad hominem argument.
Teach For America does take academically accomplished young people who know how to score high on the SAT and put them in under-staffed schools. But the biggest problem with TFA is that their recruits quit after 2 or 3 years, just as they’ve started to learn the job. This is a problem because for the very deserving children of America’s urban core (and rural areas like Appalachia or the Mississippi Delta) need to have long-term relationships with teachers in order to feel willing to try to learn. There’s an attitude among the kids of “before you can teach me, you have to know me” and when a teacher sticks around for ten years, that teacher has a credibility established through teaching the older siblings & neighboring kids that creates a quicker bridge to the trust & the learning that follows the trust.
After so many years of doing TFA the same way (6 weeks of cram camp and huge attrition after 2-3 years) you would think that the educated people in TFA would have changed what they do to reduce attrition.
But they have not.
Which means that to them, the TFA leaders, the attrition is a feature not a bug.
When I reached a given grade in school I did not know my new classroom teacher beforehand nor did I have any reason or expectation to. Likewise, if one of my teachers ended up leaving the year after I was in her class it didn’t affect me as I had moved on as well. I have known teachers who retire in the middle of a school year and I don’t think that should be permitted.
you can have situations like the 2nd grade teacher telling the 3rd grade teacher, “You’re going to have Johnny Q next year–he’s a handful but he’s smart, so keep him occupied with helpful tasks around the room, and he won’t become a distraction.” Even more helpful is when the teacher finds out which kids have a history outside the classroom–if two 2 kids have had fights outside of school in the neighborhood the teacher wants to know that before making the seating chart for class. And while some of the kids don’t know what they will get when they start a class, when there are little sisters/brothers entering the class having heard, “You’ve got Ms. Jones, she’s a good teacher” then that adds to the vector sum of student attention in the room.
The teacher has institutional knowledge that makes the actual teaching more efficient, such as knowing what to look for in case a kid has ADD or dyscalculia. Classroom management becomes something the teacher does on automatic pilot, freeing the teacher to think about how to make lessons deeper than just test prep or vocab memorization.
I thought TFA was for places where there were needs and unable to recruit teachers in the traditional manner. Otherwise there’s always a chance you will end up in a teacher’s first class or last class.
At my kids’ elementary school, there are many long tenured teachers. Their reputations are known, both by the parents and the students.
They have a “buddy” program where each student in an early grade is paired up with an older student, and they meet periodically to do fun projects. A side product of that is the younger students get to know their buddy’s teacher – who they might end up having as their teacher in a few years. It also allows the older students to maintain relationships with the early-grade teachers.
It is not an uncommon scene at pickup time to see an older sibling, picking up their brother or sister at school, hugging one of their teachers from years back.
But, mostly, the big value of teachers who hang around is the experience factor within the school. When I recently had knee surgery, I was very happy when my surgeon said, “I’ve done hundreds of these, and it’s my favorite operation.” A teacher who has taught hundreds of kids and really enjoys the job and the school is invaluable.
Well if you didn’t know your teacher before hand you must have gone to a charter school. I knew my teachers beforehand and their reputations and faces were familiar. As I walk down the hallway at my school I often hear “Hi Mr Whyte” from kids from all different grades. It’s called school community. It’s important. Teacher attrition not only robs experience, it hinders community building.
I’m pretty sure charters didn’t exist when I was growing up. I may have been vaguely aware of the existence of other teachers but they were in other parts of the building and I didn’t know them. I also did end up a couple of time with teachers for whom it was their first year in my building. I’m also the oldest child of my family so I did not have the sibling input that some might have had. Point is teachers were mostly complete strangers on the first day and that’s fine. You get to know them soon enough.
When I was a kid, I went to school and I did the work. My wife now teaches in the city and the kids do not care, do not want to do anything, do not yet trust her. Some refuse to do homework and don’t care if they fail. They call her names if they don’t like a lesson.
It might not have mattered to you as a kid (I myself had some new teachers, but mostly people whose name and face I knew but with whom I’d had no real contact before), but it might matter a lot more in a different setting.
I’ve been there. There’s some kids who home lives and histories have been so bad that those kids lose hope for/focus on their own learning.* There’s no easy solution to that. Perseverance (i.e., showing up every day and next year) shows them the teacher is not going to go away like so many other adults in their lives. And taking a visible interest in what interests them (be it baseball, their favorite TV shows, whatever) will win over more of them, if not all.
Every year around town, I bump into old students and they are happy to see me–even the ones I had to correct for misbehavior repeatedly. Tell your wife that she’s actually more successful than she realizes.
*Part of this problem is that the economy is not growing. A growing economy gives parents jobs, and kids see that they can find work when they graduate. Another reason the government needs to start spending more, hiring people to do the work that needs to be done, like childcare, T improvements, road improvements, public park cleanup & landscaping, painting murals.
As a public school, it is my understanding the charter can permanently kick those students out of their school? Certainly charters tout stricter discipline as a key difference with traditional public schools.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume all other things are equal between charters and traditional public schools. If charters can eliminate the “bad kids”, allowing the “serious student” the ability to focus on their education…that is a big deal. The public policy implications are huge. So all the kids with disciplinary problems will be segregated to traditional public schools (never mind the strong evidence that charters dump kids with language and special need challenges).
It effectively creates a two-tier, separate but equal, public school system. Charter proponents bemoan that a child’s education should not be decided by the zip code they live in. Nice rhetoric. But if they truly believed in “equal opportunity” they would not be building a two-tier public school system-one for the “serious student” and one for the knuckleheads.
These are tough questions that should be discussed head on. But instead we seem to dance around it. Charter schools brag about having strong parental involvement, discipline, a cultural the motivates and challenges. Charter critics say charter’s”cherry picking students and expel the ones that can’t cut it. It’s time to strip away these descriptives and frame it as creating two different tracks of schools: one for the “motivated” and one for the “knuckleheads”. (Of course this broad labels have much wider connotations: “motivated” may mean having a stable family life with strong parental involvement or the “knucklehead” may have dyslexia).
So let’s start having a discussion about creating separate, but equal, public schools based on those with stable homes lives, with no learning challenges and separate schools for those who have been dealt greater challenges to succeed.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/11/nyregion/segregation-in-new-york-city-public-schools.html?_r=0
It’s a problem. When the less-motivated students see other students making strides forward, that helps wake them up to the reality that they are responsible for their education.
This economy is a disaster. It’s been heading this way for years but since 2008 the bottom has fallen out. These days, when you tell any kid to do well in school if you want a good job, etc., there’s a much higher chance it isn’t true.
My dad was a so-so student who dropped out of college, joined the service to get money to go back, wound up in Vietnam and got a bachelor’s at night at the age of 31. We weren’t rich but he got us a house and raised three kids. My mom didn’t go back to work until I was 12. These days they’d never make it.
up with charters in Massachusetts.
like private schools they are completely separate from surrounding districts. (Unless they participate in some special program like the Gates-funded compact).
Big suburban charters seem more integrated into their sending districts, in part because they function more like regular schools than the extended day “enrichment” programs in the cities. By the way: while the discussion in Massachusetts is directed specifically at the lowest performing urban districts, we can look down the road to states that are further along with the charter experiment to see that a big suburban charter push is inevitable here. There is simply too much money to be made–and that sneaky provision in the Feingold legislation about charters being able to force districts to lease “underutilized” facilities and rent-controlled prices looks awfully tempting…
We’ll also likely see an effort here to replace the state with an “independent” charter authorization board that can circumvent local opposition. Charter advocates have already begun calling for something like this because they are frustrated by the ability of a Brockton, for example, to fight off the for-profit charter that has tried to set up shop there year after year.
I don’t recall hearing about charters until I was an adult, possibly high school. My town doesn’t have them, though I’m not sure if they get funded just by the town in which they are located or if its more regionalized.
To 3: At least some school systems do, in fact, temporarily put ESL students in a separate track, until their language skills are adequate. In the one case I have personal knowledge of, this involved busing across town to a different school, lasted for one school year, and was very successful.
To 3a: It might be better for ESL students to go to a charter, but only if the charter delivered specialized services that the main school system didn’t. Where’s the incentive for them to do that?
To 5: Does what community members want have any effect on the makeup of charter school boards? From what I can see, the only outside entity that has a say in who gets on a board is the Commissioner of Education, and that seems to be in the form of approving nominations submitted by the board. Apparently, the Commissioner is not mandated to require community members on the board.
Thanks for your responses. This is precisely the sort of debate we should be having publicly. While you might not mind that Walmart $$ is funding the effort to expand charters in Massachusetts, shouldn’t people be aware that all of the money is coming from a single place with a very particular agenda? The ESL issue is huge–and is going to have a major impact on the political future of Boston–and yet it is never acknowledged by charter advocates. A growing contingent of charter supporters now admit that these schools are not for all kids, nor should they be, but are for the “strivers.” So let’s have that argument. Let’s also talk about whether the demographics of our teaching force is important. Let’s have an honest, wide-ranging, full-throated debate…
But as I said, insufficient in and of itself as a reason to oppose what they support, for whatever reason. “I’m against it because they’re for it” is you current Congressional GOP, who find it impossible to take yes for an answer.
I know private foundations get involved in all kinds of endeavors, but why is a large retailer pushing so hard on the charter issue? May be ad hominem (ad corporationem?) but a certain suspicion of Walmart’s intentions seems reasonable.
Let’s stipulate that the research on effects and outcomes is a wash right now. But we still have facts on the ground: laws that reward and punish schools based on test results; differences in student population such as the ESL and SPEd; funding mechanisms that don’t take into account the fixed costs of running established schools.
With these facts, the “tracking” effect that in (3) you agree charter trends promote is emerging in an environment that will explicitly punish the most unsupported, unprepared, and disabled students. These facts cannot be adjusted as quickly as the charter cap can be lifted. I.e., you can’t be neutral on the charter cap right now based on the research or based on the possibility that a two-tier system might, under different conditions, work. In the current system, the proliferation of charters will harm the most vulnerable students.
you discount the fact that Charters discount a large majority of those who attend them, tossing out huge swaths of students every year.
It’s awful easy to make something look like it’s a winner when you discount all its losing.
The federal special education law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (as well the Americans with Disabilities Act) is premised on the idea that separate is not equal. It mandates that students with disabilities should be educated in the “least restrictive environment,” which basically means they should be educated with their non-disabled peers to the greatest extent possible. In that context, it’s hard for me to see how charters are not violating the letter and spirit of the law, by discouraging families of students with disabilities from applying in the first place, denying them services (as described by one online commenter to Scot’s op-ed, ProudIrvingMom), or counseling them out.
ProudIrvingMom described her nephew’s treatment at the Brook Charter:
Incredibly, Scot Lehigh’s response to ProudIrvingMom was this: “I really can’t comment on individual cases, but Brook students do tremendously well on the MCAS. Really off the charts. So they obviously are getting great results.”
Well, Scot, as more and more parents and researchers are learning, a significant reason for these “off the charts” MCAS scores is the exclusion of students whose scores are not off the charts. For more on this see the National Education Policy Center’s new commentary: The Dirty Dozen: How Charter Schools Influence Student Enrollment.
Here’s an excerpt:
Walmart has been in forefront of many a right-wing issue and not a single progressive issue in its existence. It’s about the same as saying “The Heritage Foundation supports this.”
If this issue goes to the ballot, as charter advocates have hinted will be the case if they don’t get the result they want from the legislature, we can look forward to the individual members of the Walton family chipping in. During the recent, hotly-contested debate over allowing charters in Washington state, Alice Walton generously donated $1 million of her own money. The Waltons have indicated that eliminating the charter cap in Massachusetts is a major priority for them and that they’re willing to spend a lot of Walmart dough to see that happen.
Are the Waltons planning to get into the charter school business? Time was that business leaders were among the strongest advocates for high quality education.
basically mixing philanthropy with education policy. They give you a lot of money if you’ll buy their ideology. It’s not enough to do well by helping you do good, you have to do good as they see it. Walmart is one of the biggest anti-union businesses in America; charter schools are seen as a way to break the back of teacher unions.
We are better off in Massachusetts than in some states where the education policy of entire cities–Camden, for example–is given over to people like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. These people think they are smarter than the rest of us and they have the money to prove it.
…that makes them non-union? Seems to me that teachers in charter schools can and should join the union to which public school teachers in their respective communities belong.
Try running that by a charter school “CEO” and then ask him about his hiring plans for the following summer.
Public school teachers are unionized and don’t get fired for organizing, so why should charter teachers? If the “public” aspect of charters is to mean anything the teachers need protections exactly equal to their traditional public counterparts.
And I don’t mean that as simply a slam–translated into ed reform language, it’s at the core of their movement. The freedom to hire and to “innovate” (make changes that alter work conditions and hours) is their raison d’etre and it requires freedom from established union protections.
I think innovation, flexibility, and experimentation are good, but I think we can do it in the context of public education, or at least with the same respect for the rights of the teachers. I think unions would often go along if they are respected, worked with rather than against. Back to my point about the Waltons. If they are not running schools themselves why should they care about those unions? Unionized teachers per se don’t affect working conditions at Walmart one bit.
I think you’re underestimating how much of their core values — and their funders’ goals — charter operators would be violating in such a collaboration. What the union movement won in the 20th century was more than protections, but a form of collaborative management incorporating the collective wisdom and values of workers into the very structure of the workplace and its operations. The careful, democratic process of making this a reality fits with stable public institutions, but goes against the culture of ed reformers, who see themselves as “entrepreneurs” able to bring about dramatic, transformative change in very short periods.
The best charter operators bring their faculties in on decision-making processes, but even they would not want faculty power codified, especially since the greatest sources of funding out there now prohibit it. The Waltons, e.g., in their philanthropy as well as their business, are committed to breaking labor’s back. Unions don’t exist in a vacuum–they are governed by the same web of labor laws, and big-picture funders and strategists on both the left and right tend to see labor power in a holistic way. Seeing a teacher’s union sidelined absolutely affects how lawmakers will respond to a labor conflict in the Walmarts in their state.
but I’ll try to summarize it in a sentence: the Waltons think unions are a scourge and they think that they are right in this belief. Their form of charity is to spread their ideas.
Another reason it’s hard to organize charter schools is that their employee turnover is very high. Unionizing is difficult and takes time. In my experience, people who teach at them tend to look for better jobs in public schools after gaining experience.
Popular program in Framingham. Half the kids are native Spanish speakers and half native English speakers. Instruction is given in both languages starting in kindergarten. Goal is for all students to be bilingual. Haven’t looked at recent data, but earlier data showed these kids generally outperforming school averages, for those who believe standardized tests measure achievement. I believe Cambridge has 2-way bilingual ed too. Wonderful idea.
I’ve never quite understood what the ban on bilingual ed passed by voters in 2002 actually did. Are two-way bilingual programs OK but teaching kids in native language was banned?