I’m often accused of being against charter schools. It’s more accurate to say I’m against false, inflated praise of charter schools by the conservative “education reform” movement in its relentless drive to demonize what “reformers” like to refer to as “government schools” and to promote school privatization. I try to burst their inflated bubble whenever I get the chance. When the charter cheerleaders start telling the truth about their schools, I won’t have to expend so much time and effort countering their propaganda.
The truth is, charter schools are a mixed bag with good schools and bad schools — kind of like those much maligned “government schools.” The vast majority of studies have concluded that when you compare similar students, there’s about a dime’s worth of difference between their performance in school district schools, charter schools and private schools, and that dime of difference shifts back and forth between one type of school and another year by year. If you want to see examples of quality education, look for schools offering quality education. Don’t look for labels or categories.
Which brings me to the wise words about charter schools. They’re not mine. They come from Conor P. Williams at the New America Foundation. This is the money quote, part of a longer piece, worth reading, in today’s Talking Points Memo.
Charters are diverse to such an extent that they almost cease to be a definable subset. For instance: charters are union-busting drains on public education — except when they’re founded and run by teachers unions. Charters are test-centric “drill and kill” factories full of aggressive, teacher-driven, “no excuses” pedagogy — except when they’re devoted to the Montessori method or discovery-based learning. Charters pretend that teacher quality is the primary variable affecting students’ academic trajectory — except when the charter is part of a community-wide organization fighting child poverty. Charters are proof that traditional public education is stultified by too much government regulation — except when they become entry points for bad actors to access and divert taxpayer education dollars to other purposes. Charters are proof that parent choice and market demand are enough to shutter bad schools without top-down accountability — except when ineffective, inefficient charters limp along despite strong evidence of persistent failure.
This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 5, 2014.
A simple request. I would like to see some hard-fact, non-agenda driven journalist investigate some numbers – specifically the salaries paid to charter school administrators. For years I have heard a mix of facts and rumors concerning charter school administrators who hire, juggle and fire lower paid uncertified staff, and give themselves annual salaries in the $200,000 range. All they have to do is survive so many years and then, no matter how bad or good the school, they rake in big bucks. The salaries of public schools’ superintendents and principals are routinely printed in newspapers. Why never the charter schools? Let’s see a list, charter by charter, even back to the beginning of the movement. Why is this tax payer expense never in the light?
” false, inflated praise…in its relentless drive to demonize”
Ha, who’s demonizing who?
Charter schools aren’t required to publish teacher or administrator salaries. The one way to get some information is to look at their 990 tax forms if they’re nonprofit — the forms are online — and look where they list the highest paid people in the organization. That’s generally the heads of the charter school or the top administrators — not always the same thing, by the way. Looking at old 990s for BASIS charter schools, for instance, shows that the people who started the charters, Michael and Olga Block, were handsomely compensated. But now they head the for-profit BASIS.ed, so their compensation is hidden behind a for-profit firewall.
As for teachers, there’s no good way to find out how they’re compensated. But based on what I’ve learned, teacher compensation varies widely, from well below salaries in school districts to higher than what districts pay.
Under ALEC, the Conservative group that is made up of corporations and conservatives, there mission is to close all public schools and open charter schools. This is a fact. In doing this, it takes away the voices of the parents and school boards. The charter schools are operated and funded by conservative groups who can choose what they want to teach the kids. They will be in control of the total learning aspect. This should be scary by all people. Charter schools is the take over by Republicans and Conservatives. People of all states must stop and disrupt this trend towards charter schools. They will deny this information, but you can just visit ALEC web site and see what there mission is for the USA>
The really important numbers about charter schools…particularly the so-called high performing charter schools…are not related to compensation of the people who run them or those who teach in them. The really important numbers are all about the composition of the student body.
In the annual Newsweek school ratings you can find quite a few of these numbers, but not in the rankings themselves. If you go to the on-line version of the rankings you can drill down to get data on student demographics. Just for a hoot, I checked out the numbers for the highly ranked BASIS Tucson charter. In summary, here’s what I found. BASIS has almost no students who receive special education services, almost no students who come from poor families and almost no English Language learners. What this means is that the students who typically score in the bottom quartile on state tests do not attend BASIS. Heck, if every other public school did not work with the students who typically score in the bottom quartile, they’d all look high performing.
Parents send their kids to schools like BASIS because they understand that an environment made up solely of highly motivated, capable students is a great place to learn…so long as your child is one of those highly motivated and capable students. The irony is that an ASU study done three years ago showed that well over half the students who start out at BASIS do not wind up graduating from BASIS.
“The irony is that an ASU study done three years ago showed that well over half the students who start out at BASIS do not wind up graduating from BASIS.”
By itself, this statistic is meaningless. The real question is how this compares with other schools. For example, if other schools average a higher percentage of their students who start there don’t graduate from there, BASIS might actually be better!