Must " reform" equal charter schools?

Parents Forum
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<p>Our state and community is strongly against charter schools( they have voted it down three times) - me- I am still hesitant but I think it is worth looking at- as well as vouchers- and I understand their concerns- BUT the status quo is not doing much for many students and their families.</p>

<p>(Despite a high school dropout blue collar background- our oldest attended private schools K-12 & our youngest attended private schools through 2nd grade & if I had known what we would go through to try and get her a " good-enough" education in our city schools, we would have stayed private)</p>

<p>Our district is in a highly educated region, with a strong socio-economic base, but the makeup of the district, does not reflect the city, many families are going private or cobbling together their own support system.( or moving out of the district)</p>

<p>Our school districts response is to say they don't have enough money, and to request more taxes, even though the bulk of the employees in the district work in administration ( opposite of surrounding districts) & the state amongst others have admonished them for illegal behavior/spending. ( another " popular" response from the district is to say- " It is too early to assess changes"- that would be closing schools to save money and then having to spend millions to reopen them a year or so later)</p>

<p>I am trying to get information about what other districts have tried- what their district looks like( socio-economic & geographic picture) & how much this depends on parents/community partners- as well as how involved who ever is spearheading the " reform" engages the community, including responding to those who are in the classrooms.</p>

<p>My kids aren't in K-12 anymore- but my oldest is getting her Masters in teaching out of state, and I am very committed to improving and expanding educational options for area families. Not just because I know how time consuming & important it is, but also for selfish reasons, I would like to continue living here ( my garden isn't finished yet!) & I think families with children, especially middle class families ( we already have wealthy & low income), are necessary for a healthy & appealing city.</p>

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<p>Charters aren’t the only solution, and they may not even be part of an effective solution. But whether they are the best solution kind of depends on your point of view.</p>

<p>If you (a) think teachers’ unions are evil, (b) believe that competitive markets optimize social outcomes, (c) believe that smaller, more intimate school will let fewer students slip though the cracks, nut (d) are committed to universal public education, and/or (e) think that there may be some constitutional issues with direct public support of religious schools through vouchers, then you are probably going to be a fan of charter schools. </p>

<p>Toggle some of those switches, or add others, and you may wind up supporting vouchers, or breaking up large public schools into smaller schools with significant autonomy, or simply breaking the teachers’ unions.</p>

3

<p>I don’t think unions are " evil", but unions aren’t there to improve product, they are there for their members.
Period.
At this point I am for anything that will improve accountability- not just for the teachers, but for the administrators who are on the board of companies which sell the tests/curriculum that is used to the district for starters.</p>

4

<p>Not all charters are created equal. I’ve seen really mediocre ones, where the parents, teachers and administration are constantly arguing, where the curriculum is weak and the kids completely bewildered. Plus, some of them are in really strange locations (like, an empty suburban strip mall. No athletic facilities, no playground, no science labs.) </p>

<p>My son attends a highly successful charter – check out their website – [Denver</a> School of Science and Technology](<a href=“http://www.scienceandtech.org%5DDenver”>http://www.scienceandtech.org)
But it took a whole army of local politicians, tech companies, donations to get it up and going. It’s not an easy or quick undertaking, and I would imagine the same amount of effort and time could be used to fix the local public, with similar effects.</p>

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<p>Charters or not, the way to begin is to organize. If I were a dissatisfied parent in that same situation, I would begin homeschooling with other families. Very often, charters have begun as a result of individual families joining self-started homeschool associations. Officially, it did not begin as a group charter, but sometimes ended up that way (for states which finally threw in the towel and were tired of resisting massive grassroots efforts). Sometimes they ended up as charter homeschools; other times as charter site schools.</p>

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<p>Realistically, charters do three things that could never, as a practical matter, be accomplished with efforts to “fix the local public”:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>They ignore union work rules and seniority (and sometimes pay scales). The administration has far more autonomy than could be wrested from a union for an existing school without an all-out war. This may not be a big deal in right-to-work states (or right-to-teach districts), but it is about 90% of what is driving the charter movement in the urban east.</p></li>
<li><p>They ignore cumbersome, bureaucratic governmental procurement rules. </p></li>
<li><p>They pull in more private funding by being able to give the funders more control than they could have over a government-run school.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>Note that I am not counting as a charter-school benefit innovative or experimental curriculums, or competition for students, or smaller schools, or encouraging parental involvement, because you CAN accomplish those things within the context of a school district.</p>

<p>In many places, charters effectively cream-skim their students – with or without fostering that deliberately – because (a) students and their parents who enter and make it through the charter lottery process are more engaged than average, and (b) many charters do not do, and are not required to do, special education or sometimes other forms of difficult, more expensive stuff, like disciplinary cases and English language learners. Those advantages aren’t integral to what makes charters attractive to administrators, legislators, and policymakers, although parents and kids may certainly notice them.</p>

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<p>I think coverage of charter schools has a lot of selection bias in it–that is, the media tends to report on excellent charter schools and not mediocre and below average ones. I also think the opposite may be going on with some non-charter public schools, though probably not to the same degree. No empirical data to support this perceived bias, just an observation.</p>

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<p>“the media tends to report on excellent charter schools and not mediocre and below average ones. I also think the opposite may be going on with some non-charter public schools, though probably not to the same degree.” </p>

<p>– I agree. Again, no stats, just what I’ve also observed. And JHS, as usual, is spot on.</p>

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<p>I haven’t read all the relevant literature but the literature reviews I’ve seen essentially conclude that, notwithstanding the putative advantages of charter schools, it hasn’t been clearly established that they actually improve educational outcomes. There are some that produce seemingly impressive results, but it’s hard to disentangle that from the composition of the student body as charter school students tend to come from a self-selecting group of educationally motivated families; to that extent the “best” charter schools may be simply cherry-picking the best students and thereby leaving the public schools in even worse shape, while building their own reputations on the backs of kids who would have been the best students in any educational setting. </p>

<p>And for every charter school “success” story, there’s a countervailing story of educational failure, lack of accountability, charter school boards and administrators with dubious agendas who maybe shouldn’t be getting public money to advance their idiosyncratic causes, financial mismanagement by well-meaning incompetents, financial plundering by outright crooks, etc., etc. Not much “adult” supervision in any of this.</p>

<p>I’m not defending the public school status quo. I am suggesting so far there’s been a lot more hype than proven success in the charter school movement, and we’re reaching a point where parents and the taxpaying public are going to start to demand the same kind of performance and accountability from charter schools that they have every right to demand from the public schools.</p>

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<p>bclintonk: As I understand it, there absolutely ARE charter schools that have produced meaningfully great results. There was some recent study – I think it was of one of the Harlem Children’s Zone middle schools – where they controlled for educationally motivated families by comparing what happened to kids in that school to kids who had applied to that school, but who hadn’t won the lottery to attend. Anyway, the difference over the course of middle school was really significant – more than a standard deviation – especially in math, where the students basically reached the same average level of achievement entering high school that kids in Scarsdale have. </p>

<p>Other charter school groups that people really admire include the KIPP schools and the Mastery schools. All of these schools are very intense – long school days, long school weeks, long school years, tons of tutoring, very strict rules, something of a boot camp atmosphere. I think the issue with them is not that they don’t succeed, but that they are relatively hard to replicate on a massive scale. In part, that’s because they are very expensive and rely on foundation support that is not infinitely expandable. There’s also an issue that they have really high teacher turnover due to the demands placed on the teachers (and the fact that they are using lots of elite college graduates who have other options besides teaching careers). You can handle that if you have 15 “hot” schools, but it would be a lot tougher if you were trying to keep 150 or 1,500 such schools staffed year in and year out.</p>

<p>I know that here the average charter does no better than its equivalent public school in terms of test results, but the charters tend to be very popular with students and families. There have definitely been some issues with incompetent or dishonest charter sponsors and boards.</p>

<p>(Disclosure: I have partners who represent charter schools, and some close relatives have been engaged in state education policy, including charter schools.)</p>

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<p>Yes, I’m sure that’s right. I should have acknowledged that. But there are at least as many charter schools that have UNDERPERFORMED the standard public school competition. Consider the following:</p>

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<p>To me, that sounds like a net negative: more than twice as many charter schools performing WORSE than those performing better. And this:</p>

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<p>I’m all for bring up those at the bottom of the educational attainment ladder, but not at the cost of undercutting educational achievement at the top end. So again, it sounds to me like a policy failure, even if it does leave charter school attendees and their parents feeling subjectively more satisfied. That’s a fool’s “reform.”</p>

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<p>Thanks, emeraldkitty, for bringing up such an important topic!
Without arguing the merit of charter schools, I believe that reform CAN happen without them. It takes some community organizing, a superintendant with vision, and a will to change.
Are you from Seattle? When we started taking action here in Pittsburgh, I looked for a city with a similar situation, and I thought that perhaps Seattle was a bit parallel, but not quite. We also have a very strong, educated group of parents in one section of the city that has not yet fled to the suburbs. Many of them do send their kids to public schools.
You can start the process by gathering a like-minded group of parents for some discussion groups, during which you identify the key concerns of parents. You may not be surprised that parents are concerned not only about the schools, but about the city! Some of their concerns might be: accountability, safety, evaluation of teachers, continual quality improvement, attention to students at ALL levels of the achievement spectrum, a culture of high achievement for everyone, including administrators, teachers, students and parents, communication with parents, and more.
Then, meet with your school board representative and present those concerns. It is important to emphasize that you all want the same goals. Also, bring demographic information about your city and suburbs, and emphasize that if the tax base leaves, the whole school district will sink entirely. Emphasize that students attending private schools reduces the subsidy from the state.
At the same time, you need a core group of elementary parents who really and truly value education to send their kids to a public school together. You need to emphasize to the school board rep that these families are willing to send their kids to public school, but they will have expectations. Make sure that in all communications, you say that ALL students must learn and be challenged. This includes the high achieving students. If high achieving students are present in a school, the culture of achievement spreads. A dirty word today is “tracking”, so don’t use that word. Say, instead, “flexibly grouping the students with regard to the skills that they need to master.” Suggest “clusters” of students at achievement levels. “Differentiating instruction” is supposed to be the mantra today, but in reality it is extremely difficult to truly differentiate and teach to a huge range of students. The cluster model brings up student achievement at all levels and makes it much more manageable for the teachers, who will usually have two “clusters” per class.
Find out if offering a particular language would attract a high achieving group of students to a school. If this is so, suggest this to your school board rep.
Ask your school board rep to arrange meetings with administrators who are in charge of teacher and principal evaluation, curriculum and instruction, and finance to present the concerns of the group.
Ultimately, you want a superintendant with the vision to bring about reform. Perhaps yours is working on it, but if not, you may need to get a new one. That superintendant may want to take action to make sure schools are safe, to put in major measures of accountability and evaluation of administrators and teachers, to put in place hiring standards, to put behavioral expectations into place with a positive discipline model, and of course to enforce strict fiscal policy.
Suggest to local community organizations that they have a public school committee, and encourage them to meet, discuss, and present their concerns.
Keep on top of your school board rep, make friends and meet with other school board reps, and make friends within the district with administrators who will take your side.
Emphasize to all that you meet that a good media relations person is imperative. There should be a search for this person asap, and this person should proactively promote what the district is doing.
Avoid using personal anecdotes from your own family if at all possible. Always emphasize that you are trying to promote the achievement of all students.
The silver lining in the situation right now is that the economy and gasoline prices may be your best friend. People who value education may not be able to move, don’t want to commute farther, and may not be able to afford private schools.
It can be done and we are doing it! But - it takes time and we have to be relentless.
PM me if you want to know more.</p>

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<p>Define success. </p>

<p>My biggest criticisms of KIPP schools is that they require parents to sign documents stating they will be highly involved. That’s a very effective way to weed out students. And speaking of the neediest students, of their lowest scoring students who enter at fifth grade, 60% are gone by eighth grade.</p>

<p>I do not believe there can be true reform unless it addresses all students, which charter schools do not.</p>

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<p>JHS: " (b) many charters do not do, and are not required to do, special education or sometimes other forms of difficult, more expensive stuff, like disciplinary cases and English language learners. Those advantages aren’t integral to what makes charters attractive to administrators, legislators, and policymakers, although parents and kids may certainly notice them."</p>

<p>This is a very common misconception. While there may be some charter schools engaging in these practices, it is clearly against the law, and not standard practice. (Note that some “regular” public schools have also been accused of engaging in these practices – bad actors are found in all venues.) There is no exception to the Federal rules requiring public schools – of any flavor – to abide by the special education laws, or the laws related to English Language Learners. </p>

<p>However, in different states the responsibility for making these decisions may be vested in different entities. In my state, the LEA (the local authority for making decisions related to special education under federal law) is vested in the school district, not any individual school within the district. The LEA is allowed to determine, to a great degree, how and where what programs – especially expensive ones – will be offered. For example, one elementary school in a compact district might be designated as a deaf ed school, where all of the teachers and specialists are competent in ASL, and where all of the classrooms have augmented sound amplification. A child who is deaf/hearing impaired can choose to go to the neighborhood (or charter) school, but at those locations might only have an aide who can translate what teachers say into ASL. Our district has a special school that functions as a day treatment center for students with major psychiatric issues - something like 21 special ed and psych staffers for 17 students, and if a student’s IEP specifies that a placement like that one is the appropriate one for the child, that’s where the child will be offered the services. Our district uses a pretty common decision matrix for all open enrollment (including charter school enrollment) decisions: if a student is staffed (according to an IEP) at 20% or less of an FTE, the student is automatically eligible to enroll in whatever program the student’s family chooses, under the theory that the appropriate services can be provided in any setting. If the student is staffed at >20% of an FTE, a staffing must be held – at the student’s current school and with the student’s current teachers/specialists and family – to determine if the proposed placement is appropriate. Either way, the charter school has no say at all in whether a student with a special need gets to come to the school. Furthermore, in our state, special ed expenses are generally calculated as a per pupil cost for every student in the district, and the charter then pays the central admin for their total student population. If a school has 250 kids and average district expenses for special ed are $1,000 for every pupil in the school district, the charter pays into the central kitty $250K. In our case, we pay into the central kitty, and then the district is responsible (legally and financially) for providing all special ed services necessary to comply with the law to any of our qualifying students, and the district’s Spec Ed staff is responsible for heading the IEP team, and handling any due process issues. We have a number of students who are on IEPs, and a number more receiving services under Response to Intervention (RTI) plans or modifications related to 504 plans. </p>

<p>The same is true for English Language Learner services – though districts (again, in our state, the legal entity for federal purposes) can, according to the Federal Office of Civil Rights, choose to concentrate delivery of these services into specific schools for financial efficiency reasons. Our district used to do this, and then complained bitterly that we didn’t enroll as many ELL students as some other schools. We pointed out the discrepancy in how they chose to provide services, and eventually they went, “duh” and reconsidered their original decision to only offer ELL at a handful of schools. </p>

<p>On the disciplinary front, our charter schools – and our neighborhood schools – may suspend students under specific circumstances, but disenrolling or expelling students is handled at a district level, and is not a decision that the charter school may make.</p>

<p>You are absolutely correct that parents who are more invested in their child’s education may take on the lottery process more willingly than parents who are less invested, but is that really any different than some parents choosing to move to areas where the schools are known to be better? From my perspective, an excellent charter school that holds a random lottery for available spaces is a lot more fair than my neighborhood school that requires that your family invest in a home costing >600K to have a chance to go to the school. My D’s charter school had students who lived in million dollar homes, and students who lived in trailer parks or low income apartments. That’s a whole lot more economic diversity than you find at almost any of the neighborhood schools.</p>

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<p>Interesting discussion. In our state, WI, charter schools have not really taken off as they have in other areas. In the charter schools that I am familiar with, the teachers continue to be part of the union. Pay scales are no different than for regular schools. Charter schools are usually created to meet a specific need. The district I work in has a small charter to help high risk students make the transition from middle to high school. In the district I live in, there is a charter school for bilingual education and they are working on creating a middle school to focus on sustainability. A neighboring district has one that focuses on the Core Knowledge curriculum. At the high school level, charters are often formed to serve at risk students. </p>

<p>I don’t see charters in our state as providing a better education so much as providing a different way of educating students. All students in charters are required to participate in the state’s NCLB testing program so accountability is not much of an issue. If parents are clamoring to get into a particular WI charter school it is because they are looking for a specific type of programming, not usually because they think their kids will get a better education. </p>

<p>We do have vouchers in Milwaukee and it is a very popular program that many people would like to see enacted in other areas of the state. However, if they did provide vouchers elsewhere, I don’t think we would see a mass migration of students from public to private schools. There just aren’t that many private schools in the state in the first place.</p>

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<p>Of course it is possibleto reform public schools without charter schools, it is just very difficult. Charter schools do serve special ed kids. There are some that ONLY serve special ed kids. Charter schools are all different. Some are great. Some of pretty god. Some are corrupt. The bads ones get shut down very quickly.</p>

<p>The best part about Charter schools is that they put pressure on traditional, government run public schools to become innovative and compete for students. Our public schools have become much better in the fifteen years since we started charter schools.</p>

<p>The point to keep in mind is that althoug charter schools tend to improve traditional public schools, that is not their main purpose. The issue is not about improving schools, it is about improving educational opportunities to individual students.</p>

<p>If families have choices, many of those families will seek out diverse schools. Diversity expands. individual needs are more often met.</p>

<p>Charter schools are not a panacea</p>

<p>No school can make up for poor parenting.</p>

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<p>pugmadkate: "My biggest criticisms of KIPP schools is that they require parents to sign documents stating they will be highly involved. That’s a very effective way to weed out students. And speaking of the neediest students, of their lowest scoring students who enter at fifth grade, 60% are gone by eighth grade.</p>

<p>I do not believe there can be true reform unless it addresses all students, which charter schools do not. "</p>

<p>60% gone by 8th grade sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But in 2008, 17 of the nation’s 50 largest urban school districts had graduation rates that were less than fifty percent. While that doesn’t break up by income quartiles, you can put money on the fact that the graduation rates are even worse for the lowest income students, who are also likely to be the ones who enter middle school furthest behind academically. </p>

<p>And that’s why you see KIPP – and several other programs – working hard to extend the model into elementary school, so that you have a chance to work with kids before they get years and years behind. </p>

<p>And on the parent involvement issue – expectations are everything. A popular columnist’s article on teachers featured stories about two teachers at the same very low income urban elementary. One bemoaned the lack of parental involvement, and the fact that few of her student’s parents bothered to come to conferences. The other required parents to attend conferences – wouldn’t send home the report card – and set up additional times that worked for families with difficult job schedules, and had virtually full participation. Any surprise that she had nearly 100% participation? </p>

<p>It is absolutely wrong to think that low-income parents don’t care about education. I haven’t seen that at all. They may not have a lot of resources, but they care very deeply. But many have had really poor interactions with school – both their own schooling and prior experiences with their child’s school – and schools too often do a really poor job of reaching out to families. </p>

<p>In a neighboring school district, a very low income school was plagued by high absenteeism in general, and students who frequently left for six weeks or so around Christmas to go to family gatherings. That school entered into a partnership with the local food bank to provide backpacks full of food – enough for a family of four for a full day of the weekend – for every student who attended school all five days in the week. They also revised the school year to start earlier, and had a longer planned winter break. Guess what? Their attendance rate jumped dramatically. </p>

<p>It can be done, but it takes real focus and some creativity. Personally, I think that all kinds of schools should take up this challenge, but I’ve had years and years of folks in public education explaining why it is all about the family, and “what do you expect?” Well, I expect a lot, and if it takes some renegades to come in and show what can be accomplished, have at it!</p>

<p>The other aspect I like about charter schools who operated under the approval of strong authorizers and good contracts is that bad schools can get shut down. And do.</p>

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<p>Here’s a timely article from the NY Times, published online today and I believe appearing in tomorrow’s print edition. It reports on criticism of the Harlem Children’s Zone schools, widely cited as charter school “success stories.” Harlem Children’s Zone spends about $16K per kid per year in the classroom and additional thousands per kid per year in outside-the-classroom programs, much of it private money; it’s thus not a scalable model as very few communities can afford to pay that much per child, and critics say it hasn’t been definitively shown that lavishing all those resources on kids actually produces better educational outcomes. And while early standardized test score results were promising, these schools have apparently faltered after New york State tightened up its testing requirements. </p>

<p><a href=“In Harlem Children’s Zone Schools Have Their Own Problems - The New York Times”>In Harlem Children’s Zone Schools Have Their Own Problems - The New York Times;

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<p>The criticism (in this article and elsewhere) isn’t particularly that Harlem Children’s Zone isn’t effective – it does seem to be more so than most of the other interventions that have been tried in that area – but that it is a tremendously expensive program, and some other charter schools in the area are getting very similar academic results with a lot less money.</p>

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<p>Well, I’m not so sure about that. Here’s a direct quote from the NY Times story:</p>

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<p>Those seem like pretty ambiguous results. No one’s saying it’s failing, exactly. Only that what it’s delivered so far may be a lot less than the hype. So is a 38% pass rate better than a 29% pass rate for Harlem overall? Sure, but it’s not good, it’s still below average, and it’s still worse than most other charters are getting. And I have to say, having spent the past weekend in NYC and driving down 125th Street, Harlem is undergoing enormous demographic changes, becoming much more upscale than I’ve ever seen it. So I’m skeptical about any claims of big educational gains in that area as measured simply by standardized test pass rates, which, until I see data to the contrary, could just as easily be the function of a changing demographic self-selecting into charter schools, rather than the consequence of charter school reforms. Indeed, that’s what the “F” grade in “student progress” seems to imply—it’s not the same kids in this school doing better (that’s what “student progress” measures), but rather a change in the demographic composition that’s producing higher test scores.</p>