For those of you sick of my education posts, feel free to move on! Truthfully, I had no intention of writing about education today, but then I stumbled across this Daily Kos diary, entitled:Charter Schools Not the Answer, Especially if We Fail to Identify the Question. Go read the whole thing!
One pattern of failure in education reform is that political leadership and the public focus attention and resources on solutions while rarely asking what problems we are addressing or how those solutions address identified problems. The current and possibly increasing advocacy of charter schools is a perfect example of that flawed approach to improving our schools across the U.S.
Let’s start with two clarifications.
First, the overwhelming problems contributing to school quality are pockets of poverty across the country and school policies and practices mirroring and increasing social inequities for children once they enter many schools.
Children who live under the weight of poverty attend buildings in disrepair, sit in classrooms with inexperienced and un-/under-qualified teachers, and suffer through endless scripted instruction designed to raise their test scores. Citizens of a democracy share the responsibility for eradicating both the out-of-school and in-school failures often reflected in data associated with our public schools.
Then, what is a charter school and should any state increase resources allocated to charter schools, and in effect, away from public schools?
There’s the opening – Now, go read the whole thing. When the topic turns to education – whether we’re discussing traditional public, private or charter schools – everyone runs to their educational corners and the insults fly. If you can get past these comments and ask about improving education you’ll find that everyone has an opinion. From uniforms to discipline to funding to STEM, everyone has a solution. But as the kos diarist points out, we aren’t asking the right questions and most of these discussions devolve into apples and oranges comparisons.
The diarist makes an important point:
Here, we must acknowledge that if charter schools are a viable solution to the serious problems I have identified above, a much more direct approach would be simply to allow all public schools to function without the restraints we know to be impacting negatively their ability to produce strong educational outcomes.
If innovation and autonomy are valuable for educational reform, then all public schools deserve those opportunities.
[…]
“[T]here is a fairly well-developed body of evidence showing that charter and regular public schools vary widely in their impacts on achievement growth. This research finds that, on the whole, there is usually not much of a difference between them, and when there are differences, they tend to be very modest. In other words, there is nothing about ‘charterness’ that leads to strong results.”
The diarist then goes on to point out the red flags coming from the Charter movement, most of which we have discussed here. Go read the whole article! In Delaware, one of the main problems is the Charter School Law. Hopefully, given this weeks events, we’ll finally be addressing the flaws in this law.
Finally, the diarist sums up the reality: There is no evidence that traditional public, private, or charters are better or worse than each other. That’s probably a fact that should be addressed. Often.
Charter schools in theory represent a belief in innovation, experimentation, and school autonomy. If these qualities are valuable and if they can address the out-of-school and in-school causes of educational outcomes, then we simply need to allocate funding and policies to insure that our public schools are afforded the same, while also admitting that we have no evidence that a school type—pubic, charter, or private—insures the outcomes we seek.
There are many myths circulating about public, private and charters – most of which aren’t true. Not all public schools are awful, and not all charters are great (in fact, only 17% of charters perform better than public schools). And until everyone accepts that all types of schools – public, private and charter – are not created equal we will not be asking the right questions, nor will be finding solutions.