"'Waiting for Superman' is the most important public-relations coup that the critics of public education have made so far."

October 22, 2010 8:54 AM

The Myth of Charter Schools. A response to the case for charter schools advanced by "Waiting for Superman."
posted by availablelight (103 comments total)

tl;dr: It's the poverty, stupid.
posted by wcfields at 9:03 AM on October 22, 2010 [5 favorites]

... combined with ...

there is a clash of ideas occurring in education right now between those who believe that public education is not only a fundamental right but a vital public service, akin to the public provision of police, fire protection, parks, and public libraries, and those who believe that the private sector is always superior to the public sector. Waiting for “Superman” is a powerful weapon on behalf of those championing the “free market” and privatization. It raises important questions, but all of the answers it offers require a transfer of public funds to the private sector. The stock market crash of 2008 should suffice to remind us that the managers of the private sector do not have a monopoly on success.
posted by philip-random at 9:08 AM on October 22, 2010 [15 favorites]

The problem with most conceptual critiquing of charter schools (and particularly Ravitch's work, btw) is that it completely misunderstands the intent of the charter process. Two of the biggest equity problems in education are:

1) Schools and teaching strategies for poor kids haven't been given nearly the same level of innovation that other schools have.
2) Poor parents, unlike rich parents, can't afford to move somewhere or pay tuition in order to choose where their kid goes to school.

Charters are free schools open to anyone who applies (unless more students apply then there are spots, in which case a lottery is held to give them out at random) which give poor parents the ability to actually pick a school for their kid. Charters also have the statutory freedom to try out really interesting new kinds of stuff - better student engagement, longer school days and years, boarding schools, etc. All of this leads us to a better understanding of what works and what doesn't in public education for poor kids.

Should charter boards be more careful about who gets charters? Probably. But because of the regulatory structure, it's far easier to close a bad charter then it is to close a bad traditional public school. Perhaps more importantly, bad charters lose students as parents clamor to get their kids in the good schools.

Chartering is, admittedly, a somewhat extreme approach. On the other hand, we've got a very extreme problem.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 9:08 AM on October 22, 2010 [12 favorites]

philip-random: "all of the answers it offers require a transfer of public funds to the private sector"

Given both that charter schools are free by law, and that many charter schools aggressively raise money from foundations to supplement the paltry sums they get from government, the reverse is actually true.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 9:09 AM on October 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

It should be noted—and Guggenheim didn’t note it—that Canada kicked out his entire first class of middle school students when they didn’t get good enough test scores to satisfy his board of trustees.

From what I read the HCZ decided to terminate their Middle School program after they determined that it was basically too late to start children in the program at that point and that they needed to focus on raising the level of younger students to bring them along and then reopen their middle school program. That is a far cry from trying to juke the stats by cutting the middle schoolers out.
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 9:12 AM on October 22, 2010

My first year of teaching was done in a charter school in California. I have since taught exclusively in public schools in Washington, where we don't have charter schools.

Ultimately, charter schools are great when they work as designed and as written. The idea is to serve specific target populations. Charter schools for the deaf. For special education needs. For the arts. Whatever. Often, these would be exactly the sorts of things that the public schools don't have the money to focus on properly anyway, so the charter schools would be doing the public schools a favor by handling the target population in question.

What HAPPENS, however, is that the for-profit companies behind them get greedy and want to go beyond that. It happened at mine, and it shot the services we were designed to provide straight to hell.

Additionally, and I know this is a sort of separate topic: bonuses for teachers don't work. The "bonus" quickly becomes the STANDARD, and then a teacher who isn't making those bonus targets feels pressured to meet those bonus goals -- which aren't always realistic depending on the student load the teacher has. Yet that teacher starts fearing for his or her job, or just wanting the supervisor off his/her back, and next thing you know numbers start getting fudged and students start getting recorded as having higher achievement -- and readiness for bigger things -- than they have made in reality. The students are the ones who get short-changed in that.

If we're all above average, then nobody's above average.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 9:13 AM on October 22, 2010 [23 favorites]

I currently work at a charter school as a classroom assistant. The problem I see with the for-profit attitude is that it doesn't actually help the students. Each month the teachers in my classroom have an enormous amount of paperwork to do, which definitely cuts down on the time they are able to spend with their students. (We are independent study, so our days are different than traditional school). These reports have to do with testing, grades, attendance, and are all ultimately tied into funding.

Every charter school is different, so it's silly to suggest that more students should be going to charter schools. As someone mentioned above, some charter schools are focused on art or music or in the case of the one I work at, it's independent study, designed to help students who are behind in school get ahead. Not every charter school is going to fit the needs of the general population of students. A lot of students would do really poorly at my school.

I think charter schools can be a great alternative, but they're not Jesus fucking Christ, savior for all humanity. When they work, it's awesome. But just like public schools, they can be a giant mess, too.
posted by too bad you're not me at 9:21 AM on October 22, 2010 [4 favorites]

Talk about burying the lead. Here's what the first link really wants you to know about charter scools, but waits 12 to mention:

[I]t evaluated student progress on math tests in half the nation’s five thousand charter schools and concluded that 17 percent were superior to a matched traditional public school; 37 percent were worse than the public school; and the remaining 46 percent had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school.

So, on the whole charter schools are worse than public schools on this measure.
posted by NortonDC at 9:29 AM on October 22, 2010 [11 favorites]

Are those first two paragraphs from different articles?
posted by Navelgazer at 9:30 AM on October 22, 2010

But waits 12 paragraphs, that is.
posted by NortonDC at 9:30 AM on October 22, 2010

I like the concept of charter schools as a school designed to meet specific needs, but in a lot of ways a lot don't.

Nuking the public education system in the way proposed in the film (from what I've read - waiting for DVD rental) is not the answer.

Supporting and growing the schools and the kids' envioroment in and out of school can do more. I have seen some of what it can do.

That said, my kids were pulled from highly rated public and private schools by me for a number of reasons - partially monetary, but mostly because despite the high rating of the public school and it's two program tracks, my child's needs were not being met, even with at home and after school intervention. We are a few months into this public magnet school, and we will see.
posted by tilde at 9:36 AM on October 22, 2010

Here's the thing about dwelling on a student's socioeconomic circumstances: it IS the single most important factor, and it's also totally beside the point, because it's not controllable.

The single best predictor of cancer, cardiovascular events, diabetes, etc., is looking at the health status of your same sex parent. But we don't fuss at people, "Hey, take care of yourself so, statistically your kids will be healthier." Because that's stupid. We don't fuss at people over their parent's health status because it's not a controllable factor.

I think it's fair to say that if everyone had a choice, they'd grow up with stable, not impoverished, happy, caring parents. And that would be fantastic. But just like parental health history, we don't get to choose our parental socioeconomic status, either.

If you want to improve something, you focus on the factors you can control.
posted by Leta at 9:36 AM on October 22, 2010 [2 favorites]

The stock market crash of 2008 should suffice to remind us that the managers of the private sector do not have a monopoly on success.

The poor performance of our current public school system should suffice to remind us that the managers of the private sector also do not have a monopoly on failure.
posted by madajb at 9:37 AM on October 22, 2010 [9 favorites]

Leta: "The single best predictor of cancer, cardiovascular events, diabetes, etc., is looking at the health status of your same sex parent. But we don't fuss at people, "Hey, take care of yourself so, statistically your kids will be healthier." Because that's stupid. We don't fuss at people over their parent's health status because it's not a controllable factor."

This. A million times this.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 9:39 AM on October 22, 2010

The problem with charter schools is the for-profit part. I worked at a non-profit charter school and it kicked ass. It continues to kick ass, in fact, and part of the reason, certainly, is that the goals of the school and everyone involved in it are the education and well-being of the kids - NOT a profit motivated bottom line. That's the problem with health-care, too.

Holy crap - I guess I AM a socialist.
posted by dirtdirt at 9:40 AM on October 22, 2010 [11 favorites]

The linked rebuttal focuses a lot of its rage on "charter chains".
Most of the charter schools around here are non-profit types.
I wonder how those fit into the argument.
posted by madajb at 9:40 AM on October 22, 2010

The idea is to serve specific target populations. Charter schools for the deaf. For special education needs. For the arts. Whatever. Often, these would be exactly the sorts of things that the public schools don't have the money to focus on properly anyway, so the charter schools would be doing the public schools a favor by handling the target population in question.

So charter schools are just private magnet schools? I attended magnet schools within the San Jose Unified school district for several years as a child, and they seemed very successful to me.
posted by muddgirl at 9:42 AM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

There seems to be a problem with the formatting of the multi-page view, with 2 paragraphs from an at review starting off page 2 - i think a few key paragraphs from the actual article are missing, too.

Here is the full article on one page, without the mistake.
posted by i less than three nsima at 9:44 AM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

My experience as a student and a parent with the public schools is that schools only work when there's cooperation and communication between the parents, teachers, principal, district, and students. Any failure in any part of this system leads to some sort of failure in the school.

My daughter goes to a school in a well-to-do area of Seattle that's surrounded by lower middle class neighborhoods and apartments filled with first generation immigrants. It's successful because the PTA raises $100K a year to fill in the gaps the state is no longer providing, which means that we're essentially paying a $300/student annual tuition just to keep the school from collapsing. The PTA is strong because it's packed with upper class stay at home moms that, while being mostly hands-off with curriculum, have a lot of say in who the leadership will be.

But the other schools have lots of two-income homes or single parents. They don't have the time to work on the PTA, and they don't have the cash to help fill the need gap in the school. As a result, their test scores are lower.

I really do think charter schools won't fix squat unless they're for very specific needs a school district can't afford to provide. In the case of Waiting for "Superman" the directors have more argued the failing is that people are fighting to get in to charter schools because the regular schools are so crappy. And I'd agree. But the schools aren't going to get fixed until we adequately fund schools so parents don't have to run around raising money every damn year. And they won't get fixed until we stop trying to throw single solutions (charter schools, vouchers, etc.) at the problem like it's a panacea.

We need to treat failing schools like cancer. You would not treat melanoma the way you treat lung cancer. And you wouldn't treat stage 1 melanoma the way you treat stage 3 melanoma. And yet, this is exactly how the charter school and voucher advocates are treating bad schools.
posted by dw at 9:48 AM on October 22, 2010 [4 favorites]

muddgirl: "So charter schools are just private magnet schools?"

They are similar in the sense that many are built around a specific educational methodology - arts education, for example. Many charter schools don't have that kind of focus but instead work on the particular challenges of urban schools.

They aren't in the sense that a school which is privately administered is not the same thing as a public school. Charters are run by outside organizations (82% are non-profits, btw and even schools run by for-profit organizations are non-profits governed by the same rules) but receive public per-pupil funding just like traditional publics. Charters are only allowed to ask your name and address on an application: they do not have access to test scores, race or any other factor they could use to choose their students. Charter schools are free to attend. And if more students apply then there are spots available, they hold a lottery to determine the difference. Those lotteries can and should be public both to ensure that they're fair / above board and because as a country we should be forced to see the thousands of parents who try to get their kids into a good school and fail because we were unable to muster the resources and political will to help them.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 9:54 AM on October 22, 2010

The single best predictor of cancer, cardiovascular events, diabetes, etc., is looking at the health status of your same sex parent. But we don't fuss at people, "Hey, take care of yourself so, statistically your kids will be healthier." Because that's stupid. We don't fuss at people over their parent's health status because it's not a controllable factor.

Well for me the point is that people who say the education equivalent of "All of our doctors are lazy and stupid, just look at this statistic showing that 90% of people who get brain cancer die! Let's get rid of these free publicly-run hospitals and replace them with private for-profit ones, so that everyone with cancer can get better!" There's no magic way to run a hospital so that nobody dies, and the people who claim they can are most likely snake oil salesmen.
posted by burnmp3s at 9:56 AM on October 22, 2010 [10 favorites]

It strikes me that charter schools may work, not because they're privatised or don't have teacher's unions (although the lack of unions probably won't hurt, at least in the short run, because the power equation has swung so far in the direction of teachers), but rather because they self-select for parents and kids that actually care about getting educated.

Lots and lots of parents and kids don't really care about school. They send their kids only because they're forced to, and don't care how their kids do. This is terribly disruptive to classes, because the teachers end up spending so much time managing the obstreperous students. Combine that with pure stupidity like No Child Left Behind (teach kids to pass tests, not to learn), and it's no wonder we're not getting good results out of those schools.

But self-assemble a group of teachers, students, and parents that all genuinely want the kids to get educated, and lo and behold, they'll get educated.

Another part of the problem is this really strong meme that's taken hold of the culture that's there's no such thing as raw intelligence, and that all students are equally special and wonderful and should all go to college, and the curriculum should be dumbed down until even the rock-stupid kids can pass and gain entry to college. The refusal to understand that intelligence is on a bell curve, and that a large chunk of kids simply aren't suited to lives of mental work, is another big contributor to the failure of schools in general.
posted by Malor at 9:58 AM on October 22, 2010 [7 favorites]

So, on the whole charter schools are worse than public schools on this measure.

Possibly, but it's a mistake to view all "charter schools" as the same thing, and to link their failure or success across the board.

The nice thing about charter schools is that they're easy to shut down. So if you have 17% doing better and 46% doing the same and 37% doing worse, you shut down the underperforming 37% (or let them know that they're on the skids), and take a hard look at what the 17% outperforming section is doing right. Then you try to replicate it.

The problem with elementary education in general is that it's stultified and very difficult to try out new ideas. Not all new ideas will necessarily pan out or work. Some may work very poorly, others may be inconclusive, but others may really be great. We need to figure out which are which, and charter schools provide a good way of figuring that out.

Otherwise we're just going to be stuck in the relentless pursuit of mediocrity, which is what you get if you refuse to take risks.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:03 AM on October 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

The biggest problem with the American primary education system is not the schools, the funding or the teachers unions.

The biggest problem with the American primary education system is that Americans by and large do not value education. It's a cultural problem. The most popular kids in school are the athletes and the pretty people. The smart kids are somewhere near the bottom.

When the football team makes the playoffs a whole town will show up for the pep rally and ride a convoy of buses to the games. When an academic team does well the only people who show up are the parents of the students involved.

The children of immigrants do well in public schools because their parents know how important education is and push the kids. Even those kids are going to have an uphill battle though, because they face the peer pressure of a culture that says being smart is worthless if you aren't popular.
posted by Bonzai at 10:03 AM on October 22, 2010 [21 favorites]

If you have a Harper's subscription, everything by Jonathan Kozol is awesome.
posted by chunking express at 10:07 AM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

The biggest problem with the American primary education system is that Americans by and large do not value education. It's a cultural problem. The most popular kids in school are the athletes and the pretty people. The smart kids are somewhere near the bottom.


I would actually argue it's partly this, and directly counter to Kadin2048's view, it's also the utter lack of systematic stability. There's been too much widespread organizational change, much of it politically motivated, over the last 30 or so years in our education system. Far from not being responsive enough, my sense (informed both by my personal experiences as a student and as an IT consultant servicing my state Department of Education) is that our educational systems have become a mess of instability, with sweeping organizational changes taking place constantly over such small time periods that no one ever gets a chance to master whatever the new system or standards are before they're scrapped for something new. All this ceaseless, neurotically self-conscious educational reforming creates way too much administrative and bureaucratic overhead, and puts all the focus on the mechanics of administering schools, rather than the substance of classroom education. That's my take.
posted by saulgoodman at 10:09 AM on October 22, 2010 [5 favorites]

Here charter schools have an easy time removing students who create real problems. The "regular" schools just rotate them around the district.
If charter schools do well, it's partly because they can select who they serve.
posted by cccorlew at 10:09 AM on October 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

It strikes me that charter schools may work, not because they're privatised or don't have teacher's unions (although the lack of unions probably won't hurt, at least in the short run, because the power equation has swung so far in the direction of teachers), but rather because they self-select for parents and kids that actually care about getting educated.



Yeah one of my co-workers is on the board of one of the really prominent charter schools here in NYC - and we talked about this exact issue, and he basically acknowledged that there is not enough data to say with any sort of statisically validity that this issue alone doesn't contribute to the outperformance of the "good" charter school.
posted by JPD at 10:10 AM on October 22, 2010

The author of the linked article seems to be indulging in a myth of her own, namely that the main critique with public schools is that they're full of bad teachers. While there certainly are plenty of anecdotes about paper-pushers failing kids, that isn't the core of the critique, as I understand it.

Reforming administrators have lots of ideas about making public schools better that don't focus primarily on getting rid of bad teachers. I'm not that big of an educational wonk, but I am close enough to the discussion to know that much. Rather, the critique is that teachers unions have used their collective bargaining power to accomplish two things:

1) Make innovation and flexibility all but impossible, and

2) Completely unbalance the teacher/non-teacher ratio, driving educational costs through the roof.

As a data point, Texas, which isn't widely regarded as having one of the more problematic school systems in the country, has a teacher/non-teacher ratio of almost 1:1. Even worse, the trend is that once you've taught for a while--and are actually starting to get really good--you get rewarded with an administrative or support position and never stand in front of a class again.

Charter schools, not having collective bargaining agreements with their teachers, are far more free to experiment and come up with non-standard, specially-tailored solutions for their situations and students. I don't have any inherent objection to the government providing schools--Adam Smith, the father of free-market capitalism, thought it was an essential component of a functional industrial society--but the crux of the argument of the linked article seems to be that Waiting for "Superman" is a crock of shit because public schools aren't actually all that bad. Well, they may not be in some places, but they are spectacularly failing the people who need that education most. Sticking one's head in the sand and refusing to consider the possibility that the public sector might have screwed this one up does not strike me as a helpful response.
posted by valkyryn at 10:15 AM on October 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

All this ceaseless, neurotically self-conscious educational reforming creates way too much administrative and bureaucratic overhead, and puts all the focus on the mechanics of administering schools, rather than the substance of classroom education. That's my take.

Yes, but there's an argument to be made that this is more a factor of the public school system's size and its restriction by collective bargaining agreements than of anything inherently problematic about reform. The school at which I worked--a small private outfit, not a charter school--had almost zero bureaucracy, and teachers were free to do just about anything they thought would effectively communicate the curriculum. There wasn't much in the way of institutional stability, but the kids still learned a ton.

That system couldn't work very well in a public school system, even a small one, due to the sheer amount of paperwork involved.
posted by valkyryn at 10:18 AM on October 22, 2010

The point that socioeconomic background is not controllable is a decent one, but it does not follow that this means it should be ignored. We do not fuss at people over their parent's health, but we do use family history as an important factor in determining the best way to keep a person healthy. Likewise, we cannot change the socioeconomic background of students, but it can certainly be a very useful indicator of where special attention needs to be paid. In addition, just because an underlying cause is not controllable does not mean that the extent of its influence is likewise uncontrollable. A sailor can't choose the wind, but they can still sail north.
posted by Nothing at 10:23 AM on October 22, 2010

Rather, the critique is that teachers unions have used their collective bargaining power to accomplish two things: ... As a data point, Texas, which isn't widely regarded as having one of the more problematic school systems in the country, has a teacher/non-teacher ratio of almost 1:1. Even worse, the trend is that once you've taught for a while--and are actually starting to get really good--you get rewarded with an administrative or support position and never stand in front of a class again.

Texas is a really really odd choice to defend this particular "critique", given that collective bargaining is essentially illegal for public employees (including teachers) in Texas. Sure, they can form "teachers' unions" which

may "meet and confer" or consult annually with school boards and administrators over salaries, benefits, and working conditions. But the teachers' requests are non-binding, and points of impasse between teachers and administrators are usually resolved without the benefit of outside mediation or arbitration.

Texas teachers may not generally utilize collective bargaining tools such as strikes or walkouts.
posted by muddgirl at 10:24 AM on October 22, 2010 [4 favorites]

The biggest problem with the American primary education system is that Americans by and large do not value education. It's a cultural problem. The most popular kids in school are the athletes and the pretty people. The smart kids are somewhere near the bottom.

I have to say that it's less not-valuing-education (which, do not get me wrong, is a widespread problem) and more the valuing of things like athletics over education. I grew up the child of immigrants and after my family pretty much got a handle on the fact that no, I am never going to enjoy or like sports -- this is after years of tennis and swimming lessons -- and so they only pressured me to get straight As. On the other hand, the kids who did like and do well in sports were pressured to shine at both. Education was objectively more important, but they didn't work any less hard at sports than the kids (and parents) who didn't give a good goddamn about school.
posted by griphus at 10:27 AM on October 22, 2010

If charter schools do well, it's partly because they can select who they serve.

I don't know if this is generally true, and I highly I doubt it. At the charter school I worked at we had a much, much higher ration of students who were either discipline or academic challenges than at the regular public school I worked at. Precisely because they weren't getting what they needed at other schools so they gave us a try. My impression, although I acknowledge it may not be universally true, is that if you are accepting the public money you are beholden to open enrollment just like anybody else. That's why there are lotteries instead of simple admission tests.

The disproportionate ratio of kids with extra needs was a huge challenge at my school, exactly the opposite of what you are saying.
posted by dirtdirt at 10:33 AM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

> concluded that 17 percent were superior to a matched traditional public school; 37 percent were worse than the public school... So, on the whole charter schools are worse than public schools on this measure.

There's a process in marketing called split-testing: It consists of generating a variety of alternatives to what you are already doing-- your control-- and measuring the differences in results. By the principles of this process, the news that 37% flopped is unimportant-- essentially, they would just go in the category of Failed Experiment, and the most you can learn from them is what *not* to do-- but what does matter is that 17% beat out the control. You then repeat the process, again and again-- the idea is not to get deterred by the many failures, but find the one or two things that work, duplicate them, and test again, with additional innovations, as quickly as possible.

With this process, small successes can snowball rapidly.

Now, obviously, you can't rearrange educational systems as easily as you can rearrange an ad. And it would suck for one's kid to wind up in a Failed Experiment school that's inferior to the standard. But the baseline performance level of our schools, particularly our urban schools, is so low that radical experimentation, with all its concomitant failures, is a necessity.

But then, of course, there are the really hard-to-solve problems-- the ones outside the classroom: Poverty, parental unavailability, and cultural expectation. Fixing those problems would require broad, massive, and most importantly, sustained effort. To some degree, conservatives are correct to harp on culture as a culprit-- but culture doesn't come from nowhere. It's a product of experiences, both of the early-childhood-imprint variety, and of the here-and-now variety, most importantly, the absence of obvious "realistic" role models for success, and the absence of "realistic" social incentives for success.

Factor in the lifestyle of the underpaid, stressed-out, and overworked teacher, one not infrequently either burnt out and soon to be driven out, or despairing and jaded, and on top of that, an extremely change-resistant union, and on top of that, a populace unwilling to invest in education and support services, and you have a constellation of elements that seem to demand the equivalent of the Apollo program, and a ten- or twenty-year effort, in order to fix.
posted by darth_tedious at 10:36 AM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

Related: Warren Julius Wilson argues Americans generally neglect institutional causes of poverty.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 10:38 AM on October 22, 2010

Texas teachers may not generally utilize collective bargaining tools such as strikes or walkouts.

Huh. You're right, that is a really odd state to use as a data point. My bad.

Lemme see if I can find another state's ratio.
posted by valkyryn at 10:41 AM on October 22, 2010

Charter schools lag in serving the neediest
Here is Boston, we have pilot schools. Built in response to pressure for charterization, pilot schools are designed to have the autonomy to innovate and adapt the curriculum according to the students needs. Teachers there, however, are unionized but work a slightly longer day (150 hours extra per year), and are compensated for it. Additionally, the teachers do no have some of the “traditional” rights as outlined in the contract. However, each pilot school negotiates a “work agreement” that has the force of contract with the administrators. If there are problems with the working conditions, there are ample avenues for this to be addressed by the teachers’ union, the superintendant, and the school administrators. What makes them different than charter schools is that they receive students by lottery (save for a couple specialty/artsy schools), and tend to carry them through until graduation, unlike many charters that remove or exclude students they think cannot pass the state-wide exams.
posted by Captain Sunshine at 10:45 AM on October 22, 2010

Lemme see if I can find another state's ratio.

No, it's still illustrative. Why is Texas's ratio so poor even without collective bargaining protection? Could it just be lobbying? Or are there other factors that we can identify in Texas that will also apply to states with stronger teacher's unions?
posted by muddgirl at 10:46 AM on October 22, 2010

> directly counter to Kadin2048's view, it's also the utter lack of systematic stability. There's been too much widespread organizational change, much of it politically motivated, over the last 30 or so years in our education system. Far from not being responsive enough, my sense (informed both by my personal experiences as a student and as an IT consultant servicing my state Department of Education) is that our educational systems have become a mess of instability

The missing link here is the assimilation of what each experiment reveals.

The split-testing model is useless, if you don't incorporate the small successes you find after each iteration... and instead just leap to a new experiment.

Instead of testing A, B, C... finding B works, and then forgetting about B, then proceeding to test the very different D, E, F, it's important to actually implement B.

This produces BD, BE, BF... so that some small gains are locked in, and can be built upon.
posted by darth_tedious at 10:48 AM on October 22, 2010

Right, data for PA is available, here.

They're doing a lot better than Texas*, but the ratio is still somewhere between 1.5:1 and 3:1, depending on how you want to categorize special ed teachers. I mean, they're important, but they aren't the sort of front-line teachers which drive the educational system. PA still has over 100,000 of those, compared to a total employment of about 171,000, but.

Either way, that seems to me to represent a huge number of non-teachers (or non-traditional teachers). The school at which I taught had... five non-teachers and a ratio between 4:1 and 6:1, again depending on how you count special ed teachers.

And muddgirl is right, I screwed that one up. I have no explanation other than the inherent bureaucratic nature of state agencies as to why Texas has so freaking many non-teachers on its payrolls. But that doesn't exactly hurt the argument for charter schools much, so I'm still glad I mentioned it.
posted by valkyryn at 10:51 AM on October 22, 2010

Here's the thing about dwelling on a student's socioeconomic circumstances: it IS the single most important factor, and it's also totally beside the point, because it's not controllable.

WTF? We could have a redistributive tax structure that sends more money to the poor.
posted by Marty Marx at 10:52 AM on October 22, 2010

It seems kind of obvious that the reason a charter school would do better at this stage is that students are desperately trying to get into them (through those lotteries) meaning that the schools end up only with students devoted to getting a good education. If you start with a group of students who really want to be there, it's a lot easier to have good results. But if every school were a charter school, you'd have to deal with the kids who are making things tough to start with...

on preview:
The disproportionate ratio of kids with extra needs was a huge challenge at my school, exactly the opposite of what you are saying.

Are they still kids who really want to do better, though? I think attitude does make a difference... It's harder to teach a room full of kids who are not paying attention than kids who are at least trying to understand, even if they're having trouble with it.
posted by mdn at 10:58 AM on October 22, 2010

New York's numbers are slightly worse than Pennsylvania's. They've got a little over 220,000 teachers--no breakdown on type, so my concerns about special ed above still apply--but over 110,000 non-teachers, for a ratio no better than 2:1. With numbers like that, saulgoodman's complaints about the destabilizing effect of reforms should be completely unsurprising.
posted by valkyryn at 10:59 AM on October 22, 2010

Leta: Here's the thing about dwelling on a student's socioeconomic circumstances: it IS the single most important factor, and it's also totally beside the point, because it's not controllable.

It is if we're talking about public policy, not just education policy. Ravitch notes that in the US, the child poverty rate is 20%, while in Finland it's 5%. (In Canada, it's 11%.) Programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit can make a pretty big difference.

From Ravitch's article:

[Eric] Hanushek [of the Hoover Institution] has released studies showing that teacher quality accounts for about 7.5–10 percent of student test score gains. Several other high-quality analyses echo this finding, and while estimates vary a bit, there is a relative consensus: teachers statistically account for around 10–20 percent of achievement outcomes. Teachers are the most important factor within schools.

But the same body of research shows that nonschool factors matter even more than teachers. According to University of Washington economist Dan Goldhaber, about 60 percent of achievement is explained by nonschool factors, such as family income. So while teachers are the most important factor within schools, their effects pale in comparison with those of students’ backgrounds, families, and other factors beyond the control of schools and teachers. Teachers can have a profound effect on students, but it would be foolish to believe that teachers alone can undo the damage caused by poverty and its associated burdens.

posted by russilwvong at 11:02 AM on October 22, 2010 [2 favorites]

I think it's fair to say that if everyone had a choice, they'd grow up with stable, not impoverished, happy, caring parents. And that would be fantastic. But just like parental health history, we don't get to choose our parental socioeconomic status, either.

This argument is one of the reasons why there is so much poverty in the US. While individuals (especially children) have fairly limited control over their economic status, we as an entire society have a great deal of control over this. We could legislate a universal minimum income and tax to pay for it. We could provide parents with a living wage and access to high quality health care so they would have more time and energy to spend on their children instead of working multiple jobs. We could drastically increase the amount of money spent on every child in public school so they can all enjoy the interventions sponsored by some charter schools, such as SEED. Economic status is not genetically ordained, but is an artifact of the economy and institutions which we collectively create and regulate. So the analogy with heart disease and cancer is not really apt.
posted by unsub at 11:03 AM on October 22, 2010 [7 favorites]

WTF? We could have a redistributive tax structure that sends more money to the poor.

We already kind of do--I pay way more in taxes than people making half as much as I do, most of which goes to social programs--but even a more progressive system wouldn't change things all that much. There's just not enough income or wealth out there for everyone to have enough money to be financially secure.

I think a better solution would be to keep the tax structure the way it is and completely revamp the way we spend money. We seriously do not need to be spending 70% of the Medicare budget fighting cancer in people over the age of 65. Because that's basically what we're doing. The money we spend on health care for the last six months of people's lives is equal to about seven or eight times the budget of the Department of Education. I'm also pretty sure we don't need to be spending $500 billion in defense.

Change those two things and you can shave about $900 billion off the budget. We'd still need about another $400 billion in savings somewhere to break even, but even spending a fraction of that on education, infrastructure, and social insurance could be revolutionary.
posted by valkyryn at 11:06 AM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

We could legislate a universal minimum income and tax to pay for it.

Theoretically, but 1) we can't even pay for current levels of spending, which aren't even close to that, and 2) there's this little thing called "inflation" which suggests that this sort of thing isn't actually going to solve your problem.
posted by valkyryn at 11:07 AM on October 22, 2010

The point that socioeconomic background is not controllable is a decent one, but it does not follow that this means it should be ignored. We do not fuss at people over their parent's health, but we do use family history as an important factor in determining the best way to keep a person healthy. Likewise, we cannot change the socioeconomic background of students, but it can certainly be a very useful indicator of where special attention needs to be paid. In addition, just because an underlying cause is not controllable does not mean that the extent of its influence is likewise uncontrollable. A sailor can't choose the wind, but they can still sail north.
posted by Nothing

Oh, certainly. My point is not that poor kids can't be helped, my point is that public school apologists need to stop using poverty and/or parental involvement as an excuse.

Yeah, a student having a chaotic family life makes a teacher's job harder. Of course. A patient living in a tenement with rats and roaches is harder to treat than one living in a clean, safe home. In other news, the world isn't perfect.

I don't mean to sound unsympathetic. It's that I think the "poverty argument" is two things: one, it's a rationalization, basically stating that it's okay if schools fail students because of factors that fall outside the scope of school. Two, it's just reinforcing the idea of just inequality- that poor are poor because they're dumb, and if they would just decide to be successful, already, then *poof* they would be.
posted by Leta at 11:08 AM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

posted by philip-random at 9:08 AM on October 22

Ah, thanks. I haven't seen the doc yet, but that helps a bit to explain why Meg Whitman been buying ads touting it.
posted by MikeKD at 11:12 AM on October 22, 2010

@Leta: "Here's the thing about dwelling on a student's socioeconomic circumstances: it IS the single most important factor, and it's also totally beside the point, because it's not controllable. ... If you want to improve something, you focus on the factors you can control."

Yeah, here's the thing about that: What ends up happening is that we DENY that socioeconomic status has any impact on schooling, and we not only then fail to address students' problems properly, but we cause negative impacts on student learning by messing with the schools, because we can control them. Let's fix the schools, it's what we can fix! Oh, wait, not all schools work very well. WE MUST FIX THEM MORE.

NCLB came with the laudable goal that every child can learn ... regardless of background. And that all children be held to the same standard, jettisoning the "soft bigotry of low expectations." Also laudable. What is NOT laudable, however, is that when impoverished schools failed, they were throw into restructuring that removed sources of stability from the students' lives in favor of unproven methods of reforming schools. Restructured schools don't typically perform any better than they did before they were restructured, but they often have lower staff morale, less-experienced teachers (although experience only matters up to a certain point), etc. Schools that anchor neighborhoods are closed, removing a source of stability for an entire community.

NCLB and similar laws would help MY district a lot more if instead of saying "We can control the schools! let's fix the schools!" it said, "It's the poverty, stupid" and pumped money into broad-based anti-poverty initiatives, including but not limited to public transit (so parents without cars can get to work); high-quality, low-cost child care; free or low-cost birth control (1/3 of women in my state who want it can't access it); lead abatement (locally among the highest rates nationwide and we have, as a result, very high special ed rates); nutrition programs; parks and recreational programs so children have safe, green places to play; police on the streets; adult education; well-funded libraries ... these are things off the top of my head that would help MY students succeed, but what we actually do for them is fire all the teachers they've known their whole lives or close the neighborhood school, thereafter removing the playground for liability reasons. Let me tell you, that works great!

As for charters, in my state, if a local school board denies a charter, the chartering group can go around them and get a charter directly from the state, and then are not subject to the same local oversight. If you are a large enough donor to statehouse races (which many for-profit charter groups are), you will obviously get the charter from the state (which has an incentive to grant charters since the state is ranked for federal money in RttT and other programs based on friendliness to charters). There are few school boards that DON'T grant the charters because they don't really have a choice.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:17 AM on October 22, 2010 [5 favorites]

Captain Sunshine: "Charter schools lag in serving the neediest"

As I've said upthread, charters don't get to pick who goes to them: parents decide whether to enroll in a lottery, and randomness decides who goes. Most charters do their best to recruit parents for their lotteries, but when charters get significantly less per student than traditional publics do, it's hard to hold them responsible for who shows up to their lotteries.

That funding disparity, by the way, says a lot about the problems many charters have with achievement. That 17% of charters do better than traditional publics despite not having the same funding and despite being stocked with students who by definition weren't having success in traditional public schools says something really dramatic.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 11:19 AM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

...the crux of the argument of the linked article seems to be that Waiting for "Superman" is a crock of shit because public schools aren't actually all that bad.

Here! Here! Waiting for Superman isn't a crock because the public schools aren't actually all that bad. Some of them are "all that bad". Waiting for Superman is a crock because it reduced a rather complex problem with a crazy amount of interdependent variables to the oversimplified film making formula of Victim (Kids, Kids' Families), Villains (Teachers Unions, Democrats who take money from Teachers Unions), and Hero (Charter Schools) when every player here has elements of victim, villain and hero in each.** Thus, further creating divisiveness between all of the parties involved. Nice job, film makers!

Charter Schools are not heroes and, as was pointed out up thread, have more control of which students get to stay or get kicked for behavioral problems that affect classroom management. And most of them are worse than Public Schools. Teachers Unions have been protecting bad teachers with tenure, but they also protect really good teachers with tenure (especially those who would be fired by local school boards for teaching *gasp* EVOLUTION) when job security is one of the few perks of a low-paying, not highly valued, thankless job. Let's not even get into the uncontrollable factors around parental involvement, socio-economic factors, special education needs (SO many private schools do not take special ed kids), etc. etc.

Ugh, I walked out of that film feeling like an opportunity had been wasted.

**I don't agree with everything that Rosenbaum said in his critique of the film, but he knocked it out of the park with THAT observation.
posted by jeanmari at 11:20 AM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

Marty Marx, russilwvong, and unsub, I was unclear, and I'm sorry.

Public schools cannot control for their students socioeconomic status. The typical public school in an area with a high poverty rate can't fix problems of a parental unemployment or a parent not seeing her kids because she has to work three jobs. Schools can't fix the problem of a lack of parents altogether. Schools can't provide safe, stable housing.

Just like a doctor can't control for family history.

If a cardiologist throws his hands up and says, "These rotten patient outcomes aren't my fault. All these poor outcomes are among patients with a rotten family history,"... well, that cardiologist should find new work.

The same for teachers and schools. Sometimes they get students with very serious problems that can't be helped by the school. It is the job of the school and of teachers to educate that child anyway.

This is NOT to say that we shouldn't do more as a country to combat poverty. We should. But that's moving fairly far afield from the FPP.
posted by Leta at 11:21 AM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

@Kadin: "The nice thing about charter schools is that they're easy to shut down. So if you have 17% doing better and 46% doing the same and 37% doing worse, you shut down the underperforming 37% (or let them know that they're on the skids), and take a hard look at what the 17% outperforming section is doing right. Then you try to replicate it."

First, it's very DIFFICULT in my state to shut down an underperforming charter. (And this would seem to be the case nationwide, based on how very many underperforming charters there are.)

Second, you don't get to replicate what the charters are doing well. It's generally proprietary and you must pay to play. Or pay to develop it in-house, which isn't cheap and isn't easy to justify to your local tax base, especially when schools are struggling to keep teachers.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:23 AM on October 22, 2010

Sorry, here was the link I meant to include of Rosenbaum and Lee debriefing the film with students at Northwestern's School of Education and Social Policy. I'm not entirely a fan of their critique, but they raised some interesting points.
posted by jeanmari at 11:24 AM on October 22, 2010

"rather because they self-select for parents and kids that actually care about getting educated. "

Freakonomics has a chapter on this exactly, and claims that, yes, that is the defining factor.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:24 AM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

Eyebrows McGee, yes. I agree with all of that. I think the question is should we do that stuff as part of our education system, or beef up the sort of patchwork approach that exists now.

Given that American public seems to be a little less stingy with money for education than what we are with "welfare", calling those programs education reform might actually work.
posted by Leta at 11:26 AM on October 22, 2010

l33tpolicywonk: "despite being stocked with students who by definition weren't having success in traditional public schools says something really dramatic."

Whoa -- charters are open by lottery to ALL students, and typically the students who apply are NOT the ones not achieving success in traditional public schools. They're generally the students with committed parents who ARE succeeding in traditional public schools whose parents are concerned about the quality of the education the students are receiving.

My district opened a charter this year. It was open to all students, and by lottery, but they still managed to cherry-pick off high-achieving students and the most-involved parents -- the ones who volunteer in the classroom, who run the PTA, etc. -- because THOSE ARE THE PARENTS WHO CARE ENOUGH TO APPLY TO A CHARTER.

And if you run the statistics on the school, you will see that their racial and economic demographics closely match the district as a whole. (Although their special ed demographics do not, it's much lower at the charter. Also, we, the home district, are still required to pay for all their special ed -- they don't pay for that.) But what you won't see is what you'd know if you worked closely with the students and parents in the district -- they have DECIMATED our PTAs in our struggling schools. What you'll also discover, if you watch, is that when the district expels a student, we are still required to educate that student, and that student's scores still count towards our district numbers. When the CHARTER expels a student, they come back to the district, and we are required to educate them, and their scores count towards the district's numbers, not the charter's. They don't HAVE to cherry pick the best students without any problem behaviors -- they can either "counsel them out" if they're sleazy, or simply follow absolutely fair discipline policies, which will ensure, because this is the way it works, that all the students with serious problems end up on the district's roster. Because we're required to educate ALL comers. (We also take all the expulsions from the local private schools, incidentally, as well as those from other public schools in the county under certain circumstances, because we run the county "safe" school for students with serious behavioral problems.) There is no asterisk in the school report card for being the "educator of last resort" for problem students countywide. It just pulls down your numbers and you get penalized.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:39 AM on October 22, 2010 [11 favorites]

@Leta: "I think the question is should we do that stuff as part of our education system ... Given that American public seems to be a little less stingy with money for education than what we are with "welfare", calling those programs education reform might actually work."

There have been some attempts in my state to do that, but the problem is that the feds are fairly limited in what they fund, and with the recession this year, the state cut back all its "extra" education funding for pretty much anything outside traditional K-12 instruction -- our adult ed, our GED programs, our early childhood programs, even in-school hearing and vision screenings! When families MOST need that help. Particularly in a recession, taxpayers do NOT want to hear about education funds going to anything other than K-12, even though early childhood spending now (for example) saves significant money later on in both educational costs AND in incarceration costs (sadly).

Some of these programs have been partially reinstated since the initial cuts, but funding is tight and the programs are significantly restricted.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:44 AM on October 22, 2010

"rather because they self-select for parents and kids that actually care about getting educated. "

It seems as though a few people in this thread have this idea, but it needs to be dispelled because it's simply not the case. A charter school is a public school, not a private school. As I mentioned, I currently work at a charter school. Believe me, a lot my students (and many of their parents) do not care about getting educated. Our school serves a lot of students who are super behind, partially because they and their parents are not invested in their education. We do have students and families who care, but are ill-equipped to really help their students flourish, but we also have a fair amount who are complacent (or perhaps just worn down by the system by the time they get to us).

Again, we don't get to select our students. Any student may come as long as they live in the school district. That means the motivated and unmotivated.
posted by too bad you're not me at 11:47 AM on October 22, 2010 [2 favorites]

"Any student may come as long as they live in the school district. That means the motivated and unmotivated."

If they MAY come but are not REQUIRED to come, that means the motivated.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:49 AM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

Not neccesarily. Each student situation is unique, but most times they have been kicked out of traditional school and are sent to us as a sort of last resort.
posted by too bad you're not me at 11:51 AM on October 22, 2010

typically the students who apply are NOT the ones not achieving success in traditional public schools

Anecdotes are not data, or something, but my experience was different than tat, and that you could divide the kids very cleanly into three groups.

1. Kids who whose families were very involved and wanted more than regular public schools were offering. These kids were succeeding wherever else they were, or they had always gone to charter schools, or were homeschooled.
2. Kids who where not able to succeed in public schools. Autism spectrum, emotional/behavioral issues, sensory integration. These kids did also have involved parents, and I feel extra terrible for kids in their situation whose parents aren't involved, but still: those kids take ton of resources and we had many more of them there than we did at the regular public school I worked at previously. My experience may not have been common, I really don't know, but it seemed like a predictable situation that would happen elsewhere.
3. Kids who lived nearby whose parents were involved enough to to say, gosh, it'd be easier if little Jimmy went to school here instead of taking the bus 5 miles.

Absolutely, all 3 groups involve parents who are active to some degree. And that's a huge plus. But not even close to all the kids, in my situation, were kids who were able to succeed elsewhere.
posted by dirtdirt at 11:56 AM on October 22, 2010

Something else that should be remembered in all of this:

The primary champions of ANY educational reform that take up the banner of the plan du jour in the eyes of the public, and who make the most noise about it, are always:

*People who stand to make money off of said reform, and
*Politicians who clearly have NOT studied the situation, but who DO benefit from having a quick, easily-articulated answer to show that yes, they care so very much about education, now please donate to my campaign.

If education were a real priority in American politics, we'd hear a lot more about it, and it would involve much, much more money and much more air-time from our politicians. If American education received a boost in funding that were even 1% of what the gov't ponied up to bail out Wall Street, it would leave everyone's eyes spinning.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 12:12 PM on October 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

Eyebrows McGee: "THOSE ARE THE PARENTS WHO CARE ENOUGH TO APPLY TO A CHARTER."

Your agency is very strange here. I've never understood how charters get held responsible for who shows up to their lottery, especially when (for schools like KIPP) five or six times as many students as slots participate. These parents are, as I said above, ones whose kids were being so harmed by their traditional public schools that their parents went looking for alternatives - kids who aren't succeeding. I've known charter advocates who do their best, in spite of their lack of resources, to recruit a diverse pool of applicants, but they can't be forced.

The idea that anyone is interested in replacing all public schools with charter schools is a ridiculous strawman, just as the notion that anyone is interested in evaluating teachers solely on test scores is a ridiculous strawman (district negotiations usually end up with one side arguing test scores should be 10% of an evaluation and the other arguing they should be 50%).

I still have a hard time understanding how denying poor parents a diversity of school choices, particularly when rich parents have all those options, is justifiable. That not enough parents exercise the options available to them, or that not enough charters exist to cater to a diversity of student needs, is justification for more charter schools, not less. Of note here: the number of available charters is arbitrarily capped in 26 of the 41 states that allow them.

One more thing: I find the routine and often flippant generalizations about parents whose kids attend high needs schools in debates about this issue really troubling (your focus on parents who "don't care about their kids education" or jeanmari's assertion that parents and their families are at least partly villains in this story). There are a variety of reasons why poor and minority adults might distrust social institutions or make legitimate values choices which are different than yours or mine. That doesn't make them any less constituents of this country or its education system, nor does it make their decisions any less worthy of respect. Calling out mostly black and Latino parents for "not caring about their kids' education" gets way too close to a Cosby-esque cultural critique for my comfort.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 12:13 PM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

"Your agency is very strange here. I've never understood how charters get held responsible for who shows up to their lottery, especially when (for schools like KIPP) five or six times as many students as slots participate. "

I am NOT holding the charter responsible for who shows up to their lottery -- our own charter did an excellent job advertising within the local community -- but the fact is that the district is held responsible when the charter cherry-picks off the most-involved parents. That means the students left behind suffer.

My beef is not so much with charters, although they lack adequate oversight in my state and, as shown by the nationwide statistics, don't do particularly better than public schools in the majority of cases. My beef is for the students that are "left behind" by charter schools. My beef is with the punishment for public districts that are required by law to take all comers, even those expelled by every place else (including public charters) and are penalized for doing so.

"I still have a hard time understanding how denying poor parents a diversity of school choices, particularly when rich parents have all those options, is justifiable."

Because what is happening, functionally, is that some students are getting a private education with public dollars. Other students are not. It isn't fair (not that current public education in my state is fair -- we fund via property taxes with no equalization, but this is unfair in an entirely new way). And the students who are left behind are left with fewer resources, fewer high-achieving peers, and fewer involved community members and parents. It helps the few at the expense of the many. It is NOT an answer to failing schools -- it is a way to feel good about helping a handful of students, while leaving the rest in even greater misery. My charge is not to look out for the few -- I am responsible for the district as a whole. The charter we granted this past year is good for individual students, but it is damaging to our student body as a whole. That's a problem.

"your focus on parents who "don't care about their kids education" "

You have no idea the demographics of the parents who "don't care about their kids' education" in my district. And it is certainly no secret locally that we have a number of parents whose own problems are so numerous that no effort to engage them in their childrens' educations has yet been successful (a significant local drug trade is one easily-understood factor). Every week I look at a discipline report with, oh, 40 students (just suspensions and expulsions), and sometimes in HALF of the cases we have been unable to contact the parents by any method over a period of two weeks. We have parents go to court and argue their kid isn't truant because the parent "needs" a 5-year-old at home to babysit younger children or doesn't want them going to school anyway because education is "bullshit." These kids need our help and care as much as or more than students with involved parents, but it's very difficult when parents actively reject or interfere with their child's education.

I mean, I get barely-literate letters from inmates two states away saying they're displeased with Johnny's reading scores and have concerns about whether Johnny's in an appropriate program that's getting him the education he needs. And then we have parents show up to court actively high when their kid's been truant for three months. Someone's socioeconomic status, race, or even incarceration status has little to do with how much they care about their kid's education. But there are definitely parents who care, and parents who don't.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:30 PM on October 22, 2010 [5 favorites]

re: leetpolicywonk

The problem with most conceptual critiquing of charter schools (and particularly Ravitch's work, btw) is that it completely misunderstands the intent of the charter process. Two of the biggest equity problems in education are:

I think this is not really a problem with Ravitch's or others conceptual critique of charter schools, because it is not a conceptual critique of charter schools. These critics are making _practical_ critiques of charter schools. Meaning, actually looking at the data on who ends up going to (and staying in) charter schools. What sorts of results do charter schools get? These are not conceptual critiques, but critiques of outcomes. This is why she brings up Albert Shanker, former president of the AFT, who initially pushed for charter schools. Shanker and other initial supporters, such as Ravitch, hoped for exactly the kind of innovation, increased engagement, and support for the neediest students. But now they have seen what has happened with that concept, which is not a matter of 100 innovative experiments, with 17 of them working, but some cases of for-profit schools operating for... well, profit, and a lot of other non-profits realizing that quality and comprehensive education for a diverse set of needy students is not something you can do cheaply and efficiently. Charter schools are not magic pixie dust for educational outcomes.
The reason that a profit motive does not magically increase educational outcomes is that educational outcomes are long term and complex (even though the terrible statistics thrown around by Rhee et al give the appearance of simplicity, 10% of 8th graders can read at grade level! Horrendous! Shameful!). What you learn in 8th grade does depend in some way on what you learned in kindergarten. But at the end of kindergarten, most parents (I know I am not) aren't equipped to evaluate exactly how much and how well their child has learned. So no, I don't think that parents quickly and easily will flee the "bad" charter school for the "better" public school when the experiment seems to have been a failure.

too bad you're not me: This may not be the case at your school, but there is evidence that charters in general have fewer special needs children. Your school may not select its students, but that does not mean that other charters haven't behaved in ways that select theirs.

Valkryn: regarding the apparent myth that "firing bad teachers" will solve our educational woes. I wish you were right. But read this and tell me if that isn't the core of the current batch of reformers. Also, by the way, there are plenty of instances of collective bargaining and innovation existing side by side, or lack of collective bargaining and lack of innovation. Sidwell Friends (where Obama's kids go) is unionized. Massachusetts is, and Texas isn't.
posted by cogpsychprof at 12:31 PM on October 22, 2010

So, Yoram Bauman has a wonderful bit about how choice is a bad thing, economically, because of opportunity costs, and the worst thing in that case that can happen is for you to be offered two identical objects, because your net will always be zero.

It's silly. But in reality, I think it applies to schools. Any resources--society's resources, in general--which are put into a charter school are funds that are, by nature, then not available to put into the local public school. Even if both of the schools are good schools, something is lost because the public school is a part of a whole integrated system of public education... and the charter school is a private concern which is not connected to that system. All children are allowed to attend the public school system, by law. As long as the public is footing the bill, I think that's where the money needs to go.

The opportunity cost of charter schools is that all of those funds could have been used by the public school system, somehow. If the public school system, the one that is available to all children, is screwing up, then I certainly believe it needs to be fixed. If you want to spend your *private* funds on another school, then well, you're the one who faces the opportunity cost there. Private school versus all the things you could buy with that money if your kids went to public school.

The opportunity cost instead is passed on, not to the family who has chosen this other school, but to all the children who remain in the public school system. That, in turn, impacts the whole rest of society. Public funds should not be used to fund just a few private concerns here and there; they should go to improve the system as a whole.
posted by gracedissolved at 12:38 PM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

Also, more food for thought on the whole "teachers matter most" hypothesis, which seems to be accepted as truth now. Just as some factors can be changed (as in teacher quality), who is to say that the relationship between factors cannot be changed either? One possibility is that, for example, not only the quality of teachers could be changed, but also their relative importance, as Dan Willingham suggests here.
posted by cogpsychprof at 12:41 PM on October 22, 2010

cogpsychprof: "but some cases of for-profit schools operating for... well, profit, and a lot of other non-profits realizing that quality and comprehensive education for a diverse set of needy students is not something you can do cheaply and efficiently. Charter schools are not magic pixie dust for educational outcomes."

If you've read my posts upthread, you'll note I never suggested that charter schools can do this cheaply: in fact, I pointed out the ridiculous funding disparity between charters and traditional publics and said that most charters have to aggressively fund raise. All public schools, charter and traditional, need more money from government then they get now. A lot more money. Schools with the poorest kids need the most of it.

That being said, it's hard to make the case simultaneously that educating kids is expensive, and for-profit charter school operators are robber barons getting rich off the less-than-less-than-adequate per pupil funding the state gives them.

It's a conceptual critique because it responds to a strawman - the strawman being that anyone claimed charters were pixie dust or that all of them were great. Superman says 20% of charters are better. It also shows parents whose kids can't get into magnets and certainly can't afford Catholic school, even with scholarships and two jobs.

I've also never met anyone in education policy (and its where I work) who thinks that this is anything other than long-term and complex. But the long-term complexity of the problem doesn't make DC's horrendous academic performance (that 9% of DC's ninth graders will graduate college on time) any less horrendous or shameful. It is horrendous and shameful. The achievement gap is the legacy of centuries of institutionalized discrimination against African American kids in particular starting with slavery and continuing through Jim Crow and into the present day. The state of education in this country is a public emergency. That's the urgency underwhich KIPP and Achievement First and SEED and Green Dot and dozens of other charter operators work, and the more they can stand up for parents working two or three jobs to give their kids better then they themselves have, the faster our moral debt will be repaid.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 12:45 PM on October 22, 2010

All children are allowed to attend the public school system, by law.

Charter schools are public schools and, to a large degree, the admissions are completely open. Moreso than regular schools in some ways because they are not tied to neighborhoods.

It's really hard, because I absolutely agree with what you say, as a (former) educator, and as a person. But as a parent there's no chance in hell I am going to send my kid to our neighborhood's schools the way they are. None. Zero. We'll try for a hard-to-get transfer, or go to a charter, or move.

I'd love for the neighborhood school to improve, with my kid there or not. I'll vote for raising taxes, and if someone comes around with a tin can or a catalog of magazines, I'm in. But I am not going to gamble my kid's education on the future participation of my district and local parents there, certainly until it is demonstrably better and safer. So the school loses another kid with active parents, and X amount of funding, and the awful cycle continues. If you've got a good solution I'd love to hear it, but removing one of few things that does work for some families is not the solution.
posted by dirtdirt at 12:52 PM on October 22, 2010

But read this and tell me if that isn't the core of the current batch of reformers.

It's certainly an issue, and to be honest, I think schools would probably be better if job security wasn't guaranteed. I know my workplace could easily stand to fire 20% of our employees without missing a beat.

But just reading that, the complaints aren't just about bad teachers per se but integrally tied up with the bureaucracy of the public school system. Seniority-based employment systems are a huge problem independent of the quality of the work people are doing, because it makes it almost impossible to shift people around or change their job descriptions, not to mention making it almost impossible to attract and retain the new talent which is essential in any organization which aspires to excellence.
posted by valkyryn at 12:54 PM on October 22, 2010

Leta - sorry if my response was a bit snippy, but I don't think the point I was making was actually far afield from the FPP, as one of Ravitch's topics in the article (responding to a comparison in the film) is that social democracies like Finland often have better educational outcomes than the US in large part because of their investments in reducing poverty and educating and paying teachers. So I think the the issue of how the US as a nation prioritizes its expenditures is relevant, because the article discusses how these structural differences are kind of swept under the rug in the film's presentation, and this is an impediment to making edifying comparisons. (Specifying exactly how I think the federal budget should be redistributed to pay for such programs, however, certainly would be outside the scope of the discussion.)

But another aspect of this problem which I think is seldom emphasized enough is the disparities in financial resources for schools across various states and school districts. As long as school funding is directly (though not solely) tied to local property taxes, public education will be grossly unequal between districts which are home to rich and poor populations. So much for starting out on a level playing field.
posted by unsub at 12:55 PM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

The problem with public schools could be fixed easily but we'd have to stop killing brown people to get the money to fix them.
posted by fuq at 12:58 PM on October 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

Ok, I can see how my argument (and those like mine) is confusing, and inconsistent on the point of the cost effectiveness. I can agree that charters aren't full of robber barons. I don't think we get anywhere by questioning people's motives (yours, or mine, or Michelle Rhee's). Which is one thing that bothers me about Rhee saying that she has the best interests of the children in mind, whereas the teachers are just thinking about their jobs. There are some bad apples in the for-profit charter world who have managed to make millions, despite the charter funding shortfall (see C. Steven Cox).
But one of the arguments for charter schools is that there is tremendous inefficiency in public schools, and charters can do a better job more cheaply (because they are businesses, in the free market, where everything is efficient). That may not be an argument that you are making, but it is out there.

I also think that it is somewhat disingenuous to say that no one in the educational policy world thinks this is anything but long-term and complex. The education manifesto by a large set of educational reformers (although Arlene Ackerman says she never signed it) does not read like an acknowledgement of a large, long term and complex problem. If you don't want to define these people as people in the world of educational policy, that is fine, but that is the educational policy that the public sees.

I grew up in DC, went to DCPS, and my dad has taught in DCPS for 15 years. I knew (and know) some of those ninth graders. I agree that it is horrendous and shameful, and a legacy of slavery and institutionalized racism. But holding teachers accountable for not single-handedly erasing this achievement gap is not part of the solution (and yes, when Hanushek says exactly that when he says that if we got rid of the bottom 10% we would erase the achievement gap in 3 years). I think the emergency and crisis thinking leads to the frantic search for short term and easy to implement solutions, for "turnarounds" and "rescues" as opposed to dedicated careers, and looking for the things that do work.

But I don't mean to lump you with Rhee, Klein, Duncan, Hanushek, etc, if that is not where you feel you belong.
posted by cogpsychprof at 1:03 PM on October 22, 2010

The state of education in this country is a public emergency.

So let's panic about it because, lord knows, we always do our clearest thinking and take the most effective steps when we're whipped into an emotional frenzy first.

Sorry, but all the alarmism is not improving the situation, in my opinion. It's leading to crappy half-solutions and clumsy grasping after pie-in-the-sky solutions that are at the same time never given proper opportunity to play out over long enough time scales to prove their results, because systemic educational outcomes can only be meaningfully influenced over much longer time-scales than our various interlocking political cycles ever permit. We're not reforming the system, we're over-thinking and noodling it to death.
posted by saulgoodman at 1:04 PM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

cogpsychprof: "But I don't mean to lump you with Rhee, Klein, Duncan, Hanushek, etc, if that is not where you feel you belong."

Hanushek's research on this point is actually fairly rigorous. You should follow the point through to the end, though - by replacing the bottom 10% of teachers with average teachers, you not only shrink the achievement gap - in 20 years, you've added to GDP enough that you could theoretically pay the teachers that remain twice as much. This isn't about getting rid of teachers so much as making teaching a more elite occupation that's desirable to high-performing college grads.

For the record, I'm generally against for-profits running charters, and I think Klein and Rhee (to a lesser extent) haven't done the best they could on the PR front. I've done research personally on leadership strategies under mayoral control (which I won't self link but, if you're interested, MeMail me for).

The "charters can do it cheaper" argument is out there: it's one largely confined to Republican ed reform circles. With the exception perhaps of Steve Barr at Green Dot, you won't generally see it among charter operators (particularly east-coast charter operators). Charter operators tend to like ideas like extended school time and paying teachers more which self-evidently cost more money.

Accountability for teachers is a double-sided coin. When we don't hold poor teachers (or principals or superintendents) accountable for their performance, we also don't reward the best teachers. That means both that we fail to learn from good teaching and that we passively discourage smart and creative people from the occupation. Finland has more social supports, but it also has a highly selective teacher training process, close government regulation of teaching positions and opportunities for the best teachers to advance.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 1:15 PM on October 22, 2010

So, I'm getting from this that charter schools are generally better funded; have newer facilities; have more dedicated administrators, outside supporters and (arguably) teachers; select for better parents (those who choose to apply) and better students (by expelling or counseling out the weaker ones) -- yet perform, on average, somewhat worse than public schools (37% worse vs 17% better).

As quick fixes go (as opposed to alleviating poverty, boosting the cultural esteem of education, and massively increasing education funding), charter schools don't seem too effective so far. Probably a better quick fix would just be outlawing local funding of public schools and the discriminatory differences in quality that produces.
posted by chortly at 1:38 PM on October 22, 2010

Sorry, I have a hard time finding Hanushek rigorous. There are a few assumptions which I don't buy.
The biggest is that teacher quality is a stable, measurable construct. I don't think we have shown that, with the value added measures, or however else he is measuring it. When you look at the value added measures, perhaps using the LA Times data, it is not nearly as stable a characteristic as the "get rid of the bottom 10%" headline suggests.
I don't see the value of following the point to the end, unless you have satisfied the logical prerequisites to get there.
I can agree that it is so much about getting rid of teachers as making teaching a more elite occupation. But from what I have seen, we get stuck on step 1 (getting rid of bad teachers), and just count on TFA and bonuses to handle step 2. I don't have data on this, but my own experience is that I wouldn't want my high-achieving college classmates teaching my kids kindergarten (or any elementary or middle school, really). Do we really want all of the smartest guys in the room from Enron going to teach school because it is more money and more elite?

To me, the "replace the bottom 10% of teachers, close the achievement gap" comes perilously close to saying that the achievement gap is not a hard problem or an outcome of generations of neglect. It feels to me related to the the John Roberts school of addressing inequality "The best way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race". Meaning, inequality isn't a real problem, just a few tweaks are necessary, requiring very little or nothing from most taxpayers. Hanushek's statement gives the false hope that we don't have to do anything about poverty, or the culture of schooling and education in this country, or how we regard the institution of public schools. All we have to do is identify those bottom 10% and get rid of them. Since he has already measured the impact of removing them, presumably he knows how to identify them. I haven't seen any evidence of that.
posted by cogpsychprof at 1:51 PM on October 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

Chortly: Better funded, nope. In Texas, anyway, charter schools do not receive funding from local taxes - only from state and Federal. I can't remember the exact breakdown but it was something on the order of 30% less. I think the"charters get better parents/better students, and expel the hard cases" idea is, at best, a jury-is-still-out sort of thing (everyone in here thinks whatever school they speak for gets the shaft - surprise! This is true! No matter where you go the grass is not particularly green when it comes to high-needs kids). At any rate, numbers can be massaged any which way: I say to do 54% were as well or better, and only 46% worse (than what? Who knows) with only 70% of the money is a pretty good return. At least worth further investigation.
posted by dirtdirt at 1:53 PM on October 22, 2010

Probably a better quick fix would just be outlawing local funding of public schools and the discriminatory differences in quality that produces.

The problem with that is you're now going to see richer parents hire tutors and other things outside of school to help. The inequity remains.

Our district last year decided to fix one spot where there's inequity. In Washington kindergarten isn't required, and so the state only funds half-day. If a school wants to go full-day, they could charge tuition for it. The issue was that the poorer schools would charge less while the richer schools would charge more, which would (of course) give the kindergarten teachers at the richer schools more resources. To solve this, the district now sets the tuition for everyone. And, of course, no one is happy -- the rich schools have less, and the parents at the poor schools are paying more.
posted by dw at 1:55 PM on October 22, 2010

It seems to me this is all a sad effort to squeeze blood from stones. It's not that we don't know what works -- we do: well-off children in well-funded schools with well-educated teachers produce well-educated students. That works. This here is just an effort to do it on the cheap, without fixing poverty, without massively increasing school resources, without paying the big salaries that would entice top-educated new teachers. While I enjoy low-cost innovation (the lifestraw; liquid glasses) it seems a tragedy that the greatest energy in American education is focussed on how to squeeze great education out of cheapo funding. But you just can't serve steak for McDonald's prices. Sure, we can figure out how to make the best damn Angus burger for $2 possible, but the room for improvement is severely limited by the budget. It's no wonder the evidence so far suggests that efforts to build first-world education for third-world prices are unsuccessful.
posted by chortly at 2:30 PM on October 22, 2010 [2 favorites]

I've seen several comments to the effect that charter schools can select what students they serve, and they don't help the chronic misbehavers or the ones whose parents don't care enough to get them into a charter school. I understand that charter schools can never fix the underlying problems for those students, but don't the rest of the children deserve a chance?

When I was 16, I went from one of the worst public high schools in the city to a non-profit charter school that had just opened in the same area. My parents would never have been able to send me to private school nor could they move, and my assigned public school was truly terrible. Now it's true, at my charter school there was a focus on super strict discipline and the headmaster was liberal with expelling students who chronically misbehaved. They could go back to the regular high school.

But I for one appreciated not having to deal with the knuckleheads all the time, the ones who make it impossible for teachers to teach because they act up all the time. Why should so many students like me be forgotten just because we are poor, in the wrong neighborhood, or don't speak the right language? My charter school served a large immigrant population (it received much of its funding from an pro-immigrant organization), affording students like me the opportunity to pick up some native Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish while giving poor immigrant students an equal chance at education.

It's a good thing that we remember the limitations of charter schools and all of the other alternatives. A lot of these problems cannot be fixed by ANY schools, period. The state of the schools is a symptom of a much larger problem (see The Wire, season 4). But they can do some real good and we shouldn't let political disagreements get in the way of that.
posted by Danila at 2:30 PM on October 22, 2010

All those kids need is a nice white lady and they'll do just fine in school.
posted by vespabelle at 2:38 PM on October 22, 2010

Listen up! Because of folks like Kuninobu here, this country's absolutely no good anymore. So the big-wigs got together and passed this law...BATTLE ROYALE. So today's lesson is... you kill each other off 'til there's only one left. Nothing's against the rules.
posted by Artw at 2:38 PM on October 22, 2010

@Danila: "I understand that charter schools can never fix the underlying problems for those students, but don't the rest of the children deserve a chance? "

Yes, but what I would submit is that the appropriate response would be adequate funding for alternative programs that remove problem students from the regular classroom, so that the remaining students can learn in a safe, non-distracting environment, and that "problem" students could receive the supports and interventions they typically need.

If we have, say, 10% of students who are behavioral problems and 90% who are fine (and 10% of a classroom is a HUGE number, really) and we provide a charter that educations 10% of the "fine" children, you have left 80% of the students behind with the problem students, when a better use of that money would be to put the 10% in a supportive, separate program and leave the 90% of "fine" students in a school that is now much more effective.

And this is really what I see as the problem with charters -- they help A FEW of "the rest of the children," but leave the vast bulk of the students behind. YOU got to go to the charter, but why should the rest of your non-knucklehead classmates have to stay behind? (Even to the point that the charter gets to remove the misbehavors and send them back to the public school!) Why shouldn't the priority be to provide a quality educational environment for ALL kids by removing the knuckleheads? Why, instead, should the priority be an education for a chosen (or lotteried) few?
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 2:51 PM on October 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

I understand that charter schools can never fix the underlying problems for those students, but don't the rest of the children deserve a chance?

Unless you're sending all non-"troublemakers" to the charter schools, then this argument cuts both ways. As Eyebrows McGee says, the right way to deal with this is to deal with these kids in the public system, not to have a small number of kids move to a different school, while most kids who want to learn are stuck with a now-disproportionate number of the "problem" students.

And of course it makes academic comparisons between charters and non-charters very suspect. If the only provable benefit is that you've eliminated "problem" students, there are plenty of ways to do that.

One "problem" student in a classroom can take up a ridiculously huge amount of a teacher's time and away from the other students. Giving them the structure and attention they need (and away from the other students) will be expensive, but it's the only real fix thats fair to everyone. (I'm also talking mostly about elementary education, where most "problem" children are that way due to circumstances outside their control)
posted by wildcrdj at 4:34 PM on October 22, 2010

Grading 'Waiting for Superman'
posted by kliuless at 4:56 PM on October 22, 2010

But I for one appreciated not having to deal with the knuckleheads all the time, the ones who make it impossible for teachers to teach because they act up all the time.

Repeated for truth. Here's what is so true, yet so completely unacceptable to most of the American public at a visceral level because we have funded the public school system so poorly that districts fight over every scrap:

It is more expensive to run a basic program public school because you have to take everyone, and taking everyone means that you have to deal with more gaps and problems. You can't cherry pick, as private schools can. To even out the "playing field" for public school teachers, you would have to funnel more resources to them to deal with the discipline problem kids, the special needs kids, the parents who aren't really around kids. Because those teachers need smaller class sizes and decent support just to keep control in the classroom. But that would never fly. Why? "Why should that school get more money than my kids' school I pay taxes I'm calling my Congressperson this is a travesty we need that special new football kid my Johnny has a scholarship to win yadda infinity." We want to pay the bare minimum for education, we want cost efficiencies, dammit! And when the result is a citizenry that can't find a job and turns to crime for survival; can't see the world in anything other than black and white; can't adapt to global changing markets? We blame the students. We blame the teachers. We blame the government. But it can't possibly be that we only care about education when it is OUR kid.

There is not a barrier of entry to being accepted to a public school related to effort or initiative (as in applying to a magnet school or charter school). What barriers you say? I'm currently navigating the CPS system as I have a child who will start kindergarten next Fall. I am a fluent English speaker with a graduate education who is technology-literate. The directions for how to navigate this system is so muddled and confusing that it has been a few months of reading blogs (CPS Obsessed; conferring with friends who are CPS parents and CPS teachers; attending the CPS School Fair (which I almost missed because I didn't know it existed...a friend alerted me); and pouring over the CPS website, websites for charter schools, and CPS booklets for me to get to the point where I "think" I know how to fill out all of these forms. It is insane. Now picture a non-English speaking parent. A technology-illiterate parent or one who doesn't have tech access. A parent who can't take the day off of work to attend a Magnet or SEES Open House which are ALWAYS scheduled on a weekday during the school day. A parent who is trying to figure out where to send all the kids and then get to work because--hey! Just because one kid got into a Magnet school in the lottery doesn't mean that your 2nd and 3rd will, even though they are supposed to get preference. These are BARRIERS. HUGE barriers. Even for parents who want better for their kids.

And if I hear one more person sniff, "Well, I'm not going to sacrifice MY kid's education by going to our nasty neighborhood school," I think I am going to barf. I live in a neighborhood where the families of kids who go to our neighborhood school speak--collectively--40 different languages at home. There is a 73% poverty rate and 919 kids. Guess what? Even the parents whose kids go to private school or got into a magnet are STILL INVOLVED IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOL. They donate money and time. Little bits all the way around, but it all adds up. Neighbors help the principal to make sure that the weekly (WEEKLY!) newsletter to parents is translated into Spanish, Urdu, Korean and Arabic. We don't just buy the magazines and popcorn, we DONATE STUFF. We fund the heck out of projects through Donor's Choose. We tend the school garden. We helped support the teachers to get a bad principal thrown out after a year. We show up at community-involved school events and plays, even though our kids don't go there. Because it is our neighborhood and THIS is the neighborhood school.
posted by jeanmari at 7:03 PM on October 22, 2010 [4 favorites]

I apologize for the grammatical and punctuation errors up there. Never drink wine and post. Let that be a lesson to all. Good night.
posted by jeanmari at 7:05 PM on October 22, 2010

HOMESCHOOLING, UNSCHOOLING,
HOMESCHOOL CHARTER SCHOOLS, AND EDUCATION FOR ALL. PLEASE EXCUSE, BUT I READ SOMEWHERE THAT 10/22 WAS "ALL CAPS DAY."
posted by emhutchinson at 9:12 PM on October 22, 2010

So the basic message of this movie is bust the unions, privatize schools, and mandate free-market libertarianism for everyone!
posted by Rarebit Fiend at 9:51 PM on October 22, 2010

Broad brushes. So appealing, so useless.
posted by underflow at 12:12 AM on October 23, 2010

Some charter schools are good; some are bad. But all charter schools offer the opportunity for teachers, administration, and parents to implement innovation and change in education. Some charters succeed in innovating education; some don't.

On the other hand, most traditional public schools-- especially in huge districts-- do not even offer that opportunity for change. They are stuck in bureaucratic gridlock.
posted by Wayman Tisdale at 7:12 AM on October 23, 2010 [1 favorite]

The problem with the cherry picking argument (funding as a zero sum game, helping the few at the expense of the many) is that the cat is already out of the bag. If we had compulsory public education ONLY, and if funding wasn't based on property tax and ZIP code, then things would be more equal, and probably better for it.

But we decided against this already. Pierce vs. Society of Sisters decided that parents right to decide the type of education they want their children to have outstrips the right of the state (in this case, Oregon) to ensure that each child within the state gets a standard education that's equal to that of their peers.

Now, you can disagree with this decision and this standard all you want, but it's not a terribly pragmatic thing to do. This is where we're at. How do we improve public schools while allowing all parents freedom of choice?

Because that's what charters (and, in their hamfisted way, vouchers) are supposed to be about, is allowing parents who can't go private or who can't homeschool the same opportunity for a better educational fit for their children. I'm not saying that there are no downsides to this. There absolutely are. But the idea that we're going to suddenly turn around 85 years of legal precedent and make private, charter, and homeschools disappear is a silly one.
posted by Leta at 7:16 AM on October 23, 2010 [2 favorites]

Observational Epidemiology is a good blog about the statistics of education reform. Here is their post on Waiting for Superman, here is where they discuss incentive pay for teachers, and this post sums up the authors' views.
posted by subdee at 5:41 PM on October 23, 2010 [1 favorite]

I apologize if this point has been made upthread, but it's getting late and I'll have to read more tomorrow. But this: Union-controlled districts fire more bad teachers than non-union districts.

There are still too many bad teachers on the job. My estimation is that 5% of teachers shouldn't be teaching. The majority of them are athletic coaches. (I am a teacher.)

But the percentage of bad teachers is less than the percentage of bad bosses. I have worked dozens and dozens of jobs as an peripatetic musician before settling down into the pedagogical biz, so I know what I'm talking about.

Bad teachers are not the problem. Kids can stand a bad teacher now and then. And unions are especially not the problem.
posted by kozad at 8:34 PM on October 23, 2010

Well, maybe it's correct that the reason charters are better is that they don't need to deal with the problem students.

Is that a reason enough to cancel the project? If it's the case that a) public schools are failing large numbers of students and b) this is because of some small number of problem students, then the solution seems clear: whether charter or public, you have to pack up the problem students and separate the the problem students from everyone else, for the general good. This will probably not help them, even if you funded the problem-child school to excess. It may well be heavily racially segregated.

Is this palatable to the average voter? I don't think so. You'd have riots and protests. And lawsuits! Maybe this explains why charters do so well-- they give the people what they want (to get rid of disruptive students) while sidestepping the political (and legal!) impossibility of doing so.
posted by alexei at 10:43 PM on October 23, 2010

Bad teachers are not the problem. Kids can stand a bad teacher now and then. And unions are especially not the problem.

Except that it's possible, with the bizarre exception of Texas, for which I have no explanation, that collective bargaining contributes to the huge amount of non-teacher dead weight in the public school system. I cannot for the life of me figure out why any school worth its salt needs one non-teacher for every two, even three teachers. One in ten seems more appropriate. But like I said above, Pennsylvania is between 2:1 and 3:1 and New York is between 1:1 and 2:1.

So bad teachers as such may not be the cause of the bulk of the problem, but you're throwing out facts--Unionized districts fire more people than non-unionized districts? Really?--with no support and coming to conclusions without argumentation.
posted by valkyryn at 4:04 PM on October 25, 2010

"I cannot for the life of me figure out why any school worth its salt needs one non-teacher for every two, even three teachers."

One thing that has led to an increase in non-teacher employees, especially at the administrative level, is an increase in federal and state reporting requirements. In a district of 14,000 students, we have a staff of five responsible for the various and onerous state and federal testing and test-score-reporting requirements. We have a staff of six who does Medicare and Medicaid administration for our students who receive services through that. We have a department that does special ed administration and compliance. We have a half person who is responsible for FOIAs. (State law changed this year, we must designate an officer for that now.) School lunch compliance has gotten SO complex that we finally just outsourced it -- not only did compliance costs and changes to rules go from turning it from an $100,000 profit center (on the non-free-and-reduced lunches) to a loss for us in a decade, but the compliance is so complicated that for our district (with Title I and everything else) it requires a professional who is very well-versed in the ever-changing rules, which is cheaper to hire from a company that does nothing BUT school lunches than to have our own in-house person.

But beyond that, I'm thinking about an elementary school of, say, 400. Let's say we have 25 teachers. (Some classroom, some "special" -- art, music, PE -- and some Special Ed, which is a smaller class size.) We will have a principal and probably about 2-3 office staff. That's 25:4. Let's assign three custodians, which is probably low. That's 25:7. Special Ed will have non-certified aides (we'll say 2) and possibly "one-on-one" behavioral aides (we'll add another two) -- now we're at 25:11. School nurse takes us to 25:12, which is right about at your 2:1, and we still haven't counted transportation (let's have three busses) or central office support or cafeteria workers. Still, certified teachers make up 78% of our personnel costs.

Which of those non-teacher staff at the elementary school would you consider dead weight?
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:13 AM on October 26, 2010 [1 favorite]

*Certified teachers *in teaching positions* make up 78% of our personnel costs. If they're in non-teaching administrative positions they're in the 22% of non-teacher personnel costs.

If it interests you, 85% of our personnel budget is tied up in union contracts; 15% is non-union. 78% is certified-teachers, all union. (We also have clerical, security, and a couple other small unions that make up that 8% non-teacher union cost.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:17 AM on October 26, 2010

So, my daughter's school of about 350 kids has 15 primary teachers + 1 gym teacher. In addition, there's a 1/2 time art teacher (a local artist on PTA stipend), a 3/4 time librarian (half his salary paid by the PTA), a nurse (one day a week), a psychologist (one day a week), an occupational therapist (on-call, paid by Federal and state money), a speech pathologist (1/2 a day a week, Fed + state), a resource teacher (1/2 time, paid by the PTA, replaces the "head teacher" that was forced to return to classroom teaching under the budget cuts), 2 special ed teachers (who roam from class to class because of the inclusion model, state and Fed money), a few classroom assistants (who were paid by the district until they were cut; now there are only a couple and they float), 2 office staff, and 1 janitor.

So, under the valkyryn argument, it'd be a little over a 1:1 teacher/non-teacher model (depending on how you'd count the special ed teachers). However, if you went by actual FTE, it'd be more like 2:1. And if you dropped everyone paid in part or whole by the PTA, it's more like 3:1.

So I'd take any 1:1 argument with a grain of salt. I'd want to know how many hours each person actually works.
posted by dw at 10:00 AM on October 26, 2010