from the Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education at the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago

“In this present multi-year (2006-2008) study, charter high schools are found to enroll
fewer low-income and limited-English-proficient students, and significantly fewer special
needs students than Chicago Public School neighborhood high schools.”

I would also like to see studies that report on the average class sizes, staffing levels, space provided per student, and spending per student in charter schools and new small schools, including both private funds and tax-payer subsidies, compared to the regular public schools.

I would also like to see data on comparative attrition rates, of both students and teachers.

Right now the DOE refuses to provide this sort of information, but perhaps the state or city comptroller could demand it.

Hoxby’s studies and many others do not provide this background information. and I shouldnt have to tell you how controversial many of Hoxby’s studies have proven to be. Have you ever heard of her “stream” studies?

Have you ever entertained the “obvious” hapenstance that parents who are desparate to get their kids out of a district school BECAUSE THEIR KIDS ARE FAILING THERE turn to charter schools in the hope that they will find something different? When I was teaching in a large, dysfunctional elementary school there were always students who were proficient and succeeding despite the school and my teaching, not because of it – and those parents were HAPPY with the school because their kids were DOING WELL. They didn’t need to look for an alternative.

Now the situation may be very different for middle and high school, as you point out. I don’t know – my reference point is elementary school. Hoxby aside, there ought to be a study, and we have enough data here in NYC that someone should be able to do it.

What do you think about the NYC Charter Center and the UFT both putting up money to an independent external consultant to study the issue? The same idea as Hoxby–who enters charter lotteries, who gets in, who stays in charter schools, and how do these cohorts compare to the surrounding district public school populations? I’m certain that 99% of charter schools would participate in such a study, to show that they serve the same representative group despite unfounded opinions to the contrary.

By the fifth year there will be thousands of kids in these schools. There is no way the state would deny them renewals, because it would mean total chaos in trying to serve those kids in the regular system.

Moreover, the city and state report cards have almost no information about charter schools. You literally have to be an investigative journalist and spend days to get any information about their student body, management or finances.

What do you suggest?

I have ideas about how this could occur, as to many others. If the Klein administration doesn’t, they should resign. I told this to Chris Cerf when he said they don’t believe in “inputs.” I asked him, why s anyone who doesnt believe in inputs in the field of education?

Many educators have an ideas about how to do this. I have strong views, as you probably suspect. If the Klein administration doesn’t, they should all resign. It is their moral and professional responsibility. And yet they no longer believe that they have any responsibility in this area.

Instead, they are eager to replace some low-performing schools unilaterally w/ new regular public schools or charters. (They have no objective standards for which schools to choose, by the way. They don’t seem to operate from the SURR list, or the school grades, by the way. But their decisionmaking remains as opaque and apparently arbitrary in this area as many others.)

In any case, the elementary and middle schools are often replaced with charter schools. High schools are usually phased out, and gradually replaced w/ Gates-funded small schools.

In both cases, the new schools often appear to succeed better in large part because of two factors:

1- they are able to recruit students more apt to be higher performing than the pre-existing school — with far lower numbers of ELL and special ed students, our highest need populations. In the case of middle and high schools, their students are also apt to have higher grades, test scores, attendance records, etc. etc.

2- DOE provides them iwith financial subsidies and privileges including the ability to cap enrollment at lower levels, allowing them to reduce class size, as well as more tax levy funding and the ability to further supplement spending through foundation grants and their own private fundraising efforts.

Often times, DOE facilities people immediately repaint their hallways, provide them with new equipment and furniture, etc. etc. — and if the new school is sharing the building with another pre-existing school, that one is ignored, and remains shabby, overcrowded and in disrepair.

Now, charter schools are more able to recruit higher performing kids than zoned elementary schools — for obvious reasons. The new small high schools use a variety of methods to screen and recruit higher performing students.

DOE should not and by law can not replace a zoned elementary school w/ a charter w/out community approval, because then many of the existing kids in the neighborhood will have nowhere to go to school. See New Orleans for a perfect example of how the take-over of much of the school system by charter schools has led to horribly separate and unequal school systems, with the neediest kids dumped into the remaining traditional public schools and provided w/ the worst conditions.

Bill Gates himself has admitted that their efforts to transform large high schools through creating academies and the like have been even more unsuccessful than their attempts to open new small schools in the place of larger schools. Guess why? though he would not admit this, this prevents those running the schools from ridding themselves of the highest need students in the building — or drastically lower the total number of students in the building — which are the two primary reasons that many of the small schools have succeeded.

In essence, if they are forced to educate the same bunch of students and are unable to reduce overcrowding and class size, their strategies to create “smaller learning communities” with advisories etc. are totally ineffective.

I hope I have answered your questions. If not, let me know.

Further, as someone who has watched this situation from afar and spoken to some of the key players, I can say that Ms. Cleary has done a whole lot more than paint the hallways and instill a culture of data. She seems to have revolutionized the way the staff thinks about instruction, and made some changes in personnel that cast aside the prior culture of failure. Unfortunately she’s a victim of a long negative track record for the institution that she wasn’t really given a full and fair chance to “turn around.”

Boy, if Harlem Success ends up in that school, I hope the community takes advantage of the scrutiny allowed by the SUNY charter school process–there are public reports annually on the SUNY website about each SUNY charter school (beginning in the second year). And the renewal decision happens after the fifth year. That’s going to be a doozy and could go a long toward either affirming community concerns or, we should all hope, alleviating fears.

But I would like to try to argue the other side the larger issue. First, let me explain what I think that larger issue is.

We’ve got a whole bunch of public schools out there, some of which are doing quite poorly. We also have a bunch of charter schools out there, with more on the way. Leonie has done a great job of reporting how it appears that decisions about which poor performing schools are not being made purely on the grounds of their performance or their prospects of improvement. Rather, she reports, their facilities appropriateness to house new (charter?) schools seems to be a big factor.

Being a charter school skeptic, I’ve got to say that I agree with Leonie that that is a big problem. Heck, closing any school is a major decision, and should not be done lightly. I generally think that it should be done simply based on the school’s prospects for improvement, not outside factors. But, as I said, I want to try to advance a counter arguement.

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* We know that there are lots of public schools out there performing way below average. Heck, there are quite a few for which even a typical below average would be an improvement. Among our 1400 schools, there really are a bunch of bad ones.

* We don’t want to close schools simple for the sake of closing them. Rather, we close them because we want to give their students and the community a better education/experience than they would get there.

* If we do not have a new school ready to take the place of a school we are closing down, we are not reall helping. Rather, we are shutting down options and making things harder at other schools, which will not have to take on more students than they have the capacity for.

Therefore, this argue suggests, the availablity of new schools to go in their space SHOULD be taken into consideration. And the lowest performing schools should not necessarily be closed down, at least not until a better option is ready to take their places.

Now, whether that new school should be a charter school or a new DOE school is a different question. I think that morally, if new DOE school is not possible that a new charter school is the right answer. On the other hand, if given a choice between the two, the arguements for charter are underwhelming. And if someone is stacking the deck in favor of charters for political reasons, well obviously that is NOT moral.

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Leonie,

Can you comment on this wider issue, of closing down schools because new schools are available to take their place? Does this argument sway you at all, or is there something that it misses. Or, am I misunderstanding your position entirely?

(And this is not to say that there are not other wider issues, as well. The rule of law IS a wider issue. Community involvement is decision-making IS a wider issue. I am just trying to tease out one of the wider issues from the others that are tangled together in this particular case.)