Waivers, turnarounds and other examples of Obama’s “reforminess”
The Obama administration, acting while Congress was still dragging its feet on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, has offered states an opportunity to be granted waivers from some of the more oppressive aspects of the current No Child Left Behind law. The tradeoffs for receiving a waiver include adopting college- and career-ready standards, developing teacher and principal evaluation systems using a variety of measures (including but not limited to student test scores), and “rigorous” programs to turn around the lowest-performing schools. This last is a bit redundant, as states receiving School Improvement Grants have had to adopt the “turnaround” strategies demanded in Race to the Top (RTTT):
- Transformation model: Replace the principal, strengthen staffing, implement a research-based instructional program, provide extended learning time, and implement new governance and flexibility.
- Turnaround model: Replace the principal and rehire no more than 50 percent of the school staff, implement a research-based instructional program, provide extended learning time, and implement a new governance structure.
- Restart model: Convert or close and reopen the school under the management of an effective charter operator, charter management organization, or education management organization.
- School closure model: Close the school and enroll students who attended it in other, higher-performing schools in the district. (A Blueprint for Reform, U.S. Department of Education)
The waiver language on evaluations is perceived by many to be code for using student test scores in teacher evaluations via value-added methodology (VAM), or some euphemism for VAM like Academic Growth over Time being unilaterally enacted in Los Angeles.
It is not unfair to suggest that the Obama waiver process is just a back-door effort to impose RTTT reform efforts onto the states, but this time without the attendant funding. It is clear from the administration’s rhetoric, both in the Blueprint and elsewhere, that they continue to perceive charter schools as the sine qua non reform for low school achievement. This in the face of research indicating otherwise. For example, charter school achievement was examined by one research group at the conservative, pro-charter Hoover Institution, CREDO, which did a massive study on charters and found only one in five outperformed regular public schools, while two in five did worse, and the remainder were no different than local public schools.
It can, in fact, be demonstrated that all of the reform and school turnaround strategies advocated by the federal Department of Education are contradicted by research. To explain this phenomenon let’s talk about the proposals in the context of Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness.” Truthiness is a “truth” based on gut feelings without regard for evidence, logic, or facts. In that sense, the “reforms” can be seen as one of many examples of educational “reforminess.”
Diane Ravitch began the deconstruction of reforminess with her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Ravitch was present for the “big bang” of recent “school reform,” traceable back to A Nation at Risk, when she was part of the conservative think tank cabal. Their “truths” were based on fantasies of market-based concepts of competition and choice, with pragmatic programs including test-based accountability, charter schools, and vouchers. Much of this became the basis for NCLB and the unholy alliance of neo-liberal and conservative school reform efforts: that is to say, reforminess.
Ravitch’s epiphany came at a think tank meeting when, one after another, the testing gurus, the charter school proponents, and the voucher propagandists stood up to report on a decade’s worth of “progress.” But there wasn’t any. Ravitch realized that the fundamentals of neo-liberal/conservative reform were reforminess – based on gut feelings and intuition, and with no basis in evidence, logic, or facts. She examined the empirical research and all the beliefs were found wanting. Ravitch concluded that reforminess was not just resulting in little to no improved achievement; it was actually narrowing, damaging, and corrupting public education.
Enter the Obama administration, which inexplicably appointed Arne Duncan, with experience in neo-liberal private sector foundations but not a day as a teacher or school administrator, as Secretary of Education. He comes up with Race to the Top. If the fundamentals of NCLB were utter failures then the only solution was to double down with even more draconian reforminess: “turnaround” proposals including, but not limited to, shutting down schools, dismissing teachers and principals, turning public school management over to private sector charter operators – all based on his gut, but absolutely no empirical research.
It goes without saying that the other cornerstone of Duncan’s reforminess, teacher evaluations using student test scores, has been relentlessly debunked by education experts. The National Research Council asserts that we have no research base to support using student scores to evaluate teachers and, if we did, we still shouldn’t do it because of negative effects on instruction.
Obviously, the main objective of reforminess is to draw attention away from the real illness ailing public education today: severe underfunding and extreme levels of childhood poverty. The billionaires continue to buy their education “reforms” through well-paid talking heads like recycled state legislators and failed school superintendents. That’s much cheaper for them than the actual solution: restoring fair tax rates on the wealthy to fund education for all.
Reforminess, with all due respect to Stephen Colbert, is no laughing matter.
Gary Ravani taught middle school for more than 30 years in Petaluma. He served for 19 years as president of the Petaluma Federation of Teachers, is currently president of the California Federation of Teachers’ Early Childhood/K-12 Council, and is a vice president of the CFT. He chairs the CFT’s Education Issues Committee.
Gary – Not sure what you mean by “billionaires continue to buy their education ‘reforms.’” Taxpayers spend over $500 billion on education in America every year. Every penny of “billionaire” philanthropy ever spent is under $10 billion. Unions have total control over what the legislature and many local school boards do. Nobody or any corporation comes close to spending more money in politics than teacher unions do. Our schools and the laws governing them reflect union priorities with a few small exceptions (e.g. parent trigger).
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Arne Duncan and the rest of us need to go back and read CFT’s “Trouble in the Hen House,” a story designed to give California’s elementary schoolchildren an unbiased look into the wonderful world of unions. It’s about some oppressed hens that rise up against their evil farmer. Here’s a gem:
Henrietta (the hen): Farmer Brown, we have something to say. This is what we chickens want:
1. More and better food. No mold, no sand in our corn.
2. Freedom to walk around outside and a bigger hen house.
3. Each hen will lay an average of four eggs a week.
4. Stop punishing us. Let Hortensia come back.
Farmer: No way! Who ever heard of chickens telling the farmer what to do? Shut up and get back to the henhouse!
Chickens: No, Farmer Brown, not this time! And besides those things, you have to recognize our union, Hens United, or we’ll all stop laying eggs!
Farmer: OK, OK, if I have no eggs to sell, I’ll go bankrupt. We’d all starve, so I guess I’ll have to do what you say. Since you’re all together, what can I do?
Chickens: We won! We stuck together and we won! Si, Se puede.
Yaaaay!! Everyone can read and buy these stories for your kids and many others at CFT’s website: http://www.cft.org/index.php/committees/309-committee-curricula.html
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In relation to the CREDO reports, the picture is considerably more mixed than Gary Ravani portrays. CREDO studies of charter schools are available for free download at http://credo.stanford.edu/
From the various CREDO reports:
For NYC http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/NYC%202009%20_CREDO.pdf
“Overall the results found that the typical student in a New York City charter school learns more than their virtual counterparts in their feeder pool in reading and mathematics….
“The results also show that in New York City Black and Hispanic students enrolled in charter schools do significantly better in reading and math compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools.” page 2.
From http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/MULTIPLE_CHOICE_CREDO.pdf
“Charter students in elementary and middle school grades have significantly higher rates of learning than their peers in traditional public schools, but students in charter high schools and charter multi‐level schools have significantly worse results.” page 12.
For California:
http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/CA_CHARTER%20SCHOOL%20REPORT_CREDO_2009.pdf
“…students in poverty enrolled in charter schools do significantly better in both reading and math compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools.” page 6.
For Colorado:
http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/CO_CHARTER%20SCHOOL%20REPORT_CREDO_2009.pdf
“The results suggest that new charter school students do significantly better than their counterparts in traditional public schools in both reading and math. In subsequent years, the impact is variable over this period, with charter school students experiencing no further gain in reading but continued gains in math from charter school attendance compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools.”
I could go on and on since there are a lot of reports and there is enough in each report for the charter advocate or opponent to claim support for their case. In general, charters in and of themselves are not a cure all. Some charters do significantly better than others and some student demographic groups do significantly better in some charters than others. KIPP and Rocketship are just two (there are others) that do much better than others at raising student achievement.
The key then is to find which ones do better, find out why, and use the methods of successful ones and replicate those schools. That is the whole point of charter schools – to try new things and see what works.
What would that look like? It might look like New Orleans where 71% of the students are in charter schools and the district(while still at the bottom of the heap in Louisiana) have shown remarkable progress going from 32% proficient in 4th grade math to 52%. Not great but a whole lot better – and both these scores are after Katrina so the population is the same. That 71% in charters has grown from 56% as people vote with their feet to leave the regular public schools for the charter schools which are almost all KIPP. http://educationnext.org/new-schools-in-new-orleans/
For those who talk about some charter officials getting in legal trouble, the New Orleans PS Board President was jailed for bribery further discrediting the regular public schools. Whenever money and power are involved, there are going to be people breaking the rules including those in public employ. You can search on “indicted superintendents” as I did and find numerous superintendents of regular school districts around the country who embezzled or extorted bribes. Illicit activity by those in power in schools doesn’t discredit the idea of those schools, be they traditional or charter.
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… The key then is to find which ones do better, find out why, and use the methods of successful ones and replicate those schools. That is the whole point of charter schools – to try new things and see what works. …
Although the charter sector obstructs efforts to do that.
For example: To learn that KIPP schools (some? all? I don’t know that, because that information is not discussed) require applicants to take a test during the enrollment process, I had to start the application process undercover with my own daughter, as KIPP had never acknowledged that its schools require applicants to take a test during the enrollment process. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with requiring applicants to take a test,* but clearly it’s likely to have an impact on the caliber of students who enroll in KIPP schools. The issue of high attrition at KIPP schools is similarly denied or obfuscated. The same goes for other successful charter schools, such as San Jose’s Downtown College Prep.
It seems absolutely critical to learn how the peer effect impacts at-risk students — if they’re educated in classrooms without low-functioning, oppositional “intentional non-learners,” is that the key, or to what EXTENT is it a factor in success?
When a KIPP school requires students to “nod to show that they’re listening,” is that effective in and of itself, or is the benefit that defiant students who would respond “hell, no” to that directive are absent from the school?
Someone will undoubtedly respond quickly to dispute that KIPP tests applicants or that its attrition is higher than public schools’ **. And in Joanne Jacobs’ book about Downtown College Prep, she specifically said the school removes students for low academic achievement, and then denied that that was what she had said when I commented on it (I believe on this forum).
And that’s exactly my point.
The fact that charter insiders and supporters obfuscate, deny and dispute these realities show us that “see(ing) what works” is not their point at all. That may have been the point originally, but it was discarded in the need to win over private funders with claims of miracles, and a “fake it till you make it” atmosphere.
*The KIPP test: It’s not a test that the student has to pass to get into the school. It’s a test to determine the student’s grade level, given before the “lottery” (I put lottery in quotes because the KIPP school we applied for is underenrolled, so the supposed lottery doesn’t actually exist). The obvious impact of the test, however, is to eliminate non-compliant students who would refuse to cooperate; students and families who aren’t interested or motivated enough to go to the trouble; students who just plain fear testing; students and families who believe it IS a test that must be passed to get into the school and who don’t expect success; and students and families who aren’t willing to risk being held back one or more grades based on the test results.
**KIPP attrition: The usual response is that it’s no higher than public schools’ attrition and that low-income students move often. But the facts are that the numbers show KIPP schools do not replace the students who leave, and that studies have shown that it’s the low-performing students who leave, so KIPP schools wind up with a much-smaller cohort with the higher-performing students remaining after the lower-performing students have left.
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The key then is to find which ones do better, find out why, and use the methods of successful ones and replicate those schools. That is the whole point of charter schools – to try new things and see what works.
I submit, though, that to the extent KIPP in particular works, it may not work for ALL children. And that’s something that needs to be acknowledged – that there’s value in variety in school culture and school curricula. KIPP would not be what I would choose for my family – but I have no problem with other people choosing it.
This is part of our problem: the assumption that if only every school were perfect and exactly the same, that every single American child would be proficient. That if you transplanted all the children from Worst Performing High School – regardless of home environment, of experiences 0-5, of genetics, of medical history – and moved them to Best Performing High School, that all those kids would be proficient.
Seems simple enough to try, eh? Some of the schools aren’t even that far apart geographically.
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CarolineSF and “el” completely ignore the fact that 71% of NOPS students attend a KIPP school (up from 56% a few years ago). That 71% (and growing) in itself belies the accusation of selectivity and whether that self-selected group of charter applicants represents more than a tiny minority. But why speculate? See for yourself. Open up SF, Oakland, and SJ to any charter school from a select list of groups with proven records of success like KIPP or Rocketship and see if SF, SJ, and Oakland would have 71% of their students selecting a charter school.
Caroline and “el” are claiming that the charter success depends on cream skimming and that the positive results don’t go beyond a self-selected few. Yet all their remarks on this board and others are to the effect that charter schools should be very limited which makes it a self -fulfilling prophecy. So open it all up and see what happens. And while you’re at it, explain why 71% of NOPS students are going to KIPP schools and showing dramatically positive improvement, albeit from a very low base.
And please tell me why you are opposed to letting students vote with their feet where they want to go. It is a public school system, and they are the public. Who are *you* to tell them they have to stay in the school *you* choose for them. I really don’t understand the mentality that makes *you* the all-powerful decider of which form of PUBLIC school (charter or not) I or anyone else wants to put their child.
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My apologies to “el”. I mistakenly lumped “el”s comments in with CarolineSF.
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I didn’t actually “claim” all that stuff, MichaelG. You’re putting a whole lot of words into my mouth that I didn’t say (out of a little defensiveness, perhaps?).
What I’m saying is that there is clearly selectivity going on, and yet the charter sector and its supporters vigorously and heatedly deny it. But if charters are supposed to be models that public schools can learn from, we need to acknowledge and look closely at the effects of selectivity.
The fact that the charter sector and its supporters have steadily (and absurdly) denied the obvious, in disputing that the selectivity exists, shows that they have no intention of being a model that public schools can learn from. So that’s what I’m rebutting.
I am not versed on what’s going on in New Orleans, but I’m friends with a deeply involved parent activist there who says that New Orleans parents are overwhelmingly unhappy and view the charter invasion there as an assault on their schools. Nobody asks parents, of course — the press and the think-tank sector just carry on with their gushing.
I’m not sure if you’re trying to say that Oakland and San Francisco don’t have KIPP schools. Oakland has one, which has THE most eye-popping attrition of any KIPP school anywhere — the 8th-grade classes are practically empty, and African-American boys especially get pushed out the door at a furious rate. SF has two KIPPs, which have decent test scores but aren’t particularly popular and have to scrounge for applicants. Their attrition is pretty high too, and the city’s public middle schools are the steady recipients of their pushouts. So, no, we don’t have 71% of our students selecting them, or even enough to fill the two KIPPs. They have to do aggressive recruiting.
Regarding Rocketship, my view would be to let other districts test their model and then let them in once it has been THOROUGHLY proven. SFUSD has already had the fiasco from hell with the “it’s a miracle!” charter fad of its day, Edison Schools, and after that we are prudent enough not to rush to embrace the next “it’s a miracle!” charter fad.
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Michael just ignores reality.
Yes, the charters skim, select better students, and have poor records of admitting RSP and Special needs children. But lets not let a few pesky details get in the way of the truth. Which is?
By admitting only students who have parental support at home and at school, highly motivated students, and students without behavior issues or other, the charters named above portray a false sense of accomplishment.
He also fails to mention that some of the Rockets may be slowing down, or their engines need slight adjustment as some of their scores dropped this year. Signs of things to come? Me thinks yes, as the sample size increases the issues facing society, and public schools in genral come to the surface and begin to mirror society and all it’s ills- extreme family dysfunction and poverty.
No razzmatazz or hocus pocus will cover that up, or as one accomplished charter school principle stated, you are “just re-arranging chairs on the titanic.”
Charter schools do some things well, as do parochial schools, home shcools, online schools, private and public schools. Let’s embrace those positive attributes instead all always holding the charters schools up to be some false demi-god.
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CarolineSF – how is it mathematically possible that 71% of NOPS students have chosen charters yet New Orleans parents are (your word) “overwhelmingly” (that would be more than 50%, right?) against them? Is this some sort of new math where 29% (max) = “overwhelmingly”?
In fact,
“A poll in late autumn 2010 by Tulane University’s Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives found that 60 percent of New Orleans residents opposed returning the schools to OPSB.” ( http://educationnext.org/new-schools-in-new-orleans/ ). That would be 60% of residents but 71% of students. You need to address that 71% number because it alone refutes all your claims. 71% in a 90% black school system. Caroline – deal with that 71% instead of talking in unsupported and unreferenced generalities not subject to verification.
From the same report:
“…students with special needs were being turned away from schools and those with disciplinary problems were being expelled to keep performance scores high, critics insinuated. The argument lost some of its political punch when 2009–10 enrollment figures revealed that the schools overseen by the OPSB, not the RSD, have the lowest proportion of special needs and behaviorally challenged students.”
So Caroline’s and Elvis’s assertions seem not to play out, in New Orleans, at least. But Elvis offers no proof of his assertions of cream skimming so we are left to guess whether those assertions come from any data he cares to mention.
If the state cap on charters were removed, and school admins and unions stopped getting in the way of charters we might find out if it would be 71% or 7% choosing charters outside in California. New Orleans may very well be a special case. In DC charters are also growing as people vote with their feet but maybe that is also an exception. So remove all the restrictions other than that of academic achievement and see what happens. As it is, the teachers unions and administrators have put so many restrictions on Charter growth that it is not a fair contest.
As for Special Needs kids, lets be clear which kids we are talking about. It is not the severely autistic, brain damaged, or Down’s syndrome children. Those are all in a very intensely supervised special ed class room and comprise on the order of less than 1% of the kids in a typical school. Most teachers outside of the few special ed teachers never even see them, much less have to teach them. Those kids would not benefit from a charter school because in a sense they are already in a special school, sharing a few of the facilities of the regular schools. The special needs kids Elvis is referring to are also not the wheel-chair bound or those with severe sight or hearing impairment since they are not a problem for teachers. What “special needs” refers to is the ADD kids who drive a lot of teachers crazy because teachers have inadequate training and guidance on how to deal with those kids. The prospect of having a class room full of them because everyone else has fled to a charter school is too scary for most teachers to contemplate. Those are about 5% of the kids and their needs should be addressed and charters should be open to them but forcing everyone else to be in failing schools to avoid the prospect (likely unwarranted) of not having non-ADD kids around is unfair to the 95% who are not suffering from ADD. I know some kids with ADD and they are generally very nice kids who will soon outgrow much of their impulse-restraint issues. And look again above in this posting to see that in fact that it is the N.O. charters which have a disproportionate number of special needs and behavior problems, not the regular schools.
Elvis and Caroline need to explain why there is a need for restrictions on charters other than those relating to academic achievement – which in general I support.
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My understanding is that many New Orleans families have the choice of a KIPP school or traveling to a faraway non-KIPP school. Those who can’t manage to get into or stay in a KIPP school HAVE to travel. But again, I’m speaking without being highly informed on New Orleans and just passing on, in general, what I’m hearing from an active member of the New Orleans parent community.
I see the “it’s a miracle!” claims. I’ve heard previous “it’s a miracle!” claims from the same voices that proved false. Sorry to be such a cynic, but to me, nobody gets THAT clean a slate. If they were full of it last time, I’m likely to be skeptical this time. I guess I admire those of you who are starry-eyed and trusting every time. It’s very sweet.
I don’t have the bandwidth today to respond to a barrage of questions out of the blue about my opinions on every aspect of charter schools, @MichaelG. My specific comments were in response to this demonstrably false assertion: “That is the whole point of charter schools – to try new things and see what works.”
Again: In reality, the charter sector and its supporters obfuscate and aggressively deny the clear facts about selectivity, self-selection, attrition and pushouts.
If the whole point of charter schools were “to see what works,” charter advocates would be putting those things in the spotlight and studying them instead of denying them and covering them up.
Another fact is that here in San Francisco, we have a number of charter school options available, and there’s only one that you can’t walk into and get a spot in at any time (Gateway HS, for the record) — though others are known to turn away undesirable applicants, so it’s true that those applicants are the exception. So the notion that more charters are needed is not borne out by reality.
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Glad to see I have been able to generate some discussion.
It is interesting that only the reference to charter schools sparks some controversy. No one seems to disagree that the remaining Duncan “turnaround’ strategies mainly turn around the hubris of conservative and neo-liberal “reform” strategies uninformed by research.
I actually have no objection to charter schools, only the assertion that they represent some “silver bullet’” solution to schools in struggling communities.
Since I actually wrote the bulk of the article some weeks ago I don’t have the documentation readily at hand; and, the article was already pushing the limits of appropriate length.
I agree that one of the late AFT President Al Shanker’s formative ideas about charter schools was that they were to be laboratories for experimentation. Shanker, of course, looking at how charters were being rolled out repudiated his support. Be careful what you wish for.
I believe UCLA did a study on charters and their “experimental” character and found that, typically, they were more like regular schools than regular schools. To the extent KIPP represents an “experimental” model it is to require a kind of regimentation, from both students and teachers, that verges on the militaristic. There are those (Jerry Brown included) who feel that model is the only one that works with children living in poverty. I question the ethics of that assumption. I don’t think it’s a model that would be tolerated by most middle-class parents.
Then there is the issue of the “success” of many charter schools. Most that I know of (KIPP, Aspire, Harlem Children’s Zone) get donations from foundations that number into the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is not a strategy that can be scaled up. I am also not sure the foundation support would continue if the regular public school system, and the need for taxes to support it, were somehow diminished.
And then you have issues around charters driving increased segregation, failure to provide services to special education students, and requiring “support” from parents that is not readily available to parents who lack financial means. The LA Times has documented the special ed issue in the LA area as well as the very high teacher turnover at charters.
As I stated, I have no particular argument with many charter schools. I helped write a charter once in order to protect the collective bargaining rights of teachers who wanted to create a school focused on the arts and get out from under a district demanding a more and more prescriptive curriculum. My organization represents charter school teachers and more and more of them are requesting representation to deal with private sector management who demonstrate little respect for teachers, or for real education for that matter. Charters that open with the idea of creating Montessori or Waldorf programs, with child centered rather than test centered curriculums, are worthy of exploring.
Thanks for all of your comments.
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Michael G, your acronym-speak makes it very hard to follow your comments. Most of us in California are not going to mentally jump to NOPS == New Orleans Public Schools.
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@Gary, I remember reading the four turnaround options in the original RTTT specs, and not only wondering about research, but wondering about the situation already on the ground. Conceivably we could be requiring the replacement of a principal when the principal had just been replaced, for example. And I was never sure exactly what “strengthen staffing” meant.
There’s an assumption that either no one has made any effort in the school in question, or that it has failed and is out of ideas and hasn’t tried anything new. If your new idea was to dramatically increase resources or change the approach in K-2, for example, it would be a few years before that cohort even got to testing.
I suspect most school districts would like to increase instructional time. It’s not funded. Why isn’t merely increasing instructional time with one’s existing staff one of the choices? (And funded?)
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I can’t remember the case to look it up, but I recall at least one instance of a story reported where a principal that was well respected by everyone and fairly new to the job had to be fired to implement one of the first two options. Everyone who was on the ground seemed to feel it was sad, but all (including the fired principal) agreed that it was the best option for the school to access whatever RTTT money was going to come to it. IIRC, they swapped the principal into another school.
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Data, data, data….
One can always find the numbers one wants to support their position.
The two largest studies done, sadly, have found no difference in scores between charters and public schools.
It is very easy just to point to outliers and proclaim superiority, but those who have a basic level of understanding of statistics can see through the smokescreen.
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1. Mr Ravani, I don’t agree with most of what you claim but there was too much to argue with so I focussed on the mis-use of the CREDO report. If you are going to use CREDO reports you should do better than Ravitch who claimed it refuted any value to charter schools when in fact the CREDO data is considerably more complex and the authors say so. I wanted to drive a nail in the use of CREDO as support for the charter opponents.
As for the idea of donations from foundations etc., that is just seed money to overcome the obstacles put in the way of charters by district administrations. A good example of such difficulties are in this NY Times article detailing the financial roadblocks put in front of charter schools by administrations:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/education/mount-vernon-district-vs-charter-school.html?pagewanted=1&hpw
2. Elvis just doesn’t believe in using data to support his arguments. He says above:
“Yes, the charters skim, select better students, and have poor records of admitting RSP and Special needs children.”
…but offers nothing at all to support this. Nothing whatever. And then says anyone who is conversant with statistics can see through whatever. So where are your statistics? Elvis says data can always be cherry picked to support any view and I guess that relieves him and everyone else of the necessity for providing any data to support any argument at all.
CarolineSF has a friend in New Orleans who knows that all data and polls I provide aren’t really true but offers nothing other than that so I guess we should just believe her unnamed friend over University polls, LA state test improvement, and 71% of families voting with their feet. Elvis supports his views with something he read a while ago but can’t bother to look up so I guess we just have to believe him for some reason or other.
So we are left with “proof by assertion”: ’It’s true because I said so.’ This level of discourse is not helping the credibility of the anti-charter movement.
I am not claiming that charters are in and of themselves superior and never said so. But charters need to be given adequate opportunities to prove themselves and parents need to be given adequate opportunities to choose for themselves. This is not currently the case in CA where there many roadblocks are put in front of charter formation by local interests who do not wish to put themselves to the test of competition.
One roadblock is the state limit on charters. The other roadblock is lack of class-room space. This is where charter opponents reveal an anti-choice position by claiming that the space is needed for non-charter students and thereby make it virtually impossible for charters to get off the ground. If a charter takes in 2 class rooms worth of students they should have two class rooms available in a public school and equal use of the facilities like gyms and libraries on a pro-rata basis.
3. Lack of money: There is always a lack of money and always will be because no matter how much is voted for by the taxpayers, it will always go to hire more teachers for lower class sizes which accomplish nothing at all *for the kids* beyond 3rd grade. Lowering class size is for *the adults* since it does require more class rooms, more school bonds for building contractors to get rich from and more administrators to provide jobs for those who are tired of teaching and want to double or triple their salaries as coordinator of something-or-other. The NYT article cited above mentions the per-student funding in the working class city of Mt. Vernon, NY at over $16K. This over 2X the CA average and unimaginable for most schools in CA yet Mt. Vernon says they are short of funds. Cupertino Union SD, 17,000+ students, does quite well with less than half that and still manages to pay it’s superintendent nearly $300K. So Mr. Ravani’s idea of raising more money to provide something or other won’t really accomplish those goals he cites – it will go to contractors and admin and more teachers without any effect.
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Let me clarify. I have a friend in New Orleans who is an intensely involved parent advocate, the center of a network of New Orleans parents. She and her fellow parents are deeply unhappy with the new landscape in New Orleans schools, and they devote endless hours to working to combat the harm that they believe the charter sector is wreaking on their community. I’m not versed enough to discuss this in detail, but I’m sharing that general information. Blustering that I don’t have the right to speak if I can’t back everything I say up with data isn’t a good-faith response.
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If you want school choice, you have to be willing to fund classrooms with some empty space to facilitate moving kids around. It’s like doing one of those puzzles where there’s only one free block, otherwise. If every classroom is running at its maximum capacity – which is the most economically efficient – then you can’t accept new students.
Whether or not lower class size is *necessary* for students to learn in the upper grades, to suggest that there’s no benefit from it is silly. Even top private universities boast of their small class sizes and high staff to student ratio as an advantage. I would also say that the more uniform and and motivated the kids are, the larger class sizes can be without being obviously detrimental. (Of course, there’s still the problem of the simple throughput of one teacher grading 60 10 page papers for each of 5 classes.)
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Since we’re inexplicably talking about New Orleans…
This article shows maps pointing out how public school locations have changed from pre to post Katrina, as well as noting which are charter and not.
http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/friday-afternoon-maps-new-orleans-race-school-locations/
One might argue that because there exist so many “schools of choice” throughout the city, that geographic location doesn’t really matter. Ya’ just got to travel a bit. Sign up for one of those great schools over there! But research has consistently shown that even in “choice’ models geographic location/proximity is central to enrollment decisions. Location matters. And having quality options nearby is important. In fact, parents will often favor location over publicly available “quality” measures, continuing enrollment in schools identified as persistently failing if/when other options are simply not geographically accessible. Then again, those “quality” measures aren’t always particularly meaningful.
The information seems to suggest that you can’t assume that parents are choosing charters because of educational success without teasing out how many are just choosing the closest school which happens to be a charter.
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El – New Orleans Public Schools (NOPS) were brought up to counter the assertion that the only reason some charter schools succeed is because they take the easy-to-educate kids and that therefore charters are not scalable beyond a few per cent of the school population. NOPS shows that that is not, in fact, the case.
Your argument for geographic locality might have merit if we didn’t have the fact that charters have grown from 56% (when geography may not have mattered as much because there was a roughly equal distribution of schools) to 71%. In addition we have the poll showing 60% of residents approve of the change. Which of course means 40% don’t and 29% of kids are not in public schools so presumably there are a number parents who to one degree or other don’t like charter school. So we needn’t speculate about whether the support is only locality, we have the poll and we have the growth.
As for the maps shown at your link, I counted the numbers of schools and while there is some decline post-Katrina, that is mostly in densely populated areas where some consolidation might have made sense anyway. I can’t see any loss of local options either regular or charter. I blew up a Google map to the same size and found no difference in availability of either option within a 1 mile radius, a distance easily walkable by any school child. I invite you to do the same and indicate where there is a loss of choice. New Orleans is a much smaller city geographically than its fame would imply and there is no loss of walkability if you look closely.
As for money and class size, it needs to be proven. Class size has been investigated very little and there has been no proof that smaller class sizes matters beyond the 3rd grade. Obviously you need some size limits but what are those limits? Tell me with proof and I’ll be willing to advocate for more money as long as you cap the % going to admin and cap superintendents salary. Clearly you need some level of funding but what is that level of funding? If you listen to most unions is s just “more”. Tell me how much – I want a number – and prove it.
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@CorolineSF: “Blustering that I don’t have the right to speak if I can’t back everything I say up with data isn’t a good-faith response.”
Michael G never argued that you have no right to speak. He simply (and correctly) pointed out that you run your argument at the level of ’It’s true because I said so’ and in conflict with hard data he provided. He also pointed out that this level of discourse is not helpful. If you consider that blustering, or taking away your right to speak, well … perhaps some extra reading might be in order.
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Here’s another analysis of New Orleans achievement data.
http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2011/10/12/new-orleans-rsd-the-miracle-district/
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Michael is clearly not looking very hard for data that counters his opinions.
1) “The push to create more charters has been questioned in light of research showing no advantage – or even a negative effect – for students attending charter schools.” Such research includes a much-publicized study a year ago from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) Stanford University
2) “This analysis of US mathematics achievement finds that, after accounting for the fact that private schools serve more advantaged populations, public schools perform remarkably well, often outscoring private and charter schools.” NAEP Mathematics Data
3) “After two decades of experience, most charter schools in the Twin Cities still underperform comparable traditional public schools and intensify racial and economic segregation in the Twin Cities schools.” This is the conclusion of a new report issued today by the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School.
4) Locally,at the Santa Clara County Board of Education Bullis Charter school was found to have 1% EL’s and 3% Special Needs students out of 435 students. 2 Board members voted against renewing their charter for this type of selectivity.
So, please do not make me do your homework!
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“G”:
“Seed money”….Right. The Harlem Children’s Zone, made famous by the “Superman” commercial and that oversees number of charters, has a $200 million dollar endowment. A lot of seeds that.
I think it’s time to move on. There will be another article to think about is a few weeks.
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@Elvis,
teacher unions. Specifically, their fully funded Great Lake Center Education “Research” center.
Speaking of “homework,” perhaps you could do yours a bit better next time.
Your item (1) — the CREDO study — does NOT say that charters show “no advantage — or even a negative effect.” It shows that charters show no advantage when one includes even first year transfers. Once those are excluded the picture changes. The longer they stay in charters, the better they look. Basically the opposite of a typical public school. Micheal G. mentioned the need to carefully read what CREDO study actually says. It’s not enough to copy your homework from what someone else says about it.
Your item (2) — is sponsored and paid for by your friendly (sometimes
Item (3) is a better one, but you should read the report rather than rely on reading the Cliff notes. It focuses mostly on the “racial segregation” that, it argues, charters in Twin Cities only intensify. If you follow such discussions you ought to know charters are in a Catch 22 situation in that regard in inner cities. If they draw mostly from the disadvantaged population, they will be charged with increasing racial segregation by the likes of Ed Trust and the Institute on Race and Poverty (at UMN, at UCLA, wherever). If they allow disproportionate enrollment of non-targeted population (read: white) they will be accused of cherry picking by Gary Ravani and Caroline Grannan. Regarding achievement the report is much more careful and it explicitly admits the serious limitation their achievement data offers. With those caveats, it does find a small disadvantage to charters in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
Finally to your homework item (4). Bullis is one school of … how many charters in Santa Clara? In California? How many times we ought to repeat that the plural of anecdote is not “data”? This is true in the case of Bullis as much as in case of Grannan’s friend in Louisiana.
Bottom line — homework incomplete. Please read the source works, not the Cliff notes.
But the true bottom line is different. Schools fail all the time — both charter and non charter public schools. Do you know what you call a charter school that persistently fails? A CLOSED charter school. Do you know what you call a public school that persistently fails? Compton Unified. Los Angeles Unified. DC Public Schools. Detroit Public Schools. …
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CarolineSF – Can you explain to me what the is point of the article you cite? Reading http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2011/10/12/new-orleans-rsd-the-miracle-district/ I find that the gist of what they are saying is that charter schools in New Orleans have achieved dramatic improvement from a low base (which BTW, I mentioned earlier). I gather that because of the low base the dramatic %-age improvement is nothing to brag about and anyone could have done it. Which inevitably raises the question why the regular public schools didn’t accomplish this improvement? It also raises the question of what *would* have been something to brag about – dramatic improvement from a *high* base?? Certainly that would be impressive but why would anyone bother to offer alternative charter schools if students are already doing well? The point of charters (for me, at least) is to break the cycle of poverty by raising the level of those doing most poorly. This article you cite makes no sense to me at all but it seems to prove something to you and some others so perhaps you can explain it.
Moreover, your article goes on, New Orleans Public Schools (NOPS) are still the lowest ranked (50th out of 50) in Louisiana (LA). (Which, BTW, I mentioned when I cited my article). I’m not sure, but I think this is meant to imply that therefore the charter schools have not done anything worthwhile. So not only is dramatic improvement not an accomplishment but to be an accomplishment they must raise the the level above that of other districts for an even more dramatic improvement. And what if they do – say NOPS goes from 50th to 49th as they seem on track to do? Will we have to dismiss that result because it is from a low base or we will have to disregard that result because there are still 48 districts above it? Or both? I can’t tell what the author would consider vindication of charter schools in New Orleans?
CarolineSF, please elucidate – just tell us what you would consider justification for the charter schools in New Orleans since they accept from a broad range of students (71%) , have a greater proportion of behavior problem and special needs kids than the regular public schools, and have posted dramatic improvement in state test scores (that non-charter public schools were not able to accomplish). What. Would. It. Take?? I eagerly await your answer.
Elvis – As I pointed out in my own quotes (which BTW had links and page numbers, unlike *some* I could mention) the many CREDO articles have something in there for anyone. My point is that pulling a _Ravitch_ by using a single quote or country (like Finland) is invalid as a proof of a blanket statement and ultimately deceptive. I don’t think you or Gary Ravani, or CarolineSF are purposely trying to deceive, you are simply following the example of Ravitch who clearly IS trying to deceive (unless she is simply stupid, which I very much doubt).
My point (which must be *really* hard to grasp, I guess) is that for *some* students (mostly the poor) *some* charter schools (like KIPP, Greendot, and Rocketship), are a valid alternative and if allowed to operate without the massive impediments put in their way would flourish and raise the achievement of the most vulnerable.
I have no objection to the Waldorf, or Montessori models that Mr. Ravani favors (not for MY kids, thank-you-very-much but hey, go to town on your own holistic, experiential, child-centered charters) – as long as he favors removal of restrictions on the “no excuses” hyper schools like KIPP. I actually agree fully with Mr. Ravani, that these hyper-school charters are not appealing to the middle class and college educated because their kids *already* do their homework and have lots of after school homework help. I fully agree with Gov. Brown that poor kids benefit from these hyper schools – which have no gimmicks other than “quit fooling around and do your homework”. Mostly what I favor is letting the parents choose with their feet what is appropriate to *their* *own* kids. Odd, I know, but there you are.
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I’m not claiming to be versed in the New Orleans situation — rather the opposite. I gave anecdotal information that there’s a strong parent movement opposing the charter takeover of NOLA schools, without claiming that it was any more than anecdotal information; and I added an analysis that counters the claim that New Orleans is a miracle success story under the privatization/charterization regime.
, but go fight with someone else about New Orleans.
@MichaelG, I see you’re dancing around me fuming, “Wanna fight? wanna fight? Come on, fight!” I’m not going to get into it about New Orleans. I can take anyone who tries to deny the attrition/skimming situation with one hand tied behind my back
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And by the way, ever since the days when now-failed Edison Schools was the reformy miracle-fad-of-the-moment, my attitude has been: You say “miracle,” I say BS. Funny how “miracle” Inglewood — long hailed by the reformy types as justification for heaping scorn on anyone who connects poverty with low achievement — just showed up in this very column as a failure. I’m sorry for that grimy, sad, depressed city that its miracle has fallen apart. But please, ever-gullible reformy types — will you EVER gain an ounce of old-fashioned common sense?
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In previous comments I made the mistake of relying on memory. In fact, the charter experiment in New Orleans has resulted in the school district going from 70th out of 70 (not 50 out of 50) to 69th out of 70. I regret the errors.
CarolineSF, I was simply curious as to what it would take for you to admit the value of some charter schools for some students and by not answering it you have answered it. The article *you* cited about New Orleans Public Schools lists a variety of accomplishments of the N.O. charter experiment but dismisses them as all worthless for no reason I can see. It makes no sense at all to me and you seem unwilling to comment on it.
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I do admit the value of charter schools for some students, @MichaelG. I think that it benefits many students to be in student populations that don’t include the most challenged kids. I just think it’s likely that any school could have similar success if it also excluded the most challenged kids and reaped the bounteous resources that the successful charters get (along with all that acclaim from the press, political leaders, etc.). Instead, charters get the bounty and the praise while the public schools that accept the challenged students are bashed, vilified and starved of resources. It’s the dishonesty and denial about all that from the charter sector and its boosters that I brought up in this thread to begin with.
But it’s only my speculation that public schools could be as successful. My issue is that this needs to be examined and studied, which is impossible when the selectivity and attrition are downplayed, denied and disputed.
I’m not taking ownership of the New Orleans debate, period. I’m just pointing out that all the gushing flies in the face (yuck, what an image) of what actual New Orleans parents are saying.
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And, to be clear, one reason I’m not even getting into New Orleans is that I’ve heard far too many lies from and on behalf of the charter sector over the many, many years I’ve been following education reform to believe any claims about miraculous success, period. I don’t have it in me to be that credulous and trusting.
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