For Release Sunday, May 16, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
Are charter schools still the best hope for students from America’s low-income urban families?
Some charters do fail and are terminated — victims of poor management or inability to raise students’ achievement scores.
But two powerful experiments — one in Boston, the other in the San Francisco Bay Area — suggest the power of well-run charters to break through barriers and dramatically increase the potential fopr inner-city children to succeed.
Critics have said test scores in charter schools aren’t materially better than regular public schools. Even when charter school scores are better, the critics dismiss the findings by suggesting the charters have an advantage because they’re skimming off students from committed families already more engaged in their education.
But a rigorous Harvard-MIT study of Boston area students, sponsored by the Boston Foundation, has shown otherwise. Massachusetts uses lotteries to decide which children get admitted to charter schools — and which don’t. So the researchers were able to compare the subsequent academic performance of the lottery “winners” and “losers.”
And what they found was extraordinary. At both the middle and high school levels, students who’d won the charter lottery subsequently scored impressive gains, both in math and English skills, compared to students who’d lost and remained the regular public schools.
“We were thrilled with the charter school results,” says Mary Jo Meisner of the Boston Foundation. “There’s been a feeling there’s nothing you can do for poor, urban kids unless you cure poverty” and “fix” the entire environment that holds them back. The test results, she adds, show that’s “just not true.”
A more recent Boston Foundation-sponsored analysis, Meisner says, explains a critical difference: time in school. Compared to the regular Boston schools’ short days, the charters typically offer longer hours. Combining that with more personal attention to each child’s needs produces real results.
Plus, charter students scored far better than students in Boston’s “pilot” schools. The pilots are a cross between charters and regular public schools that the Boston Teachers Union had initially agreed to, but subsequently resisted (presumably out of fear of loss of control over hours and working conditions). The union’s intransigence angered Mayor Thomas Menino, who’d initially seen the pilots as a way to raise standards without a bare-knuckles fight with the union.
Based on its charter school findings, Boston Foundation President Paul Grogan and his colleagues led a major campaign to double the number of charter school seats available in Massachusetts. Enlisting corporate and civic allies, it formed a broad “Race to the Top Coalition” to take advantage of the school funding competition being conducted by the Obama administration.
Gov. Deval Patrick, at first hesitant, embraced the idea. And the Legislature, notwithstanding members’ fear of teacher union retribution, passed a landmark education reform bill giving underperforming school districts major new powers to help lagging students, including the right to move or fire teachers, start new schools and expand school hours.
Significantly, the bill doubled the state’s number of permissible charter school seats — from 16,739 seats to 35,082 seats for the most underperforming urban school districts.
In California, there’s a 20-year old program — “Making Waves” –that’s been coaching underprivileged African-American and Latinos kids in Richmond and San Francisco through the public schools and in college.
The program, founded by multimillionaire investor John Scully and the late Rev. Eugene Furlough, is the epitome of “wrap-around, year-round service.” Children aren’t just provided tutoring and ongoing academic enrichment but every assistance from solid meals (children with higher protein intake have higher achievement scores) to mental health counseling (to cope with trauma many have experienced).
And the results are little short of sensational: Virtually all the students graduate from high school and 94 percent go on to college, including such schools as the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton, Stanford, Emory, Harvard and Yale.
With its full-time staff of academic advisers, psychologists, social workers and nutritionists, Making Waves has extraordinarily high per-pupil costs (roughly $21,000 a child a year). But by forming its own charter school — overcoming bitter opposition of the Richmond School Board — the program has been able to get some government funding to supplement its high, philanthropy-provided costs.
There’s no chance, in Scully’s view, to break America’s “cycle of poverty” in troubled neighborhoods unless we increase our per-student expenditures dramatically to address young peoples’ myriad needs. Such an investment, he argues, “will be recouped many times over in economic growth and increased productivity.”
It’s a difficult message to absorb in hard economic times (especially in a California with its gargantuan deficits). Though as both the Massachusetts and Bay Area reforms suggest, there’s one constant: charters, with their entrepreneurial flair and freedom from work-rule focused school unions and deadening school bureaucracy, will have to figure prominently in the equation.
Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.
For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.
4 Comments
Your comparison is unfair. If public schools were able to have small classes and more adult attention, they would do as well or better. Having been a teacher in high school, community college, and university, I know that small classes raise motivation and performance for students of all abilities.
Also, attending school in one’s neighborhood has multiple benefits to the students, the neighborhood, and to the environment.
Betty Taylor (former teacher, current city councilor)
I have wondered how the wealthy served themselves with Charters. Charters have done a number on Albany Public Schools and did my April column on the subject. Then I saw what Gonzalez wrote. FYI, Paul
Albany charter cash cow: Big banks making a bundle on new construction as schools bear the cost
Juan Gonzalez – Daily News
Friday, May 7th 2010, 4:00 AM
My evolution on charter schools: Wealthy investors and major banks have been making windfall profits by using a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction.
The program, the New Markets Tax Credit, is so lucrative that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years.
In Albany, which boasts the state’s highest percentage of charter school enrollments, a nonprofit called the Brighter Choice Foundation has employed the New Markets Tax Credit to arrange private financing for five of the city’s nine charter schools.
But many of those same schools are now straining to pay escalating rents, which are going toward the debt service that Brighter Choice incurred during construction.
The Henry Johnson Charter School, for example, saw the rent for its 31,000-square-foot building skyrocket from $170,000 in 2008 to $560,000 last year.
The Albany Community School’s rent jumped from $195,000 to $350,000.
Green Tech High Charter School rents went from $443,000 to $487,000.
Meanwhile, all the Albany charter schools haven’t achieved the enrollment levels their founders expected, even after recruiting hundreds of students from suburban school districts to fill their seats.
The result has been less money in per-pupil state aid to pay operating costs, including those big rent bills.
Several charters have fallen into additional debt to the Brighter Choice Foundation.
You’d think these financial problems would raise eyebrows among state regulators – or at least worry those charter school boards.
But the powerful charter lobby has so far successfully battled to prevent independent government audits of how its schools spend their state aid.
And key officers of Albany’s charter school boards are themselves board members, employees or former employees of the Brighter Choice Foundation or its affiliates.
Christian Bender, for example, executive director of the foundation, is chairman or vice chairman of four of the Albany charters.
Tom Carroll, the foundation’s vice chairman and one of the authors of the state’s charter law when he was in the Pataki administration, was a founding board member of Albany Community Charter School and is currently chairman of two other charters, Brighter Choice School for Boys and Brighter Choice School for Girls.
Carroll also sits on the board of directors of NCB Capital Impact, a Virginia organization that used New Market Credits to pull together investors for all the Albany building loans.
A Brighter Choice official confirmed Thursday that the Virginia organization gets “a 3% originating and management fee” for all school construction deals that Brighter Choice arranges.
Under the New Markets program, a bank or private equity firm that lends money to a nonprofit to build a charter school can receive a 39% federal tax credit over seven years.
The credit can even be piggybacked on other tax breaks for historic preservation or job creation.
By combining the various credits with the interest from the loan itself, a lender can almost double his investment over the seven-year period.
No wonder JPMorgan Chase announced this week it was creating a new $325 million pool to invest in charter schools and take advantage of the New Markets Tax Credit.
So does Carroll see any problem with being simultaneously part of the landlord, tenant and lending bodies for Albany charter-school construction?
“I sit on the nonprofit NCB Capital Impact board as a volunteer,” he said this week. “On that board, I have never voted on any of the deals that Brighter Choice Foundation has been a party to.”
Albany is exhibit A in the web of potential conflicts that keep popping up in the charter school movement. It’s one reason the state Legislature should refuse to lift the current cap on charter schools unless it also adopts stringent new government auditing rules.
If wealthy investors and banks can double their money simply by building charter schools, taxpayers deserve to know exactly who arranged those deals, who will benefit and what they will ultimately cost each school.
jgonzalez@nydailynews.com
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2010/05/07/2010-05-07_albany_charter_cash_cow_big_banks_making_a_bundle_on_new_construction_as_schools.html#ixzz0nuwXEB5y
Our teacher union critics point to work rules and control of working conditions, the ability to hire and fire, and lack of performance based incentives as the culprits in the never ending race to the bottom of educational achievement in the US. Yet, other advanced countries, also with uninized teacher corps, perform very well in the educational achievement of their school children.
Just as we have experienced the economic distortions of a “military industrial complex” we now face the distortions of a “financier-charter school complex.”
The teacher unions have been advocating smaller class size, enriched sylibus, paraprofessionals, and more funding per student, for decades.
What makes American urban school children more professionally challenging to teach than their peers from the suburbs? Teacher Unionism? Perhaps low achievement is the legacy of racial discrimination, an underfunded public sector and class and race enforced ‘anti-intellectualism’? Why is it that we ‘invest’ in suburban schools and ‘subsidize’ urban public schools?
Comment received from Chris Jones, vice president for research of the Regional Plan Association, New York City:
I’m not an educator, but like many of us I’ve long had a deep interest in education as a central and often neglected issue in urban development. In full disclosure, I’ve also spent the last four years helping to launch a new public elementary school that my daughter attends in Washington Heights. The experience has given me more knowledge and insight—and I’m sure biases as well—than any research I’ve read or conducted.
My main disagreement with your article, as with much that has been written about charter schools and other education reforms, is that it draws conclusions that are far broader than the evidence suggests. The two examples that you cite may very well be places where charter schools have performed well, but there are many places where they have not measured up. I’m not familiar with the Boston Foundation study, and would be interested in reading it. The Making Waves program sounds like a wonderful model with a long track record, but it’s not at all clear to me that its success has as much to do with it being a charter school as with the extraordinary resources that it has been able to garner. There are dozens of examples successful public schools that can only imagine what they could do with $21,000 per pupil!
The only recent comprehensive study of charter schools that I’m aware of is the CREDO study showing that less than a fifth of charter schools outperformed comparable public schools. No matter how you view the study, there is no objective evidence that charter schools, on average, perform any better than public schools. I’ll go a step farther and argue that we don’t even have the tools to do this type of evaluation. Standardized tests and graduation requirements vary so much from state to state and even year to year, and have been shown to give widely inflated results of progress compared to the National Achievement of Education Progress scores, that any studies that rely on these measures are suspect. The emphasis on testing, which is almost exclusively focused on English and math, has also created a perverse set of incentives in which art, science, history and civics get short shrift, schools focus on excessively on short-term results, principals shift their best teachers to grades where test results matter most in school evaluations, and lower performing students are all too often encouraged to transfer out. This is not only detrimental to long-term outcomes, but it also makes it even more difficult to use these tests as a measuring stick of school performance.
But the biggest problem is that this movement to hold charters as the answer to public education would require them to be something that they can’t be. Unless there is oversight that insures quality and matches resources to needs, and until they are required to take every student who walks through their doors, then they can’t take the place of the public school system. And yet that would undermine their main rationale—freedom to innovate. There are unquestionably a number of wonderful charter schools and places where they have provided a needed shake-up to complacent school districts. But I suspect that what separates the successful charters from the failures and mediocre examples are the same things that characterize successful public schools—sound management, a focus on teacher quality and professional development, a rich curriculum, individualized instruction, strong family involvement and the money to provide and maintain these resources. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to institutionalizing these across all schools.
My fear is that the push toward more charter schools is pushing us toward a new segregation. At the top will still be the affluent families who would never think of sending their children to the type of regimented classrooms that seem to characterize charter schools. In the middle will be poorer families who are savvy or lucky enough to attend a high-quality charter school, and at the bottom will be those in a failing charter or a neglected group of public schools that are required to take the most difficult students.
Obviously, the status quo in education is unacceptable, and the optimistic side of me hopes that the creative tension unleashed by the charter movement will lead to more rational reforms. I think you identified two promising avenues in your article—a restructuring of the standard school day and year to handle the demands of 21st century education and the attention to the full range of social, emotional and academic development exhibited in Making Waves. But the right lessons and reforms won’t happen if we rush to anoint what is still very much a work in progress. The more I think that I know about education, the more I’m humbled by how hard it is to get it right. On that score, I encourage you to take a look at this fascinating interview with Diane Ravitch on why she has changed her mind on school choice and other reforms: http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/05/17/diane-ravitch-on-being-wrong.aspx. Even if you don’t agree with her, it’s really a discussion about how difficult it is to change course in any public policy debate.