Charter Schools are Great -- But Not Why You Think

The recent celebration of National Charter Schools Week is as good a time as any to make an observation that's been rattling around in my mind for a while in search of a home, or lacking that, a blog post. Which is: charter schools are a boon to public education, but not for the reasons often advertised.

The original rationale for charter schools had several dimensions. First, they would create competition among public schools and thus replicate the competitive dynamics of the marketplace in a controlled environment of public accountability. This would have a positive effect on regular public schools, which would be spurred to improve in an effort to hold on to market share. Second, charter schools would create fertile ground for innovation and customization, giving people a chance to try new approaches and parents the ability to choose a school environment that best fits their child's particular needs.

The jury is still very much out on the "competitive response" benefits of charters schools. There may be some, but there are still a lot public school systems losing students to charter schools every year that remain poorly run. And most charter school are, fundamentally, operated in the same basic manner as regular schools. There are differences, but of degree, not kind.  

For example, last year I spent some time volunteering at a charter elementary school near the Columbia Heights Metro stop here in DC. It had classrooms, teachers, colorful pictures on the wall -- all the things you'd expect. It used an "expeditionary learning" approach to teaching that's employed by charters but also plenty of regular schools. If you were teleported into the lobby and didn't know it was a charter, you wouldn't know it was a charter. 

Yet the school has to hold a lottery every year to determine which students can enroll, since their are many more applicants than slots (By law, DC charters can't pick their students). Most of the applicants came from low-income and minority families, but there were also more well-off parents from the gentrifying neighborhoods nearby. All of this stemmed from the vision of the school's founder and principal, a smart, tireless, dedicated educator who also happens to have an MBA from Yale. 

And there's the difference. Before charters, there was simply no way she would have been able to open and run a public school the way she wanted to. She would have had to find something else to do with her talent and time. Charters allow organizations and individuals other than the government to run public schools. The primary benefit of this doesn't come from creating public schools that are different, but public schools that are better. 

Charter schools allowed Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin to create the burgeoning and phenomenally successful KIPP network of middle schools serving almost exclusively poor, minority, and previously low-achieving children. Charter schools allowed veteran labor organizer Steve Barr to create Green Dot Public Schools as an alternative to the terrible high schools in Los Angeles. Charter schools gave a couple of young management consultants the ability to create the nation's first, and very successful, urban public boarding school in impoverished Southeast DC. And so on. 

Given the opportunity, the best charter schools (and to be clear, there are certainly bad ones) haven't tried to reinvent the wheel. They've just balanced the wheel, fine-tuned it, reinforced the parts that were weak, and made sure it was in maximum working order. Charter school laws opened a conduit for talent, energy, and philanthropic money directed toward public education, resources that previously had no way to break into a bureaucratized monopoly state school system. Even if that's all they did, that's way more than enough. 

Vote Your Conscience

Next week I'm going to be appearing at a "Blogger Summit" sponsored by ED in '08. There's a best blog poll. You know what to do.

More Teachers See Unions as "Absolutely Essential"

In recent decades, America has experienced a steady de-unionization of the private sector workforce. This is a real problem, particularly in an era of declining economic security and increasing inequality (problems that partially stem from de-unionization itself). The public sector, by contrast, has pretty much maintained a steady level of unionization, in part because governments don't go out of business and most municipal and education jobs can't be shipped overseas.

Teachers unions represent a substantial percentage of the unionized public workforce. They're politically powerful and seen by some as an impediment to needed school reform (I myself fall into that camp from time to time). Unlike some people, I don't think teachers unions are a bad thing per se. Teachers have a right to organize, period, and schools work best when teachers have a strong voice and role in the educational process. But I wish I agreed with teachers union policy choices more often than I do.

I suspect there's a hope among some union antagonists that teachers unions will fade in power and importance over time, much as their private sector counterparts have. That hope is often based on a generational theory of change: as the teachers who remember or participated in the initial struggle for unionization retire in large numbers in the next few years, they'll be replaced by a younger generation that grew up in a more de-unionized society, people who don't see teaching as a 30-year career leading to a comfortable retirement and will thus be less supportive of what unions have to offer.

According to a new survey of teachers published this week by Education Sector, these hopes are unfounded. From 2003 to 2007, the percentage of teachers who see teachers unions and associations as "Absolutely Essential" increased from 46% to 54%, a statistically significant change. And the change among teachers with less than five years of experience was even more striking: 30% to 51%.

Interestingly, this is despite the fact that most teacher are quite open to reforms of traditional labor arrangements that many teachers unions fail to actively support at best, and oppose at worst. For example:

• 55% agreed that the process for removing teachers who are "clearly ineffective and shouldn't be in the classroom" is "very difficult and time-consuming."
• 42% said their most recent evaluation was "just a formality" while another 32% said it was "well intentioned but not particularly helpful to [their] teaching practice"
• 80% favored giving financial incentives to teachers who "work in tough neighborhoods with low-performing schools," 58% for teachers who "consistently received outstanding evaluations by their principals," and 53% for teachers who "specialize in hard-to-fill subjects such as science or mathematics." All of these percentages represent a statistically significant increase since the same question was asked in 2003.

Teachers were, however, split down the middle on using "value-added" measures to evaluate their performance, which I find disappointing given that I think such techniques have a lot of promise. Most teachers remain skeptical of tying pay to standardized tests. But the majority (52%) "somewhat" or "strongly" support the idea of their union "taking the lead on negotiating a way to add teacher performance as a consideration when deciding and individual teacher's salary.

There were also regional patterns: teachers from the South, were unions are structurally weaker, were more supportive of differentiated pay options than teachers from other regions. The same was true for newer teachers compared to veterans.

The message seems to be that teachers are open to a number of good ideas that could improve the way they're paid and evaluated, but those reforms can't and shouldn't be implemented in a way that's fundamentally antagonistic their labor rights or idenity in terms their union. That doesn't immunize teachers unions from criticism when they oppose commonsensical reforms that most of their members support. But it does point to a collaborative reform strategy--which is as it should be.

Update: Liam Julian at the Fordham Institute turns in a somewhat bizarre reading of the above post here. He says:

To say that the loss of jobs in, say, Michigan and Ohio stems from de-unionization certainly has originality going for it, if not much veracity. To maintain that the steady decline of Ford and General Motors—neither of which can compete with Japanese car makers in large part because they pay something like $2200 more in labor costs per car than does Toyota—is the product of de-unionization is... well, it’s definitely new.

There is, of course, nothing in my post about job loss in Michigan and Ohio. But as long we're (now) on the topic: a significant part of the reason Ford and G.M are paying more in labor costs per car is because they're paying health care costs that our government--unlike those of our foreign competitors--won't. (I look forward to upcoming Flypaper posts advocating for universal health care.) Meanwhile, a growing percentage of the labor force is employed by corporations like Wal-Mart that actively employ blatant and often illegal union-busting tactics--when they're not busy giving money to organizations like the Fordham Institute. Liam also says:

That teachers are only receptive to educational reforms that fit the agendas of their unions—agendas that are inarguably designed to increase union membership, solidify union political power, and ensure teachers don’t work too hard—is not progress of any sort.

I really have no idea how Liam managed to get from here to there. To repeat: teachers unions are often against tougher evaluation systems, against making it easier to fire ineffective teachers, against moving away from the single salary schedule to differentiated pay plans. Our survey indicates that most teachers are, by contrast, in favor of those reforms.

Update 2: Liam responds by saying "I’m unsure whether Fordham receives money from Wal-Mart or its ilk." Really? Here's a suggestion: Trying Googling "Walton Family Foundation" and "Fordham Institute," which returns hundreds of hits, including this one, from Fordham's own Web site, which offers thanks to "the foresight, insight, and checkbook of the Walton Family Foundation and its terrific board and staff."

Liam then tries again to engage in some kind of vague larger argument about unions. Which is pointless, it's obvious where we stand: Liam dislikes organized labor and wishes it would go away; I don't. People can draw their own conclusions about what that says about our respective takes on education policy. The problem with the kind of generalized labor-bashing on display in this post and on Flypaper overall is that it destroys the writers' credibility when it comes to a range of important education policy issues that involve teachers unions. The next time Liam has something to say about merit pay, tenure, or some other issue where he disagrees with a national or local union, people will just assume his opposition stems from his obvious larger anti-union bias. Frankly, I wouldn't blame them.

Update 3: When I first wrote the paragraph above, it said "Liam hates organized labor," but I changed it to "dislikes" before posting because "hates" seemed a little over the top. But that was before I read the comments thread on his post, where he says of unions: "Like all parasites you tolerate them until they become more trouble then they’re worth."

"Hates" it is, then.

Oops, that was a commenter, not Liam. My bad. Back to "dislikes."

Breaking Down School Choice Silos

Over at This Week in Education, Alexander Russo criticizes the charter school movement for being too insular and for being absent from conversations about improving traditional public schools—where the vast majority of students are, and likely will continue, to be educated for the foreseeable future. I agree that too often conversations about charter schools and traditional public schools happen in isolation, or only the context of charters versus districts. I had the good fortune to attend a conference on Tuesday that took a decidedly different tone, focusing on the common goal of Chicago charter schools and Chicago Public Schools—to create many new and better school choices for students and parents in the city.

The conference, held by the Renaissance Schools Fund, a partner to CPS's Renaissance 2010 initiative to create 100 new schools, didn’t focus just on charter schools or just on creating and turning around traditional public schools. Instead the conversation revolved around topics that cut across all types of schools. Sessions focused on best practices for replicating successful school models, how to involve private philanthropy, ensuring that proposals for new schools—whether they are charter or district schools—are vetted through a rigorous quality review process, and the struggles associated with turning around an existing school. The panelists varied from practitioners in CPS schools to charter school operators, to the people in philanthropy and non-profit organizations that work to create and support these new schools. All in all, it was a great discussion about what it takes to establish high quality new school options, including restructuring existing schools.

But I’m not sure if this type of conversation was possible a few years ago, before charter schools were a sizable part of the education scene in many urban districts and before it was clear that charter schools aren’t going away any time soon. And I’m not sure if it will happen in districts that don’t have the leaders—mayors, schools superintendents, and leaders in the business and nonprofit communities—who are willing to see charter schools a source of ideas and talent for improving an entire school district.

One thing was clear from the conference—that lessons learned (and still being learned) from the charter school movement, including balancing autonomy and accountability, ensuring quality in new schools, and replicating existing school models—can be, and should be, applied in school districts that are looking to make some real changes and create new options for students.

Global College Rankings

America has bestowed many gifts on the world--baseball, comic books, the Internet (and really, what else is there?). To that list we can now add college rankings. First popularized by U.S. News & World Report in the early 1980s, rankings were, for a long time, strictly an American invention. But in recent years there's been a huge increase in rankings-related activity around the globe, coming in two forms.

First, publications like the Times (of London) Higher Education Supplement have been trying to establish themselves as the U.S. News of the world, rankings thousands of institutions in every country. This has produced the predictable controversies about methodology, fairness, perverse incentives, etc. At the same time--and this is arguably even more interesting--a growing number of individual countries have been creating internal rankings of all institutions within, for example, Kasakhzstan (really), basically as a means of accountability and quality control, plus providing prospective students and employers with useful information. You can read all about it in my InsiderHigherEd column, published this morning.

Fact Check

The New York Times, April 20, 2008:

The number of low-income students at top institutions is still fairly low but is growing. The share of Harvard undergraduates receiving Pell grants rose to 13 percent this year, from 10 percent in 2003-4. At Amherst, over the same span, the number has risen to 18 percent from 15 percent.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2, 2008:

Elite colleges have made headlines in recent years with financial-aid plans aimed at enrolling more low-income students. But despite those efforts, the proportion of financially needy undergraduates at the nation's wealthiest colleges and universities actually dropped between the 2004-5 and 2006-7 academic years, according to a Chronicle analysis of federal Pell Grant data.

Thus illustrating the difference between an article based on anecdotal stories from a non-representative sample, and an article based on actual analysis of data.  

Paparocrisy

About a month ago, my wife got an email from Virgin American offering some kind of insanely cheap promotional fare from DC to LA. So we decided to make a long weekend out of it, having never really spent any time there outside of the standard airport-taxi-hotel conference center-taxi-airport business trip where you're never outside of air conditioning for more than 30 seconds. The flight was great, the airline seems to actually be designed with what customers in 2008 might want in mind, i.e. laptop outlets, comfortable seats, and--this is the best part--a touch screen in back of the seat in front of you that not only has 20 channels of cable TV,  video games, and on-demand movies, but allows you to order food and drinks any time you want, as opposed to waiting 45 minutes for the beverage cart or what have you. There's also a little keyboard thing that allows you to text people in other parts of the plane. It's cool.

Anyway, we check into our hotel, drive over to some place (the geography was confusing, thank God for GPS) with lots of nice stores, park the car, walk up out of the garage, and we haven't been on the sidewalk for--I'm not making this up--more than 5 seconds when I hear the following conversation (conducted in vaguely Eastern European accents):

Guy#1: There is nobody there, I'm telling you.

Guy#2: I go up there, is Tom Arnold. How much money for him?

Guy #1: Nothing, see, that's what I said, is nobody.   

Sure enough -- paparrazi, complete with bad haircuts and huge telephoto lenses. So I figure, hey, photo opportunity! I pull out my little digital camera and take a picture of the guys standing there on the sidewalk with their big cameras. And they get mad! Guy #1 says, "Hey, not picture, not pictures" -- without irony.