Several readers have pushed back on my support for charter schools. I admit that it is difficult to reconcile with my belief in the null hypothesis, which is that no educational intervention makes a real difference. I guess I would say that my support for charters is tentative and based more on sympathy for entrepreneurs than on hope to find an education “cure.”
Here is a post from a few months ago from the blog Education Realist.
As any Cato wonk knows, charters are killing private schools. Increasing charters increases public school spending. More charters will increase the number of kids under government oversight, give even more control to the states and ultimately the federal government. So why are choice people pro-charters? Charter schools purport to give choices but actually just drive up public education costs for the express benefit of a lucky few underrepresented minorities or suburban whites and Asians too cheap to send their kids to private school. As long as I’m ordering the world, choice folks, can’t you go back to pushing tax deductions for private schools? Then let Bill Gates pay tuition scholarships for URMs rather than fund meaningless and usually unsuccessful initiatives in his public school sandbox.
Thanks to a commenter for a generic pointer to the Education Realist blog.
I mostly disagree with the quoted paragraph.
1. I think of charter schools as having primarily a down-market appeal. Maybe I am falling for some public-relations stuff, but I don’t see them as competing with elite private schools. I don’t think they currently compete with elite public schools, for that matter.
2. The fact that charter schools are public schools poses problems for both the left and the right. For the right, they represent schools that are funded and regulated by government, even though they are not operated by government. To me, this is not such a big issue, since even with vouchers, or for that matter with tax deductions, government is going to claim a rationale for regulating schools.
For the left, I think that the problems are more acute. Membership in teachers’ unions drops. I think that the balance of power shifts away from government school boards and toward parents.
One scenario for charters is that they could suffer from what I called a “stifling embrace” by the government. That is, left-wing politicians could endorse charters heartily, with a strong dose of regulation to make sure that charters “serve the community,” meaning that they are forced to adopt all of the worst practices of public schools.
On the other hand, there is also a scenario in which charters achieve a sort of escape velocity, and the education system becomes more decentralized and diverse. That is the scenario I tried to paint in my earlier post.
Meanwhile, it does not seem that more purist libertarian education reforms are getting anywhere.
Private schools and, to a less extent, charter schools succeed because they discriminate in favor of those children that can be educated. If charters are more likely to draw children from private schools than from the other, regular public schools, then they could well have a negative effect overall.
This argument is BS for charter schools or you are ignorant.
Ignorant in what way? One of the reasons people don’t put their children into the traditional public schools is because those particular schools are undermined by the requirement that they take everyone regardless of how disruptive or utterly hopeless it is to educate them. I don’t know where most charters get their students, but it is pretty good assumption that the student body consists of a higher proportion of students that are neither disruptive nor incapable of being educated.
In San Diego, pretty much the most desirable charter school is the High Tech system: three campuses, in central, south, and north San Diego metro area; goes from elementary through high school (although started out as high school and expanded downward through middle and elementary). Anybody is eligible to apply as long as the student meets very basic standards (C average or better in previous school). Admission is by lottery, with the only criteria being how close the student lives to the home school district. They get approximately 10 times more applicants as there are slots. So, as long as the parents are willing to fill out the application, the student has just as much shot as anybody else. From what I can see, a decent number of the parents are trying to get their students in there because the parents feel the students aren’t living up to their potential (including being troublemakers) and they think the High Tech school environment will help.
But the High Tech schools aren’t taking away students from private schools, oh, not at all! The prestigious private schools, with tuition ranging from $30k to $50k or more per year, have huge waiting lists too. Even in places where the public schools are prestigious (e.g., Torrey Pines High School, which from all reports is as rigorous as any private prep school), the private schools are full with waiting lists (e.g., Cathedral Catholic, a $40k per year private school, is half a mile down the road from Torrey Pines).
Referencing the comments lower down, I have some sympathy for letting kids drop out of school and focus on a vocational track, but I worry that it’s an overly coarse sieve – how many 15-16 year olds (particularly boys) would bail on academic subjects if they weren’t required to go to school, only to regret it bitterly three years down the road? That age group is notably poor at making good decisions. It’s a complicated problem in real-world teenage psychology and incentives.
And note, the discrimination I am talking about is probably pretty passive, and mostly caused by the selection of the parents themselves to put their children in the private schools and the charters. Personally, I think the best reform you could initiate for the public schools would be to remove the mandate to have children to attend school in the first place.
Agreed. My preferred alternative would punt kids who the public schools didn’t want into a kind of apprenticeship program. And the kids with discipline issues get punted into a third program that resembles a scene from Cool Hand Luke.
These are good points, and I agree that charter schools are only a partial improvement. But there is a big “right to exit vs. right to voice” advantage that I think is the trump card here.
I will say that in Arizona, where charter schools have a good foothold, we get glossy marketing circulars from our public schools now, which I take as a positive sign. We don’t spend hours at town meetings listening to angry parents or at the superintendent’s office, begging for attention in one matter or another. We just choose to attend somewhere else, and the public schools engage themselves in the goal of getting us back.
“no educational intervention makes a real difference”
It can be A LOT cheaper.
I would say the affect on private schools is absolutely correct – expecially among lower tier private schools (e.g. catholic schools). Anecdotetally, in Boston catholic schools closed all over the place with the rise of charter schools – there were other confounding variables obviously – but the timing is indisputable. Now we have very costly privately schools (none that I know of closed) and few catholic schools for private ed choices.
Do charter schools really increase education costs? Maybe in the short run through duplication, but over the long run, if their proliferation causes public school enrollment to fall, some of those public schools will simply close. When you consider the long run effect of reducing the ranks of unionized teachers with generous pensions, maybe you come out ahead, even if the short term hit is substantial. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not being cynical enough, and the real story is that any attempts to reform the system simply result in greater expenses as the process is captured by various “stakeholders.”
Also, what is a ‘URM?’
A URM is an UnderRepresented Minority, a person who is non-white and has been catagorized into a group which is not doing well. In American education, blacks and hispanics are underrepresented minorities. Asians, on the other hand, are overrepresented minorities.
I have also seen the acronym NAM: Non-Asian Minority.
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Quite possibly, but then one of the benefits of charters- the ability of parents, who actually care about their children’s education, to escape the regular public schools will be undone. The charters will then fill up with all the children that were left behind in the public schools that closed. I think, in a short time, you would see the public school system reemerge, with all the problems.
Thanks for the link and discussion.
” I don’t think they currently compete with elite public schools, for that matter.”
That’s certainly true, but not all private schools are elite. As Checker Finn has acknowledge, and as Cato points out, Catholic schools are in decline and research shows a good chunk of the decline is due to charters, particularly in urban areas. I agree that these schools would be considered “downscale”, but the movement is from private schools to government schools. This increases the cost of public education, pensions, and so on.
However, not all charters are downscale. Here’s a piece I wrote on suburban charters, and here’s a specific example. In economically diverse areas that can’t use zipcodes to lock out all the low income kids, charters are a popular way for wealthy but not super-rich parents to get their kids away from too many poor kids without forking out funds for a private school. End result–mid-level private schools are also struggling. Over time, as that Cato report points out:
“When charters draw students from private schools, demands for tax revenue increase. If governments increase educational spending, tax revenues must be increased or spending in other areas reduced, or else districts may face pressures to reduce educational services. The shift of students from private to public schools represents a significant shift in the financial burdens for education from the private to the public sector.”
“Membership in teachers’ unions drops. I think that the balance of power shifts away from government school boards and toward parents.”
Remember that with or without teacher unions, teachers are government employees. If the Chicago strike taught us anything, by the way, it’s that parents support teachers a lot more than they do reform philosophy.
Speaking generally, parents aren’t angry at schools. They’re angry at the laws that schools operate under, particularly those that hamstring schools because of disparate impact requirements: demands that discipline and advanced course population both have the same racial distributions being a big one. Parents don’t leave public schools until the federally mandated laws make the environment unpleasant. As a rule, they’re happy until then.
That’s important because in the world you envision, where charters get “escape velocity”, the feds will step in and make the same demands that they now only require of public schools.
So then we’ll be stuck with more expenses, more teachers, smaller schools, and all the disparate impact, access, and special ed mandates that charters were created in no small part to avoid.
All of this seems right, but I don’t know how big a deal the tax issue is. What’s the likely private-to-charter impact on the whole school district tax base? A percent or two? It could be more in some areas I suppose, but where I live I would imagine it to be pretty small.
Of course, if any parent moves their kids to any public school, it has the same tax consequence. If we improve public schools and decrease the value-gap, then the marginal parent would shift their kids the same way, and it would cost more in taxes. I think the likely response from most people is, ‘probably still worth it’.
I don’t disagree that the parents would say it’s still worth it. Would the taxpayers?
Moreover, I can’t figure out why libertarians would be pushing charters, given that they increase government control of schools, as compared to private schools.
And it’s not the district taxbase, but the state’s.
Charters offer more opportunity for alternative methods. “Sage on the stage” isn’t really the best way to teach, it is just the easiest to control a large group. It is also the one most conditioned into older individuals. But flipped classroom, student discussion, etc, are methods that have merit.
I personally think that with the new technology, the flipped classroom has real potential. An entire school where kids do the “lecture” online off hours, then do labs during the day with teachers monitoring to offer individualized help. It may only work for some types of subjects or it may be the school is less about regimented classes and more a flowing lab/online deal. Better students could help other students. Nothing improves your “knowledge” of a subject like trying to teach it to someone else. You really find what you glossed over.
I am also convinced of the null hypothesis, but I still think charter and/or private schools can be better that the regular public schools.
They can spend less money and they and they can suit parents demands better by for example extend their hours to cover all the parents work ours. They can improve the lives of the students by doing a better job of shielding timid kids from aggression of the their more aggressive piers.
I’ve always hated the “tax schools only do it the way we do it” argument.
Now we know homeschooling is fine, unschoolinh is fine, charters are fine, classroom flipping is fine, etc.
Maybe it us time to expect public schools to improve and reduce costs.