The NY Times had a lengthy piece over the weekend on charter schools. Readers of these pages will find little new in the data disagreement (CREDO v Hoxby), or the trusim that the mere designation of “charter” is no guarantee of success, but there was one point of agreement that I found compelling:
What most experts can agree on is that charter school quality varies widely, and that it is often associated with the rigor of authorities that grant charters. New York, where oversight is strong, is known for higher performing schools. Ohio, Arizona and Texas, where accountability is minimal, showed up in Ms. Raymond’s study with many poorly performing schools.
This, as well, is hardly new, but the idea that the charter authorizers (usually school districts) are themselves a major determinant of charter success has largely escaped the public debate. Now I would add Denver to the historical list of top authorizers (although the critical ability to close poorly-performing charters is nascent), but even this ability is on a political tightrope.
Critical to the continued development of local school boards (as I wrote two years ago) is a shift from acting solely as a school operator to also managing an array of independent organizations that run schools and provide services.
This is not a simple transition — school boards rarely think of themselves an managers of independent organizations, and often they have no framework for recognizing what sort of skills and tactics are required. However it is made far harder as many elected officials (particularly those with higher political aspirations) depend heavily on the political support and contributions of groups for whom charter schools are a threat to both membership and job security.
And lastly, many of these same officials are reluctant to make unpopular decisions — like closing poorly performing charters — that might upset any members of their existing or potential future constituencies. This invites contradictory positions, with even anti-charter board members voting to keep poorly performing charter schools open — as if they desired the continued failure of these charters to serve as a useful political punching bag while pleasing the inevitable parents who want the school to remain open.
What is required instead is continued research (building on studies like this) that looks at best practices and rankings of authorizers, and then compares the schools in those top districts with their traditional peers. Secondly might be a comparative study of charters and TPS in districts with mayoral control — where the political process that so clearly contorts some authorizers is eliminated.
Now, don’t be fooled, as some ideologues will put forward not specific ideas on improving the authorization process, but merely impediments to charters at all. But most practically the challenge should be placed squarely on the school boards themselves.
There should be no more question about the relative success of charter schools in DPS, thanks in no small part to the history of effective authorizing. Nor, given the overwhelming parental support and substantial waiting lists in Colorado, do I think anyone serious believes in eliminating charters all together (or political stunts such as a moratorium, which is contrary to state law).
But will elected board members in Colorado’s 170+ school districts take seriously their role of authorizer and of themselves ask: not what can we do to dismantle the authorization process, but what can we do to improve it?
Popularity: 3% [?]
Unfortunately, Mr. Ooms fails to mention that, according to a 2006 study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project, since charter schools have proliferated throughout Denver Public Schools (DPS), racial and economic segregation has accelerated. Unless one regards racial and economic segregation as acceptable, this trend must be addressed. Thus far, DPS administrators and the board of education have not addressed this issue. What would Mr. Ooms suggest?
I generally enjoy Mr. Augden’s determined partisanship, but still believe his comments should have at least some even minor relationship with fact.
The Civil Rights Project study, of course, said nothing whatsoever about Denver Public Schools. And the CREDO study, which is more often used as ammunition for his diatribes, stated: “States with significantly higher learning gains for charter school students than would have occurred in traditional schools include… Colorado.” Lastly, CLCS has publicly said that in Colorado “charter schools look more like the district than the neighborhood schools with respect to the percent of minority students they serve.” But none of that that should not stand in the way of Mr. Augden’s casual claim to some statistical foundation for his pet bias.
Should Mr. Augden care so reverently about racial and economic segregation, I suggest he start with the selective admissions programs within traditional public schools. There is not a single of these programs that comes close to the average district percentages for either poverty or minority students, which does not seem to dissuade his calculated attack only on charter schools.
For Mr. Augden has little problem with schools where few students of color can read, write and add at grade level, so far as they are adequately mixed in with their more proficient caucasian peers. That the parents of these students feel differently is no concern to him — it is not student learning to which he is committed. Luckily, I believe Mr. Augden no longer teaches Denver’s students, since he seems to believe that an educator’s primary purpose is to achieve some amorphous racial and economic ideal, instead of helping students learn.
OK, here’s how I see it: if we have charters, we need accountable authorizers who are maintaining accountability of charter schools and it is all getting more complex, especially for traditional school boards who, it would seem, have perhaps had too much on their plates already. So, we have yet another bureaucracy created where it had not existed before to deal with a problem that had not existed until people started solving the “problem” of public schools with new schools that would compete with other schools to raise the bar for everyone.
Have I got this about right?
Maybe we need vouchers. But of course we would need an accountability system for how taxpayer money is spent by independent operators and we know how well that worked out for Chavez charters but that’s just one bad apple, trust us it will totally work mostly, for everyone, yes that’s it vouchers, competition…um, never mind, this is too depressing.
jj,
In all seriousness and although I respect your opinion on these pages, no, I don’t think you have it right.
Authorizers need to see charters as part of a larger public school system for which they are equally accountable as traditional schools. There should be no implicit preference between the type of school. While this requires a shift in perspective, it should entail less direct oversight (not more). It does not create any additional bureaucracy – if done well, the shift to managing organizations who operate schools should require less bureaucracy.
But part of the problem is an obvious conflict of interest with many elected school officials who depend on traditional school advocates for votes and money. If your local government official was funded and elected by United Airlines and its employees, do you really think they would try to improve the performance of Southwest?
If there is a case study of how taxpayer money in education is spent poorly that exceeds that of traditional district schools, I’d like to see it. I’ve seen estimates that it costs DPS over $1 million per student who enters kindergarden and eventually becomes proficient enough to attend college without remediation. The shame here is the dozens of schools who consume taxpayer dollars with high dropouts and low proficiency and attract no attention whatsoever.
You are no doubt depressed by the current situation of public schools, but I think most of that should sit squarely within the current system and the existing centralized bureaucracy, not with the innovation and charter schools who are looking for ways to limit the current administrative chokehold.
OK Alex, I get the notion that charters ‘should’ not be an extra burden. And I get the idea that there is a messy conflict of interest potential with them. I just have a hard time imagining that there aren’t other at least, administrative costs of evaluating a different set of parameters for a different kind of school. I’d also really like to know how that one million gets figured, seems a tad high.
By the way, will this blog discuss magnet schools sometime soon? How do they fit in the whole alternative delivery mix? I’m not asking for an answer here, just askin’.
Some back-of-the-envelope simple math gets to the $1M number pretty easily. Last year DPS had 4,378 10th graders take the math CSAP. But math proficiency in 10th grade was only 15%, so only 657 students were proficient. Let’s take a happy assumption that no one drops out between 10th and 12th grade, and if you are proficient in math you are also proficient in all subjects. So DPS graduated 657 proficient, college-ready students.
But only 50% of DPS students go on to graduate, so one starts with about 8,700 students. If you take a fixed annual attrition (5.61%) the annual cost per student is just $8,000 and one gets to a $1M per proficient student rate over 13 years. Now this is simple math, and oversimplified (student attrition is not linear) but $8k per student is really low (the annual DPS $1.3M total budget divided by 75k students is $17k), and we have made some optimistic assumptions. I don’t know if it is right, but I’d bet it’s close.
I’m all for a discussion of magnet schools and selective admissions programs (see:
http://blog.ednewscolorado.org/2009/09/15/the-ghost-of-selective-admissions/ ) and I’d be interested in your thoughts.