The coup is almost complete and most o’ y’all slept through it.
After two decades of legislative chicanery, malfeasance, incompetence and the misuse of public funds that should have landed several people in prison, we are now being told that the Arizona charter-school “movement” is a success. Except it isn’t.
I know, I know, here he goes on charter schools again. Why the hate? Unfortunately, because people are busy and worrying about making it from week to week, the pattern goes like this:
Right-wing Legislators: “Charter schools are the greatest thing ever!”
The People (armed with the truth): “No, they’re not!”
Right-wing Legislators: “Charter schools are the greatest thing ever!”
The People (armed with the truth): “No, they’re not.”
Right-wing Legislators: “Charter schools are the greatest thing ever!”
The People (armed with the truth but late for work): “Aw, the hell with it.”
Well, I’m not going to say “the hell with it.” Charter schools are NOT the greatest thing ever. They never have been and, despite some incredibly cynical moves by Republicans in the state Legislature, they never will be. Oh, there will always be individual success stories, like that of AP Test-factory Basis, but articles touting the improvement of charter schools notwithstanding, the fact remains that charter schools, on average, do not perform nearly as well as the traditional public schools to which they are adjacent.
For the past few years, charter-school critics have pointed to a Stanford University study that pretty much showed the performance as abysmal overall and pretty much across-the-board worse than traditional public schools. The Stanford group recently did another study and concluded that, in some states, charter school performance is improving. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. When you start sucko, your only options are staying sucko or becoming less sucko.
According to the updated Stanford study, what once was abysmal is now simply really bad. Hurrah! Among the findings in the new report is that while the 2009 study showed that 37 percent of charter schools were providing a substantially worse education than local public schools, that figure is now 31 percent. That would be cause for celebration were it not for the fact that, in the years between the two studies, 8 percent of all charter schools closed due to bad performance.
I’m going to go slowly here in case any of Al Melvin’s buddies are reading this. If you cut off the bottom 8 percent of any statistical sample, the quality of what remains must go up (although not necessarily by 8 percent). In this case, the percentage of poorly performing charter schools improved by just six points. That’s hardly a reason to cheer. The fact remains that less than a third of charter-school students outperform their public-school counterparts in math and the improvement over the past four years has been the same for both groups.
There was a time, back during the jogging/running craze of the late 1970s, when women’s distance-record times were falling at an astounding rate as more women took up serious running. Between 1970 and 1980, the world’s-record time for women in the marathon went from 3:02.53 to 2:30.27. That’s a drop of more than a half-hour and cuts nearly 18 percent off the record time. During that same period, the men’s record went from 2:09.28 to 2:09.01, a drop of 27 seconds or 0.3 percent.
I remember there was this flurry of quasi-scientific articles that looked at comparative graphs and concluded that the women’s record would someday be better than that of the men because the women’s graph line had a steeper slope. Alas, they were using incomplete data and making false assumptions. (Maybe they worked on political campaigns and figured that if one line was showing great improvement, then the other one would have to be showing a decline and they would have to meet at some point.)
Such is obviously not the case. Over the past 30 years, the women’s record time has improved by about 10 minutes, to around 2 hours, 15 minutes, while the men’s has dropped by more than five minutes, to around 2 hours, 3 minutes. However, the women’s record hasn’t been broken in more than 10 years; the line has flattened out for a decade. For the men, the record has dropped by a couple of minutes during that time. The two lines may someday grow closer together, but it’s highly unlikely that they’ll ever meet.
So it is with charter and traditional public schools. Having started at the bottom, charter schools are going to show an upward trend. But, despite the infusion of private money and the disgusting (and perhaps unconstitutional) preference being shown them by state legislators, charter schools will almost certainly not overtake traditional schools.
To be fair, the report did note that in some limited areas some charter schools are actually outperforming their public-school counterparts. However, in most of the 25 states in the study, charter schools were doing worse—or even much worse—than public schools. And on that list of states where charters were substantially inferior: Arizona.
This article appears in Jul 11-17, 2013.
I’m no fan of charter schools or home schooling. But it is an inevitable trend. It’s like when cell phones replaced land lines. The quality of sound coming from a land line was exponentially better than the quality of sound coming from those early cell phones. Similar arguments have been made about switching from vinyl records to cassette tape, and cassette tape to CD. Remember Betamax? It was so superior to VHS that TV stations used that system exclusively. VHS won the popular market, though, and Beta quickly died out (except in commercial areas where VHS was never adopted). The point is that schools are now going through the same process. The quality of charter schools is horrible. They are more convenient (they even set up in abandoned convenience stores) but use cheaper labor and poor quality teaching tools, and have a very limited curriculum. Your argument about quality falls on deaf ears because it’s not about what people want or even need. It’s about what government and businesses want to provide.
……..”it’s not about what people want or even need”…….
Nuff said.
For many, these BIG HUGE public high schools have all the charm of going to the airport. You should try the noise level at say, Tucson High cafeteria on any given day. So many of these schools are like tube socks, cheap and one-size-fits-almost everyone.
American public education made this country what it was before creeping corporatism invaded all aspects of public life. The American dream was realized by many, through public schooling. The dismal results of today’s charter schools, prove that choice is not the panacea it was touted to be. But I’m sure that in this state, we’ll continue throwing good money after bad.
Excellent article. Just think how much better the public school system could be if all the money thrown away on charter schools could go to them. There are some things the government just does better and education is one of them.
“There are some things the government just does better and education is one of them”…. Never mind the missing comma, of course. But in what world does the government do education “better”? Prior to the creation of the federal Department of Education, States and local communities developed and set their own educational standards – high enough that we were ranked 7th in the world in educational achievement. Since the DoE came on the scene and the federal government took over primary education, we’ve slipped to 25th. Yeesh, if this is the kind of “progress” you’re selling, don’t knock on my door.
Oh, and don’t give me that “Republicans cut funding” crap, either, because our intellectual slide has come over 5 decades in which our educational spending as a percentage of GDP has increased from around 3% to 5.6%.
One; this study is very biased and funded by the teacher unions. Two; the unions are a great part of the problem with education in America today. Three; Tom, Sen. D. P. Moynihan said it best “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.” Studies are not factual, they are a statistical manipulation of a set facts.
We still have a great education system, if you live in the right zip code and your parents make enough money and have higher education. Check some AIMS scores around town, and see if that isn’t correct. Cat Foothills, A or B. SW side of town, C, D. Corporate reformers couldn’t dip their fingers into public funds meant for students, unless NCLB and Congress allowed the public to think that schools are failing, rather than public policy being the cause of failure.
GAME PLAN: Make the profits private and the losses public, charter schools are on the rise, public schools are closing down – remember, our highest court would recognize “corporations are people too” before recognizing even the ‘same sex’ civil rights of actual people. Corporations have had the legal right to merge with each other for years.
I find this article really out there considering a Tucson based charter school was named the third best school in the country.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/201…
Local public schools could not even get a nod in that direction, Flowingwells comes close, but schools like TUSD are embarrassment to the cities.
So my question is which local public school does Tom or somebody he knows work for?
The reason Republicans want Charter Schools is it takes away the voice of the parents in education. If you read the agenda of ALEC, they indicate that. Republicans want to be in control of what kids are taught without the parents having a voice.
Most Republican control states are closing public schools by defunding them and starting Charter Schools. The sooner that voter understand the mission of ALEC and the Republicans the sooner they will defeat Republicans.
Basis cherry picks their students, and the attrition rate is enormous (66% from 6th grade to 12th). Basis is not an example of a typical charter school.
Every time on the rare occasion that I grab a Tucson Weekly, there it is in the first few pages: Danehy bloviating on about charter schools. Well, it’s time to set him straight.
Charter schools (none to which I have any affiliation) are not going away, and are here to stay. How did they begin? Why, at the hands of public school districts themselves! It was public schools with their individualized everything that created a culture of “alternativeness” for retarded, learning-disabled, educable mentally-handicapped, pregnant, language-deficient, ethnic, newcomer, etc., kids. As the therapy culture liberal-minded new-educational establishment continued dividing & categorizing school children, it became apparent that public schools couldn’t handle the new workload they helped create. Soon, it was apparent that public education’s own expensive inefficiency couldn’t meet all the new needs of our current day school kids. In stepped ex-public school teachers, administrators, and retirees who could satisfy those kids’ needs, and thus the charter school concept was born.
And make no mistake about it, charter schools are being created and run by former public school teachers and officials possessing good old fashioned entrepreneurial spirit. Some might envision dollar signs, but I’ll posit that most of them just envision a better way of educating kids who for whatever reason, aren’t cut out for public schools. Here in Tucson, even the city’s best school district, Tanque Verde, senses opportunity and is opening a charter school. Danehy cites studies, some that show charter’s faltering in comparison to public schools, others showing them excelling. A recent Chicago report showed charter schools holding the top 9 spots for school kid’s performance in ACT scores. We’re not talking HS graduation exams, but the full-blown ACT college entrance exam. And that is Chicago, a city rife with poverty, violence and other factors that hinder a child’s success.
Despite Danehy’s ranting’s, charter schools have as much to do with “right wing” and they do with “left wing” or chicken wings. The hilarious irony of Danehy’s whining, is that it’s actually liberal educational policies that helped create the charter school industry he so decries. Indiscriminate moaning about the proliferation of the charter school industry is like crying about Fedex and UPS out-performing and displacing the USPS: it’s going to get you nowhere. Like most liberal-democrats, Danehy needs someone to blame for his inability to accept change. It’s time for Danehy to get over himself, let the charter school bloviating go, and move on to another topic.
Firelog of long wind, low compassion and narrow insight; The education industry you champion is as necessary to society as a tick infestation to an anemic animal. There have long been private schools able to fund themselves with private money. The “right wing” “Fountainhead blather” drivel does nothing to disguise that these corporate welfare seeker charter schools have a hand out for more public school system money. If these charter schools were meant to stand on their own, let them do exactly that.
– private profits by public losses…
Maybe Mr. John Kromko could petition on our behalf for a ballot initiative to wean off those parasitic charter schools once he deals with issue of all the unauthorized traffic cameras?
See “ROBOCOP REFERENDUM” http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/the-skinny/Content?category=1063733
– private profits by public losses… again
Mr. Private Profits: Of course, you couldn’t address any of the point I made in my long-winded comment. So, I’ll assume you agree with the majority of my comment. However, I’ll comment on your response.
First off, I’m no champion (where did I say that?) of charter schools, nor would I want my kids to attend one. I had great experiences in public schools, as did my kids, but that of course was a looooong time ago. My simple point is that their existence is inevitable. And public funding for them is inevitable as well. And that our public education system is largely responsible for giving birth to them. Does the public ultimately lose? I don’t know. But then one can say we lost our youth long ago to a public school system that advocates therapy for everyone, brands children with newly dreamt disorders, and has taken on the slippery-slope role of “learning facilitators”. These were losing campaigns and self-assignments that public schools should have never assumed. And now, it’s only inevitable that someone steps in with a true alternative.
I agree with “private profits by public losses”, as a member of the voting public I don’t feel that any public money should be used for the charter school or camera infestation on the public’s dime without the public’s vote.
Public schools are a religion for Danehy. Not much point even reading the column. You know how it ends.