As Obama’s Department of Education touts its charter-school-propelling “Race to the Top,” whose regulations were issued last week, let’s heed the moral of the fable that we all learned in grade school: In the end, the Tortoise beats out the Hare. Alan Gottlieb recently wrote about a plan by the Denver Public Schools to effectively morph charters into standard neighborhood schools, whereby kids in a particular catchment area would be steered to them by default. This is a terribly important move whose outcomes we should carefully observe. Charters typically require students’ parents to enter them into lotteries, from which they might be selected to attend the given school. This creates a huge self-selection bias problem, whereby the students who wind up in charters will be the children of engaged parents, and who will therefore tend to do better than their peers, no matter the school they attend. I wrote about this in the Boston Globe a few months back: Critics of charter schools have long expressed concern that charters tilt toward students with certain advantages over their peers in traditional public schools. To matriculate at a charter school, a child typically needs to be entered into a lottery of all those students seeking admission. This requires having a parent or guardian who is highly involved in a child’s education — enough to know about the possibility of his or her child attending a charter, to conclude that to do so would benefit the child, to apply to enter the lottery and follow its proceedings. Charter parents must also frequently agree to substantial participation in the child’s schooling. Children of parents who play this active role in their education will tend to perform better in school than children of less-involved parents. The effect of such parental involvement has been measured: Controlling for race, gender, and socio-economics, students with involved parents will tend to achieve at about the 75th percentile — well above average. Surely, most parents want their children to excel in school, and beyond, and will work as well as they can toward those ends. But for any of a variety of reasons — health, language barriers, constraints from employment, or, sometimes, lack of concern — some children simply do not have stable adult guidance in their schooling. Parental engagement in education should be strongly encouraged, but having involved parents should never be a prerequisite for a child to gain access to the best opportunities. That would mean many kids – those who are already somewhat disadvantaged — would unfairly miss out. Different jurisdictions have studied this phenomenon to varying degrees, but in Boston, for instance, it’s well-documented: A 2009 study by the pro-charter Boston Foundation made it clear that students entering charter schools entered with higher test scores than their peers. Despite these inherent advantages, and even more disturbing because of them, charters vary wildly in the quality of education that they provide: The pro-charter hype can make it hard to believe, but studies have repeatedly demonstrated that, on average, charter students tend to perform at or below the level of their peers in traditional public schools. (Here’s a recent study out of New York . And there are multiple federal studies , undertaken by the charter-friendly Bush administration, with similar findings.) Cash-strapped states need to be wary of the pro-charter hype, especially as the federal government urges them to reorient their budgets and education policies in order to vie for a paltry one-off shot of $4 billion in stimulus funds — which amounts to less than one percent of annual total public school spending across our nation. (Rhode Island is the only state with no school funding formula, and has the worst reliance on property taxes to fund education. Yet creating a single new 75-student charter became the focus of local education “reformers’” efforts this year, as they scrambled for a piece of that pie.) To improve the quality of public education is an unambiguously laudable goal, and so too are many of the more specific undertakings that Obama is encouraging: “reinvigorating math and science education,” promoting stakeholder collaborations, implementing “statewide longitudinal data systems,” “improving teacher preparation,” and so on. But there’s no quick fix to our education system: While many are indeed of high quality, the current crop of charters has proved no panacea. Where charters outperform traditional public schools, we need to make sure that placements are fairly distributed. Where they perform worse, states must stop turning a blind eye, and reign them in. Pedagogy is quite important, but genuine equity in education will occur only in a generally equitable society: No education reform is comprehensive that does not entail progressive taxation, a stronger labor movement, and environmental and social justice more broadly. More on Parenting
Read the original post:
David Segal: Slow And Steady As We "Race To The Top"
