Teachers, the New Piñata

A lot of "reforms" center on teacher quality as the critical factor in fixing our education system.  While I think teacher quality is important, I have argued on this blog that teacher quality and success are two different things.   Great teachers may not have the same connection and success with an entirely different class, and thus their success will vary across years.  I have also noted that I don’t think teacher quality is the largest part of why education in America is failing.  That said, it is important, and if we don’t start sending a message that teachers are respected, we risk losing the good ones we have and not being able to replace them.

The Problem

According to nearly every reformist’s model, you would think teachers are the problem with education.  If we just had better teachers, our kids would be fine.  You listen to them and hear about “the evil teacher unions” who favor bad teachers at the expense of children, you hear about the impossibility of firing bad teachers, you hear praise for programs that put 22 year olds with no real qualifications in the classroom, you see teachers being graded publicly for the results of their students’ test scores on one day and having their employment status and pay hanging in the balance.  Does this sound like a desirable job to you?  Yet so many great teachers go in day after day with low pay and decreasing job security. 

To illustrate this differently, imagine you were a foreman on the Ford assembly line.   Imagine that your right to unionize for a safe workplace and reasonable hours was being threatened.  Imagine that far cheaper kids in vocational school were starting to replace other foremen in your plant.  Imagine that your pay was determined by how well your team built cars on one arbitrary day of the year (and imagine that one team mate just got divorced and another’s dad just died and think how productive they might be).  Imagine that your boss did not want you to focus on quality or to innovate, but wanted you to focus on only a few bare-bones basics that were beneath your standards as someone with 25 years experience making quality cars.  That’s what it must feel like to be a teacher.

In summary, teachers are:

n      Unprotected:  Increasingly, teachers unions have come under attack as protecting bad teachers at the expense of student learning.  There are surely corrupt unions and bad teachers, and both are bad things.  That said, this idea that groups that protect teachers are simply unjustifiable is unwarranted.  In Texas, for example, a very powerful conservative group would sit in the back of classrooms and see if a teacher taught anything “controversial.”  Teachers do need protection from arbitrary firing.  Further, they are employed by the government, which means they can be used as a political football.  Given that the ultimate source of power is the government, a union serves to check that power.  Worse, in an era of increased firings and a new evaluation system every year that has real consequences, teachers deserve to have informed representation.  Many great teachers that I know (union affiliated) made the point that it is not in a union’s interest to keep bad teachers: it makes it harder to win gains for all teachers when you harbor a lot of bad teachers and it demoralizes really stellar teachers who may not want to be part of such a union.

n      Losing Job Stability: Because they are paid with taxpayer dollars and almost every level of government is struggling with debt, teachers are at the front-line of those job cuts.  Further, when you look at school leaders making headlines, many have fired teachers immediately upon getting a poor rating on a new evaluation system based largely on tests (Michelle Rhee fired 4% of DC’s teacher force in July 2010, Providence, RI, Mayor Tavares fires nearly 2,000 employees in February 2011, etc.).  Worse, a new trend in closing ineffective schools has teachers fearful that they may not even have a position from year to year, even if they are a great teacher in a bad school.

n      Paid or fired based on things out of their control:  The argument for using tests to judge teachers is that they teach a student, so if a student cannot perform well on a test, it must be the teacher’s fault.  That said, there are so many complications, including the weather and how a student is feeling or how well a student takes tests (not to mention whether the test contains worthwhile knowledge in the first place).  Nevertheless, that one high-stakes day can be used to determine the bulk of a teacher’s rating, their pay, and increasingly their employment status.

n      Denied creativity:  By basing scores on tests, many teachers feel like they run a test-prep program and are increasingly forced to waste time on practice tests and test-taking techniques rather than imparting knowledge or concepts.  Some districts (NYC, San Diego) suffered through the micromanagement of Anthony Alvarado who developed an exact reading curriculum that every teacher had to follow, down to having kids identify what kind of reading they were doing when they read a sentence (it had a mixed effect on scores at certain levels, and it did introduce a system of peer coaches for teachers that would have been good if they were encouraging all-around good teaching, not enforcing a model).  Many teachers have begun to question if they should remain teaching in a system that prioritizes teaching students what to think over how to think.

n      Paid poorly for a tough job: You are likely pretty highly-educated.  You have to work a full day, then go home and grade papers and plan lessons (and any good teacher will tell you that takes longer than delivering the lesson).  You may have to reach out to parents, attend school events, and supervise an extracurricular activity.  On top of that, you have to be accountable for the success of 30 students (some of whom are going through puberty) who change every year and may not be compatible learners to your style of teaching.  Then you have to be accountable to some 60 parents, and the local school board, and your principle, and the board of education.  Then you take home a whopping $40k ($45k if you have a Masters, maybe).  The majority of early childhood educators are not even clearing the poverty line.

n      Denied respect:  A special education teacher who was recently rated as “bad” in New York City (and publicly so at that) based on his special education student’s test scores not matching other students wrote a really hard hitting Op-Ed on the experience.  He notes that by virtue of teaching kids, everything he does from how he dresses to how he teaches is immediately critiqued by his students.  Worse, programs like Teach for America send the signal that any blind ape can teach.  We’re just going to throw these college grads into the worse environments after training for six weeks at a summer camp and let them figure out how to teach for two years before they go to business school.  Sending the message that you are easily replaceable and that your profession is merely a means to an end is a great way to increase people’s job satisfaction, right?  Sadly no: a recent survey of teachers found that in the last couple of years, teacher satisfaction dropped substantially (15 percentage points fewer teachers now feel very satisfied with their job) while the number of teachers that will likely leave the profession nearly doubled to 1/3 of all teachers!

n      Suffering from the pressure: As teachers are forced to pay the price for student outcomes on high-stakes tests or as they are expected to maintain high performance even as class sizes increase or budgets get slashed, it creates a high-stress environment that sets the teacher up for failure, an inability to give personal attention, and very little sleep. As the aforementioned Special-Ed teacher noted, his teaching became secondary to implementing the rather arbitrary requirements of his administrator (who controls his employment).  It isn’t an environment that supports good teaching.  It is an environment that punishes falling short of perfection.

The Implications

These are not all the problems, but even these few have some really devastating implications:

n      High turnover: As more teachers become too stressed, are fired because of a bad testing day, lose faith in the system, or are replaced by Teach for America members that largely leave after 2 years, more money is wasted finding and teaching new teachers.

n      Lost benefits of experience:  A teacher does not continue to become amazing after two to three years of teaching, but if experienced teachers feel unrecognized and leave and the new crops of teachers last (or are expected to teach) only two years, they leave right as they are getting their sea legs.  It is widely known that teachers gain the most in teaching quality in their first two or three years.  That means you have a perpetual crop of teachers stumbling to find their way that leave right as they get good and students are much less likely to benefit from a teacher who is excellent.

n      Lower-level thinking:  If your child’s teacher is teaching to a test (or as is often the case how to take a test), how much is your child learning?  Is it important that your son or daughter select the least bad summary of the topic in a poorly written essay?  That they can calculate the angles of a triangle in 45 seconds?  Some parents and many employers would like a well-rounded student that is able to work in groups, think through problems critically, and be well-rounded.  Very few of life’s problems or workplace tasks come with multiple-choice answers.

n      Exposure to fewer topics:  What is tested is what gets funded and taught, so if your child is not going to grow up to be a calculator, a dictionary or a test designer, they are severely disadvantaged by the push to have teachers teach to the test.

n      Greater inequality:  As the lowest performing students are subject to the whim of random reforms, teachers under fire, and school closures, they suffer from the problems they bring to school and a lack of stability and coherent instruction in the classroom. If they are getting a worse experience, they are more likely to perform poorly, become disengaged, and drop out.  My guess is that this is contributing to the widening inequality we see in our society.

n      Destruction of community:  When school closure based on testing or “poor teaching” is exercised, students lose the bonds they have formed with their peers, their teachers, and their community.  

Act on it!

n      Monitor your child’s homework and see what is being taught.  If you notice that the work is not very enriching and is more test-oriented, speak with the teacher.  If instructions come from higher, speak to the principal or go to a local school council meeting.

n      Don’t fixate on your child’s test scores.  If they do poorly, find out what concepts they find challenging and work with them.  If they are a bad test-taker, they may very well respond to a far different style of teaching and learning.  Worse, you are unnecessarily stressing them in a way that doesn’t encourage improvement.  Tests should extend learning, and these tests don’t.

n      Attend town hall meetings when school administrators want to close schools, punish teachers on untried evaluation systems, or fixate only on test scores.

n      Write to your member of Congress to repeal No Child Left Behind and to reign in Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan’s arbitrary use of discretionary authority to implement similar reforms.

People with the education level of many teachers can take their talents elsewhere.  If we make the profession appear so undesirable, those who might do really well and impact a whole new generation of kids will decide it is not worth it.  I already watched a friend who is amazing with kids, highly educated and organized, and a trained teacher leave the profession because it was too stressful and she was not supported.  I know scores of Teach for America alums who taught two or three years, were probably pretty great by the end, but who have now left the profession.  This doesn't fix our system, and it is unfair to our kids.

 

Speak out!

Tell me about a really great or bad teacher you had.  What made them good or bad?

Reverse Robin Hood: Poor Districts Pay More, Get Less

Sometimes there are some really egregious local issues that deserve national attention.  This one comes from Pennsylvania, and I hope some of you will take some action.  There is a convenient narrative that poor districts pay less in taxes, so their schools get less funding.  There is another narrative that per pupil spending on education is too high.  Both can be true, but neither is the whole story.  In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the story is quite different (Montgomery is right outside Philly, where the author of "If I were a poor black kid" that inspired this post was writing).  According to an article in the Pottsdam Mercury, low income districts are absorbing some of the largest budget cuts. 

The Problem

The article discusses a recent report released by the Education Law Center (ELC) that advocates for low-income students in PA.  The report has analyzed funding, which was cut to the tune of $1.5 billion since 2008.  According to their analysis "school districts with a low income population and high property tax rate, like Pottstown, have absorbed up to 10 times more of the $1.5 billion in cuts to state education funding than wealthier districts."  Worse, more cuts are slated and the most recent budget proposal calls for them to hit districts like Pottstown.  

The ELC analyzed Montgomery because the county is home to some of the best and worst in the state. Half of the ten districts with the smallest cuts and "all but one of the districts faring the best under Corbett’s budget are located in southeast Pennsylvania and read like a who’s who of wealthy locales." Not surprisingly, these districts also are among the lowest in student poverty concentrations in PA. 

Why It Matters

What is interesting about this policy is that districts have many low-income students, but some very high property tax rates.  An argument that I hear a lot, "It is not fair for the wealthy to subsidize students in schools their kids can't use," thus doesn't apply here.  Even if you buy into this argument and it applies, these allocations serve to entrench systemic inequalities:

• Low income parents have fewer resources to provide educational opportunities and programing for their kids after school, which leads to decay of previous learning and less overall time spent learning (in and out of school). 
• Low income parents tend to work more hours, be more likely to be single parents, and have less time to allocate to their children's education (as say to putting food on the table or trying to get a table) 
• Low income families tend to have fewer ties to the education system and the benefits of education, thus reducing resources to their schools can send very negative signals.  If you already doubt the value of school and see that your schools are not well funded or effective, then you are more likely to feel like your beliefs have been reaffirmed. 
• Lower budgets cut the amount of time that schools can offer programming and the amount/types of alternative programs they can offer.  That means that poor children are exposed to fewer things, are less likely to find topics that engage them, and are more likely to be routed into an unfilfilling career or track. 

Are these guaranteed outcomes? Absolutely not.  All the same, we should be very concerned as a nation when some of our most disadvantaged students are forced to face even more barriers to success than those that poverty and societal scorn already place upon them.   This is not an argument for higher per pupil expenditures. This is an argument about being fair in how difficult cuts need to be made.  This is an argument for allocating resources and talent in ways that maximize the outcomes at a systemic level.  You can't deny that investing more in students whose parents already provide a lot of support for education and extracurricular programming is somewhat wasteful in a budget-scarce environment.

Act on it!
 

• Write Governor Corbett and ask him to justify and reconsider this regressive policy
• Email: Governor@pa.gov
• Call: 717-787-2500
• Submit an Inquiry Online: http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=1072219&parentname=ObjMgr&parentid=11&mode=2.
•  Contact the PA representatives who might change the coming budget:
• Senate Education Committee: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/cteeInfo/cteeInfo.cfm?cde=23&body=S
• Senate Finance Committee: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/cteeInfo/cteeInfo.cfm?cde=25&body=S
• Montgomery County's General Assembly Members: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/findyourlegislator/county_list.cfm?CNTYLIST=MONTGOMERY 
• Write your local school board or legislator or mayor/governor and inquire about how funding is distributed and how they make cuts when they face budgetary scarcity.  I guarantee this is not isolated to Montgomery County, PA. 

Speak Out!

• Post some ideas for letters you might write to these officials to ensure more equitable funding for schools. 
• Have you seen this in other areas in the US? Call them out!  

Should Teachers Be Paid for Performance?

Paying teachers for performance should be a great idea, right?  In the corporate world, paying based on merit seems a great way to incentivize someone to do a better job.  For some reason, however, most teachers are against so-called “merit pay.”  I have to say, I was very surprised by this reaction.  My thoughts were similar to many critics, “Well, if you are doing a great job, you should have no worries and should welcome the recognition of your work.  So, it seems like the worst teachers would be the biggest critics, not being able to perform or having to work harder.”  I started to realize that a lot of teachers were quite against merit pay.  Not only that, but unions, who traditionally fight hard for increases in teacher pay, were also against it.  In this post, I hope to identify the arguments for and against merit pay to better understand whether it is a way to improve student achievement and teacher retention, among other things.

The Arguments for Merit Pay

Teachers are often severely underpaid and underappreciated, and the position is not attractive to people with large student debt.  There are some very compelling reasons why merit pay could strengthen public education:

1. After Michelle Rhee implemented bonuses for teachers being rated “highly effective” for two years or more, one such highly effective teacher who was considering leaving the District to teach elsewhere decided to stay. 
2. Paying good teachers more should make the profession more attractive to more highly educated individuals.
3. The private sector has, for years, used merit pay to improve efficiency and allow people to advance for performance rather than simply for working a long time or taking shallow credentialing.
4. Merit pay can be adjusted to reflect the goals we want to elicit out of the system: you can design the weight that standardized tests have in determining performance; what kinds of training or activities are deemed best practices, etc.
5. The way teachers are currently rewarded (premiums for having an advanced degree) has not been shown to correlate with gains in student achievement.
6. Being paid for performance has the potential to encourage teachers to be more creative in how they teach, trying to improve outcomes to earn these incentives.

The Arguments against Merit Pay

While rewarding and retaining quality teachers seem like pretty strong arguments, I have to give pause to some of the incredibly strong arguments against merit pay:

1. What if merit pay doesn’t work? According to a Harvard study of a New York City merit pay program, merit pay did not affect teacher behaviors, student achievement (in the areas measured: English and Math tests) actually declined, and made only negligible improvements in other measures like student attendance, behavioral problems, graduation exam scores, and graduation rates.  Fryer, the economist who conducted the study and was initially supportive of merit pay, noted that the literature was mixed on the effects in other countries, but that NYC’s $75 million investment was not worth it.  Research on performance pay continues to show that it does not work, not even for CEOs in the private sector.
2. How do you measure merit? In a letter to the editor of St. Louis Today, it was noted that measuring merit is usually largely determined by test scores.  As I noted in my post on standardized testing, this is not a measure of real learning or of good teaching, but of shallow learning and uninspired teaching.  The more test scores are used to determine pay, the more we are incentivizing mediocre instruction.  
3. Is merit consistent across all teachers? The St. Louis Today letter also noted that just because a dermatologist performs better than an oncologist in terms of number of deaths, you would still not want the dermatologist to treat every illness.  Likewise, a kindergarten and Junior Math teacher need two very different skill sets in terms of subject matter expertise and classroom management skills. 
4. Are the student’s entering competency and personal challenges accounted for? Just as it is more likely for someone treating cancer to have more patients die than a podiatrist, it is more likely for a teacher in a poor district to have lower test scores because students enter with lower test scores.  It is unreasonable to expect a teacher in a rich, suburban district to end up at the same place as someone from a poor, urban or rural district.
5. Are teachers (good or bad) offered the assistance needed to improve? The Washington teachers’ union criticized merit pay (the IMPACT program) in DC because it is used more as a stick (to fire bad teachers or simply offer a cash bonus to teachers who do well) rather than to provide tools to facilitate a teacher’s improvement.
6. Do teachers want merit pay? According to a survey of American Federation of Teachers members, there is limited support for merit pay based on improvements in portfolios of students’ work, but virtually no support for merit pay based on test scores.  Teachers were far more inclined to think that experience or taking on additional responsibilities are better reasons to extend a bonus to a teacher.
7. Is it redundant? Studies show that more experience tends to make teachers more effective in the first five years of teaching, so wouldn’t the natural increase in teacher’s salary for tenure that is in place already reward improved performance? Further, most teachers I know aren’t really in it for the money, so there is the question of whether it would elicit more performance or dedication from someone who took such a grueling job that pays so little in the first place.
8. Is bad teaching is the root of all problems in the American education system? As I noted in my post on some rather bombastic solutions for how poor kids can help themselves succeed, there are many problems that go beyond the ability of a good teacher.
9. Does merit pay serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy?  Psychology shows us that people respond more to positive feedback than to extrinsic rewards, and this article in the Washington Post raises good concerns about whether merit pay undermines the intrinsic value teachers have for their craft and if the pressures of constant focus on testing improving might make a good teacher perform worse.

Different Ways of Structuring Merit Pay

To be honest, I was surprised in writing this post to have my opinion changed so fully.  Merit pay seems like a brilliant way to infuse the system with new creativity, to get rid of those bad apples, and to reward actual work.  That said, the most salient point for me was that it simply hasn’t worked all that much, even in the private sector.

That said, I think teachers who do have a proven track record do deserve recognition.  I would urge that some of the following points be considered in structuring merit pay programs:

1.     Merit pay should be designed on improvement during the time the teacher is with the student. It is unfair to say “your students still read below grade level” if they entered two or three grade-levels below average in the first place. 

2.     As a corollary, teachers should be rewarded for taking on the most challenging classrooms, as that is where gains really need to be made.  If you just base merit pay on testing, teachers are incentivized to work in the classrooms where kids already start at or above level, which effectively entrenches or worsens the problem of teaching quality in the most struggle student populations.

3.     Merit pay should compare apples to apples.  Comparing an art teacher to a math teacher or a 1^st and 11^th grade teacher is not fair, as the positions require different skills to be successful.

4.     Merit pay should not be informed greatly by standardized tests.  We already have seen the deleterious effects of tests in my last post, and to reward teachers for producing bubble-filling automatons that have not learned any significant skills is an awful idea.

5.     Merit pay should be linked to programs to help teachers improve and work together.  An interesting model was one that rewarded a whole school’s teachers for improved performance, thus creating a sense of teamwork to improve all kids’ education.  Nobody thinks bad teachers should be in the classroom, but if the system offers only back-handed financial rewards and creates competition, it is not creating a healthy environment for students.  Further, students spending 6-8 years in a school will need all their teachers, not some of them, to be good, so creating whole schools with great teaching is key.

6.     Merit pay can include experience for the first five years to incentivize teaching retention, but this factor should lose weight after 5 years, as most studies agree that there are no benefits to experience after that point.  

7.     Merit pay should not be viewed as a panacea, as teachers—particularly in the poorest environments—are not going to be able to overcome the gaps in basic needs like proper nourishment and parental support that many kids bring to the classroom.

Speak out!

What are your thoughts on merit pay? Do you have an experience with merit pay (in teaching or elsewhere) you can share? In your opinion, what are the limits of merit pay?

What ideas do you have for how to structure merit pay in an effective manner for teachers so that quality teaching is rewarded and students are given access to the best quality teachers possible?

Charter to Nowhere?

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?”

Is Your Charter Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?

Sadly, many charters are not that good. According to the most comprehensive study comparing the performance of charter and traditional public school students (Stanford, CREDO, July 2009), only 17% of charter schools students perform better than comparable students in traditional public schools. In 37% of charters students do worse than their public school, and in about half students show no significant difference. English language learners and those in poverty do slightly better in charters, but Blacks and Hispanics do significantly worse. While the results vary depending on when a kid enters the charter, the charter's location, the race and economic stratus of the child, and other factors, this is quite disturbing for what is being hailed as the future of our education system.

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!

1. What do you think is good about charters? What could be improved?
2. 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! As if on cue, he started a new campaign, so I hope people will support my friend Tyler's classroom by going to https://npo.networkforgood.org/Donate/Donate.aspx?npoSubscriptionId=1002090&code=support+page+button and putting a note that you want to contribute to the "BHAG Book Fund," through which he encourages and enables his kids to read).
• 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.