Why focus on problems with Charter Schools

Why focus on problems with Charter Schools when the focus should be on how to fix education in our country?

With so much “reform” focused on expanding charter schools it is important to realize that they are not the magic bullet many have made them out to be. You can’t compare Public and Charter schools in NYC, because the charters are playing by different rules with different students.

Several high performing charter schools have changed the threshold for grade promotion from 65 to 80. Its not hard to have a 100% passing rate on standardized tests when only students that have 80’s in the class take the test. If a student has less than an 80, it is likely they will be transferring out of the charter to a public school, rather than being left back. That’s why the charter schools with high standardized test scores are also the ones with 30% attrition.

In addition, we know that the charter schools that are enrolling fewer ELL’s and SPED students.

Charter schools are also investing big money on PR and advertising. As a result we hear about the success of Harlem Success Academy or Harlem Village academy, but we don’t hear about the great work P.S. 83 is doing in the same district.

The PR campaign has worked. Reform to many now means, expanding charter schools and providing them with huge (multi million dollar) donations. We can’t address the current reform movement unless we also address the fact that CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE NOT PROVIDING PUBLIC EDUCTION, but education for the top 2/3 of students. If we listen to their PR firms long enough we will forget that the bottom 1/3, the group of students our reform movement should focused on, are left out. I guess not all of them are left out. Some of them will attend P.S. 83 a high performing public schools that is humbly doing the job they were meant to do - Educating all children.

If we were to sit down with Geoffrey Canada for a drink he would tell us what reform really means. “Keep the kids that make your test scores and graduation rates look great. Create policies that ensure the low performing students transfer back to a public school. Once your numbers look good hire a PR firm to get you on Oprah.”

Charter School ≠ Better School

I can't tell you how many times after I describe the fantastic school I work at someone says, "that sounds great, is it a charter school?"

Why is it that charter schools are equated with better schools even though all the research says that they are no better than traditional public schools. (see a great article about reasearch on Charter vs. Traditional Public Schools)

That is a rhetorical question, I have my own ideas. How much money was spent on the Harlem Village Academy, or KIPP websites? Sure the DOE has its own fancy website, but spread over a million students the cost is nominal. Spread over a thousand students the PR and advertising expenses of charter schools mean real sacrifices on instructional materials in order to create the illusion of a functioning school put the best face on a school. If the DOE spent per student what the charter school operators do for advertising and PR it would cost, (real data is not available because charter schools are not required to report it) for lack of a more precise figure, a lot.

At some point people who were supposed to be journalists caught whiff of the charter school PR and jumped on the bandwagon. There were feel good stories about students in poor communities with low high school graduation rates breaking the mold and going to college. These stories focused almost exclusively on high achieving charter schools even though we could hand pick a proportionate number of high achieving public schools doing the same things for students. We could have also picked a number of charter schools and public schools completely failing their students.

I get really upset when "real journalists" buy into PR sound bites and start producing biased writing. Winnie Hu wrote an article for the NY times the other day about an idea I don't think will be very effective - completely teacher run schools. It is interesting that most of her articles about charter schools are success stories, and the articles about traditional schools depict them as struggling or searching for answers, but I digress. In this article she casually writes that public schools are scrambling to come up with answers to catch up with charter schools. She writes,

"Teacher-run schools are spreading as many districts seek new ways to raise student achievement and compete more effectively against charter schools."

Why do traditional public schools need to compete more effectively against charter schools? What is it we are competing for? We already know that charter schools are not more effective than public schools. (See Searching for Superguy in Gotham).

The article by Bob Herbert is another example of the New York Times painting the story of a successful charter school and failing public schools. Later this month a movie called "Waiting for Superman" by the same director as an inconvenient truth will open. In it he picks looks at the Harlem Children Zone Charter school which has done well for its population of students (which doesn't include a proportionate number English Language Learners or Special Ed students.) Why did the director choose a high performing charter school and not a high performing public school?

Unfortunately with the focus only on successful charter schools and failing public schools, public perception will remain the same. I will have to continue explaining that I work in a high achieving public school and that they exists in an equal proportion to high achieving charter schools.