School Choice Is Not a Magic Bullet, Studies Reveal

[Frodo]

Despite Push, Success at Charter Schools Is Mixed

By TRIP GABRIEL
Published: May 1, 2010

In the world of education, it was the equivalent of the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria.

Executives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, McKinsey consultants and scholars from Stanford and Harvard mingled at an invitation-only meeting of the New Schools Venture Fund at a luxury hotel in Pasadena, Calif. Founded by investors who helped start Google and Amazon, this philanthropy seeks to raise the academic achievement of poor black and Hispanic students, largely through charter schools.

Many of those at the meeting last May had worried that the Obama administration would reflect the general hostility of teachers’ unions toward charters, publicly financed schools that are independently run and free to experiment in classrooms. But all doubts were dispelled when the image of Arne Duncan, the new education secretary, filled a large video screen from Washington. He pledged to combine “your ideas with our dollars” from the federal government. “What you have created,” he said, “is a real movement.”

That movement includes a crowded clique of alpha girls and boys, including New York hedge fund managers, a Hollywood agent or two and the singers John Legend and Sting, who performed at a fund-raiser for Harlem charter schools last Wednesday at Lincoln Center. Charters have also become a pet cause of what one education historian calls a billionaires’ club of philanthropists, including Mr. Gates, Eli Broad of Los Angeles and the Walton family of Wal-Mart.

But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”

Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools.

Researchers for this study and others pointed to a successful minority of charter schools — numbering perhaps in the hundreds — and these are the ones around which celebrities and philanthropists rally, energized by their narrowing of the achievement gap between poor minority students and white students.

But with the Obama administration offering the most favorable climate yet for charter schools, the challenge of reproducing high-flying schools is giving even some advocates pause. Academically ambitious leaders of the school choice movement have come to a hard recognition: raising student achievement for poor urban children — what the most fervent call a new civil rights campaign — is enormously difficult and often expensive.

“I think many people settle and tend to let themselves off the hook,” said Perry White, a former social worker who founded the Citizens’ Academy charter school in Cleveland in 1999 — naïvely, he now recognizes — and has overseen its climb from an F on its state report card in 2003 to an A last year. “It took us a while to understand we needed a no-excuses culture,” he said, one of “really sweating the small stuff.”

Visits to half a dozen charter schools in Cleveland and New York State show that high- and low-performing schools often seem to take pages from the same playbook. They require student uniforms, a longer day and academic year, frequent testing to measure learning, and tutoring for students who fall behind. They imitate one another in superficial ways, too, like hanging inspirational banners: “This Is Where We’re Headed. To College!” say posters in the hall of the Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School in Brooklyn, with campus scenes of a chemistry lab and big-time college sports.

But the differences in how schools are run, the way classes are taught and how school culture is nourished are striking. It is like watching two couples dance a tango, one with poise and precision, the other stumbling to execute the intricate footwork.

[Padfoot]

Charter schools can be great but they are able to get away with way too much sometimes.  There definitely needs to be more accountability as long as they're receiving tax-payer dollars.  They certainly need to be shut down if they're doing worse than traditional public schools.

[CultureKing]

Charter schools can be great but they are able to get away with way too much sometimes.  There definitely needs to be more accountability as long as they're receiving tax-payer dollars.  They certainly need to be shut down if they're doing worse than traditional public schools.

Yep, though personally I would just do away with the entire idea. The idea of an independent school system that receives governmental funding seems simply bizarre.

[live free or die]

Charter schools can be great but they are able to get away with way too much sometimes.  There definitely needs to be more accountability as long as they're receiving tax-payer dollars.  They certainly need to be shut down if they're doing worse than traditional public schools.

Yep, though personally I would just do away with the entire idea. The idea of an independent school system that receives governmental funding seems simply bizarre.

They are more effective and efficient.

[The Duke]

Nothing is a magic bullet.

[dead0man]

So a study done by Stanford Uni says charter schools are no magic bullet.  Conflict of interest maybe?

I'm not saying the study is wrong.

[Linus Van Pelt]

So a study done by Stanford Uni says charter schools are no magic bullet.  Conflict of interest maybe?

I'm not saying the study is wrong.

What? Charter schools compete with K-12 public schools, not with a private university.

[Verily]

So a study done by Stanford Uni says charter schools are no magic bullet.  Conflict of interest maybe?

I'm not saying the study is wrong.

What? Charter schools compete with K-12 public schools, not with a private university.

In fact, colleges routinely complain about how inadequately prepared entering students are by their high schools--surely if charter schools were making a difference, universities, especially private universities (which are run quite similarly to charter schools in many ways), would be the first to take notice.

[dead0man]

So a study done by Stanford Uni says charter schools are no magic bullet.  Conflict of interest maybe?

I'm not saying the study is wrong.

What? Charter schools compete with K-12 public schools, not with a private university.

Right, and which "side" would they be on?  Teachers unions or charter schools?

[Verily]

So a study done by Stanford Uni says charter schools are no magic bullet.  Conflict of interest maybe?

I'm not saying the study is wrong.

What? Charter schools compete with K-12 public schools, not with a private university.

Right, and which "side" would they be on?  Teachers unions or charter schools?

Not teachers' unions, unless you think everyone is in the pocket of teachers' unions. What would a university (public or private, but especially private), and especially a top university like Stanford that won't be sending its graduates into teaching unless it's via Teach for America, have to gain from supporting teachers' unions?

[opebo]

Nothing is a magic bullet.

Not being a poor is a magic bullet.

[Linus Van Pelt]

So a study done by Stanford Uni says charter schools are no magic bullet.  Conflict of interest maybe?

I'm not saying the study is wrong.

What? Charter schools compete with K-12 public schools, not with a private university.

Right, and which "side" would they be on?  Teachers unions or charter schools?

Not teachers' unions, unless you think everyone is in the pocket of teachers' unions. What would a university (public or private, but especially private), and especially a top university like Stanford that won't be sending its graduates into teaching unless it's via Teach for America, have to gain from supporting teachers' unions?

Stanford actually does have a school of education, unlike most top private universities (Columbia is the other major exception I know of). But still, I don't understand dead0man's point at all - individual academic researchers certainly have their biases and ideologies, but the idea that "Stanford" as a whole is biased in favour of any particular "side" in this controversy is bizarre, as does the idea that researchers at a large university in general have some unified point of view.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Also, now that I actually download the study in question from the web site linked to in the initial post, I see that it was conducted by "CREDO at Stanford University in partnership with the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the Colorado League of Charter Schools". So, yeah...

[Marokai Backbeat]

So a study done by Stanford Uni says charter schools are no magic bullet.  Conflict of interest maybe?

I'm not saying the study is wrong.

What? Charter schools compete with K-12 public schools, not with a private university.

Right, and which "side" would they be on?  Teachers unions or charter schools?

That is a ridiculously paranoid response to something like this.

[War on Want]

Charter schools are terrible. Take it from someone who actually went to one for 4 years. The administration bent over backwards for teachers, even when some teachers would be punishing students for no reason, couldn't teach material, and sometimes acted in a very disrespectful(like sometimes borderline harassment) manner towards students. My old charter school was actually ranked as one of the best schools in the country but the credit should be given to the kids. Now of course the school lost over 50 high school students out of around 200 this year alone so it really doesn't seem to be sustainable.

That was an anectdote but I'm sure it applies towards some charter schools.

[opebo]

Nothing is a magic bullet.

Not being a poor is a magic bullet.

As if there were no rich people who are dumb.

As if being 'dumb' or not matters.