While I respect any teacher or institution that educates our children well, I am not the biggest fan of charter schools and the so-called “parental choice movement.” A lot of research and preliminary tests show that many charters just aren’t that good (some are, but again, so are some public schools), though parents often overestimate how good charters are for their kids. Forming a parallel (yet still “public”) education system seems like reinventing the wheel, discarding all the infrastructure, funding and thought put into the current system. The idea that a public system should cater to specific parents’ desires even though it is funded by taxpayers who may or may not have children also seems questionable, blurring the distinction between public and private benefits. I also fear that having schools who select largely based on a lottery sets up many kids to be rejected and always relegated to a bad education. Finally, we need to ask ourselves, “do we want to use our school system to track students rather than to promote an equal opportunity for them to approach the world?”
Worse, some charters are considered good because they invest an inordinate amount of resources, and the assumption is that this is scalable. As a recent New York Times article on the connections between poverty and educational outcomes notes:
"Another rationale for denial is to note that some schools, like the Knowledge Is Power Program charter schools, have managed to “beat the odds.” If some schools can succeed, the argument goes, then it is reasonable to expect all schools to. But close scrutiny of charter school performance has shown that many of the success stories have been limited to particular grades or subjects and may be attributable to substantial outside financing or extraordinarily long working hours on the part of teachers. The evidence does not support the view that the few success stories can be scaled up to address the needs of large populations of disadvantaged students."
Now, DC has the idea of shutting down charters that are failing relatively quickly as a remedy to bad charters. In this way, its charters do slightly better than public schools (which is not exactly an accomplishment in the nation’s worst-performing system). Think about anytime that you or your kids moved or switched jobs because the company went belly-up (not because you chose to do so): it is a stressful experience; it could be highly detrimental to the child’s learning and emotional well-being (or at least distract them with adjusting to a new setting instead of focusing on learning); it disrupts social bonds that emerge among students that facilitate interpersonal skills; and, it undermines parental connection to any given school and may negatively affect the school’s performance or the parent’s involvement in the child’s education. What this says to me: we will give up on failing charters just like we gave up on failing regular public schools. If this didn’t work for public schools in the first place, why would it work for charters?
In the end, you have to ask why we would invest public money in another parallel education system that often does just as well or worse than the system it purports to fix.
The Shadow Network
We have invested money, time, energy, thought, political capital, administration, policies, personnel, and infrastructure in developing a public school system. Charters are fixing the system by not fixing the system into which we have funneled so many resources, but rather by duplicating all that effort. Is a new system necessary? If the answer is yes, might we not recoup some of the losses from what is already in place? If some charters are good, why can't we identify those best practices and use them in all schools?
The only answers that I can think of are the supposed problem of intransigent teachers' unions and the issue of rigid or inept school and system administrators. The supposed problem of unions is that they keep inept teachers in the public system and are averse to any kind of change. Having just visited one of the most dynamic teachers I've ever had--a union member--I find it hard to believe that teachers' unions are so averse to change that a new system that excludes them is needed. I went from welfare to Stanford with unionized teachers (who even went on strike one year), so the public system can work and unions can't be that problematic. There are certainly unions that are inept and mismanaged, sometimes with the worst teachers rising highest. That said, union push-back against replacing more experienced (and thus expensive) teachers every time their is a budget shortfall is a good thing. Protecting innovative teachers is a good thing.
As for school administration, that is universally viewed as a problem. When Michelle Rhee became chancellor of the DC system (the nation's worst), she found a bureaucracy so poorly managed that supplies and books were sitting in warehouses rather than classrooms. Corruption and nepotism were the norm. Regardless of your opinion of Rhee's policies regarding charters and unions (a recent report found that 15 DC charters were ranked at the bottom of the pack, compared to 5 at the top) the amount of change that she managed to achieve in the bureaucracy of the DC education machine was impressive after decades of failure and stagnation. Rhee demonstrated that change was possible within the system even as she aggressively promoted charters:. As my dear friend, who was a teacher in a charter, noted, the administration was still incompetent and she was constantly stressed until the point where she left. In that case, and in many charters, this new system did not resolve these administrational issues.
Public, but still “Mine, Mine. Mine!”
There are public and private schools for a reason, and no school will exactly fit the educational needs or desires of a given student or parent. It is incredibly unrealistic to expect this of public schools. The goal is to ensure that all of society is prepared to enter the workforce, to contribute. The idea that parental choice should exist for a public service is also questionable. The goals for a public system are to serve a societal good, not a private good. In some ways, then, it is society's benefit, not that of a particular parent or student, that is important.
The other irony in all this is that many parents cannot or chose not to be all that involved in their child's education. Vigorously promoting parental choice for a population that is not willing or able to make that choice seems weird. Given that poorer parents often (but not always, my mom was an exception) are working more and can't take the time to choose beyond their neighborhood school, it seems to me that the real goal should be to ensure that all schools provide a decent baseline.
The way parental choice works is that charters--which are assumed to be good schools--attract more and more demand. This causes public schools to close. The system is then only made of a good, charter schools. We have already seen that the myth of these schools being good is ridiculous, but we also will see that the amount of demand for these schools that still choose based on a lottery is not being met by supply. Further, we have to ask ourselves if it is acceptable for some students to get out of a sinking ship while others wait for it to be squeezed out of existence to get their shot (if it comes in time).
I Guess Some Kids Just Don’t Deserve a Good Education
According to the CREDO study mentioned earlier, while 1.4 million kids attend charters, 365,000 were on a waiting list to get into one. How is this mismatch between supply and demand decided? Usually, a student enters into a lottery and their future is chosen at random, by chance. Do we really want to play mad scientist with kid’s futures? A bad teacher or school can have detrimental effects on a student for the rest of their academic career and life, so should we not aim to provide a decent public education system to all kids, not just those that “win the lottery?”
What I suspect will happen is that parents who are most dedicated or able to invest in their children's education will do so and will be more likely to get their kids into the best schools (public, magnet, charter, wherever). The charter system, which largely depends on empowered parents who are invested enough to push for their child to go to a different school, will not best serve the children without parents, with bad parents, or with parents who are overworked or uninformed. Further, because charters have so much demand, they don't have the incentive to widely broadcast so that parents can realize there is this other option. In my case, I got into a magnet school because my mom found out through dumb luck that they were offering a test and she happened to be off that day. I might not be writing this blog if I were put up to a lottery!
There are some great charters, but they are often enabled by overworking teachers or by using private funding (why not just pay taxes or donate to schools, private donors?). Further, the idea that good performance should yield more funding is scary: if your child is at an underperforming school, they will likely see fewer resources. Perverse, no? A good friend of mine, who also has trouble with this, noted that schools with poor administration should not be rewarded with funding. I want to agree, but ultimately, you are punishing the students for the failures of the administrators. I like a lot of the changes that charters enable, but I also find it troubling to move toward a system with less accountability, fewer results, less supported teachers, and random choice of who succeed with a greater focus on testing...I would rather think of ways to make our system work than reinventing the wheel in a way that is just not working.
While I am not the biggest fan of charters, I am a big fan of all schools providing decent education to children. For this reason, I would rather see public schools better supported than charters defunded. I would like for all schools to have the same accountability. I would like to see more parents being given the information and ability to better participate in their child's education (or if they refuse, I'd like to see them compelled to participate).
Speak out!
- What do you think is good about charters? What could be improved?
- What obstacles do you see to implementing reforms in public schools? Does a charter resolve these issues? Is it the best way to resolve them?
Act on it!
- Support your local public schools and join their Parent Teacher Organization or Local School Council.
- Volunteer (either to help teachers or administrators or to directly help students. Check out my blog post on one way to do this!).
- Donate supplies to classrooms (a great site is http://www.donorschoose.org/), or go to your local school and ask what they need. Don't think in a limited way, as schools have music and art departments or gym classes that can benefit from donations that are not paper and pencils. Heck, maybe you are handy and your school needs repairs.
- Ask a teacher you know what they need (a friend who lived in my sophomore dorm has often asked for book requests for his 9th grade English classroom on facebook, so look out and help out!).
- Help a parent you know (especially a struggling one) to learn about opportunities for their kids to test into good schools early on!
- Stay vigilant and demand good schools of your local and national politicians for ALL children.
No comments:
Post a Comment