“Regular Public Schools Start to Mimic Charters,” reads the article headline in the current edition of Education Week. You’d think Education Week would be more aware of the impact that the headline would have with regular public school teachers. The article describes limited attempts at collaboration between charters and their district non-charter schools.
This collaboration would complete the initial intention of charter schools: To be, as the article states, “research-and-development hot houses for public education.” So far the collaboration has been limited in its scope. To me, this is no surprise when you look at how far we have strayed from charters’ initial purpose.
Competition is fierce between these two factions as they fight for student enrollment. This limits the incentive to collaborate. I could go on, but I have pontificated on this before.
I want to go back to the headline and the interesting responses to the online version of the story. Here you will see snipping about whether or not the innovative idea that the charter uses originated with the charter or in the non-charter public school. You’ll also read complaints that charters are once again presented as the “second coming” for public education.
Oh, come on! Can we embrace the greater issue here and ensure that whatever is working makes its way into educational practice?
Popularity: 2% [?]
It’s worth pointing out, once again, that the initial intention and purpose of charter schools that Mark cites and to which he subscribes (“research-and-development hot houses for public education”) is one that has been applied by others TO charters; it is not one that I have heard any quality charter operator use to define themselves (“We’re not really a school, we’re best described as an R&D project.”) Would anyone object if someone said it is the intent of traditional public schools to resist innovation and reject R&D activities?
The intent of schools – traditional, charter, innovation and otherwise — is to educate kids. It’s odd to ask for collaboration and criticize animosity when the entire premise is founded on a belief that these schools are different. What is the objection to the idea that all schools share the same intent?
Alex, I’d go one step further and say that the purpose of public education is to educate ALL children (not true for private schools). Not just the students in my classroom, the students in my school, even the students in my district–ALL students. How will this happen if we shut the doors to collaboration?
Competition for students will not bring about collaboration. Competition operates off of the premise that there will be losers. If we do not investigate what qualities allow for successful schools, and replicate them, then we will continue to have losers. And these losers will continue to be the most marginalized.
Mark,
There are already significant losers in a system that has long resisted any alternatives to a geographically-assigend school. While you may decry “competition,” parents and families are clamoring for choice. I’ve written about this previously (http://bit.ly/cng1dS): managed choice can be helpful and complementary.
Competition for traditional public schools already exists: private schools and dropping out altogether. Public education already loses far too many students to these alternatives. It’s hard for me to see how expanding public school options harms students.
There’s also little evidence in spite of some of the rhetoric that competition has made things worse for kids. In fact those urban districts like Seattle that have resisted choice, new high quality school development and competition have generally not made any progress while they continue to lose market share to the burbs and private schools.
From my experience starting to research charter schools in the late 1990s, one notion was that the freeing up from bureacratic constraints would allow charters to be innovative in creating new educational approaches. Many charter advocates did trumpet this innovation or R&D idea. (BTW: this was aiso the time when many for-profit K12 education ventures were being launched, also touting innovation and convinced they could make a good profit while also educating students well for $5,000 each – that hasn’t work out so well).
In early research I did on the east coast, I suggested that charters had largely not been very innovative, but were mostly recycling old and current educational ideas. Even the more successful ones.
Still, over time, I have to admit that some successful charters have taken perhaps “old” formulas but made them work well, with good implementation, follow-through and perhaps a few new bells and whistles added.
So, I suppose it is in the eye of the beholder whether successful charters have been innovative or not. As some have said, at least a few charters, around the nation and in Denver, seem to have “broken the code” in terms of figuring out how to substantially improve the test scores and graduation rates of low income students. I think that successful expansion and replicability of these approaches is the true test, more than whether or not these qualify as true innovations or not.
Charter schools still cater to the few at the expense of the many. In Denver, charter schools have contributed to increased segregation and isolation for students of color and poverty. Choice without equity is a false choice. In Denver Public Schools (DPS), some students in regular schools are in classes of more than 35 while students in charter schools are in classes of less than 25, have longer school days and longer school years. That violates the guarantee of the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution of equal treatment under the law and the Colorado constitution guarantee of a uniform and equal education for all students. Proponents of charter schools in Colorado should read the 2006 Harvard Civil Rights Study Project, “Denver Public Schools: Re-segregation, Latino Style.” DPS administrators and the board of education are still ignoring its existence. How long can they ignore it? Not long, because injustice cannot be ignored.
Ed, is this the report you keep referring to: “Denver Public Schools: Resegregation, Latino Style By
Chungmei Lee, January 2006″?
After hearing you stand up and speak about this report in virtually every meeting about school reform, I finally read it. There is no mention of Charter or Magnet schools. The report cites the dismantling of the court-ordered busing and how concentrations of poverty housing leads to schools filled with low income children. The word “Charter” was found twice in this report, “… charter schools should have equity provisions built into their charters so as not to discriminate against students of different racial/ethnic backgrounds in providing equal access.” This report seems to be saying that schools situated in neighborhoods offering to educate the children in the neighborhood will be segregated due to our housing patterns, not due to intentional discrimination.
Here are some of the paragraphs that seem to show that the movement of Whites to the suburbs as well as the concentrations of wealthier white people within traditional neighborhood boundary schools has led to the resegregation of our schools. Note that many of the trends towards resegregation reported in this study come before many of the charter schools even opened.
The paragraphs come directly from Lee’s report:
“The Denver metropolitan area experienced two major demographic shifts since 1990: the migration of the urban student population from Denver to the surrounding counties and an increasing share of the non-White population in the greater metropolitan area…”
“The movement of families (mostly Whites) to the suburbs and away from urban Denver further exacerbates the racial isolation of students in Denver County… ”
“Even before the Keyes ruling in 1973, the White share of the District’s student enrollment was already dropping (Table 4). As Whites continued moving to the suburbs, represented by a declining White enrollment that plummeted from 66 percent in 1967 to 20 percent by 2003, attempts to desegregate within an urban center became increasingly difficult. The drop was largely replaced by Latino enrollment, which rose from 20 percent to 57 percent during this same time period…”
“A breakdown of the distribution of students in DPS strongly indicates a heavy concentration of students in racially isolated schools (Table 6). Eighty-four percent of Latino, 74 percent of Black and 52 percent of Asian students attend schools with more than 70 percent minority students. While minority students are heavily clustered in segregated minority schools, only 27 percent of White students attend these schools. At the other end of the spectrum, seven percent of White students and three percent of Asian students attend schools that are overwhelmingly White, in which at least 80 percent of the student body is White. The presence of these racially isolated schools in an urban area where only a fifth of the student body is White is indicative of the level of segregation within the district…”
“The termination of the court order in 1995 was followed by growing concentration of minority schools in intensely segregated (90-100%) minority schools (Figure 2). In a little over a decade, the percentage of Latino students attending these schools shot up from zero percent in 1990 to 70 percent in 2003…”
“In a period of two short years from 1995 to 1997, the share of Latino students attending intensely segregated schools more than tripled from 11 percent to 38 percent.”
“The rise in isolation of White students in concentrated White schools has been especially steep in the years following the lifting of the desegregation order in 1995 (Figure 3). In 1995, 14 percent of White students attended schools that were majority White. Two years later, in 1997, the percentage of White students in majority White schools had more than doubled to 31 percent…”
Are those who apply to charter schools disproportionately from families with higher S.E.S.? If so, that could serve to exacerbate resegregation. And if so, who advocates for lower S.E.S. students in order to ensure equity? Not the schools they would be leaving.