Darn non-charter edumacation.

I refer to the dominant theme of Klein’s essay, as I have written about at greater length here on GS numerous times.

Inserting the “how they’re paid” etc qualifiers simply spaces out the core “teachers = civil rights obstacles” connection.

For shame.

Now, if you read that essay and come away agreeing with Klein: “If only we paid them differently, these bigot teachers would suddenly be the second coming of MLK, Ghandi, and Bishop Tutu, all rolled into one,” I’d be at a loss for how next to respond.

Another good read. No mention of Klein’s themes, veiled or explicit, in “What Makes a Great Teacher”, though I would immediately note low turnover is on the list; Klein would prefer the churn for what it does for average salaries.
http (colon) //www (dot) greatschools (dot) org/improvement/quality-teaching/what-makes-a-great-teacher.gs?content=79&page=1

I can’t speak to all charter school studies off the top of my head.  I do know off the top of my head that well-designed studies, such as Pat Wolf’s studies of the DC voucher program and the Mathematica study of KIPP charter schools, begin by dividing students into two groups: those who applied to the lottery and won, and those who applied to the lottery and lost.  Then the ones who won the lottery are in the “treatment” group forever, even if they drop out from KIPP or a voucher school after a year, or even if they never attend KIPP or a voucher school at all.  That’s the ONLY way to do such evaluations, because otherwise your results are going to be contaminated by the fact that the students who drop out may not have done so for reasons of personal taste, but may also have been performing more poorly.  

Now the dropout/attrition factor could theoretically affect the results in another way, and this is the only nitpicky criticism that I’ve seen of the Mathematica study of KIPP: maybe if poorer performing students are the ones who tend to drop out, and maybe if they’re not replaced with other poorer performing students from elsewhere, that will somehow change the peer group experience of the students who remain, and maybe their performance will grow more than it would have otherwise.  

As for demanding parental involvement, I’m not sure what actual evidence exists.  In my personal experience having kids in a public charter school and in a traditional public school, the traditional public school demands quite a bit more in the way of reading logs signed by parents, etc.  But maybe that’s because I had my kids for a while in a public charter school with an arts focus — the kind of school that Ravitch ought to support but would rather just criticize for not having good enough test scores.  Anyway, I think it’s generally a good thing for schools to try to coax parents into being involved. 

In other words, do you suppose that traditional public schools might benefit in the same way charters have if they had these two important arrows in their quivers? (Of course, this would require the creation of another type of school to educate the kids who’ve been counseled out of traditional schools, or changes to our compulsory education laws, but ignore that for the purposes of this thought experiment.)

(I’m not a wonk or a teacher, merely a taxpayer and a parent of children in public school.)

Thanks in advance.

To my knowledge, no one seems to be talking about my (self-hat-tip: brilliant) idea of opening a charter school as a neighborhood school. If you’re worried about charters not attracting “truly at-risk” kids (my language trying to summarize the argument against the current enrollment patterns) then eliminate that potential barrier by trying it as “opt-out” rather than “opt-in.”

I know many of the neo-con people in the charter movement would go on and on about school choice, but I’d bet there would be a bevy of charter school folks lined up at the door to have that arrangement: autonomy over governance, curriculum, hiring and work rules; accountability to the state authorizer for a coherent set of targeted goals; and zoned status. To quote the SNL Harry Caray impersonation, “I know I would.”
I don’t know, maybe some of this turnaround work that’s going on includes charters-as-zoned-schools, but the law remains the same: charters are schools of choice.

I know you also claim to have damning evidence about counseling out and charters pushing out low test score kids; I’m sure that’s true at many charters, but charters are not a monolith and it is certainly not happening at at least SOME charters (while it certainly is happening at some district schools, like the one with the principal who told one of my former students’ grandmother, “I don’t want your special ed kid, I can’t deal with him! You have go to somewhere else.”

Another point I’d like to make about this counseling out business is that, as my school has grown and evolved, we have found (through authorizer pressure, internal and external feedback and strategic planning) that our expectations are going up every year in all areas – meaning that we are starting to be perceived as “too strict” or “too tough on lateness” or “bothersome about attendance” by some parents, parents who are used to a frankly laissez-faire district that doesn’t seem to care whether their kids are in school or not. So when a parent opts for the path of least resistance (“I’m going to a school that is going to leave me alone!”) but we are seeing patterns of poor attendance correlate with low achievement, what do you recommend we do in order to change that dynamic? Should we lower our standards to meet the expectations of the community schools that serve as a de facto outlet for frustrated parents who don’t want to or don’t understand our expectations? (Mind you – in every step of the process for this attendance issue there is an explicit question, “How can we help you?” and involvement of both parent assocation and student support/social work team. I understand that’s it’s one thing to have high expectations and quite another to be ruthless.

Am I missing something else in your argument?

Have you been intellectually honest by disclosing that at least one of your links is to a website by a person you are publishing papers with?  Have you mentioned that Greene is affiliated with a right wing think tank?  Did you also notice that if you follow Greene links that back his point of view, one of the 9 papers said vouchers didn’t have an effect, one was by Hoxby (right wing think tank ties, just to start with), and, 3 of the papers are by the blog writer himself.  Describing this as “scholarly consensus”, as he does, hardly smacks of intellectual honesty to me.  
Also, speaking of intellectually honest, let’s mention the work of Caroline Hoxby, who is frequently quoted by pro charter folks because her research runs contrary to CREDO studies.  Maybe you could help explain how her refusal to release her calculations and the fact her paper a few years ago was treated as fact when it wasn’t even published in a peer reviewed journal is intellectually honest?  I always thought putting your work out for public and peer scrutiny was part of the process. 
I must have missed the parts where pro charter folks have been intellectually honest and mentioned these things.  

BTW, is it histrionic for Klein to suggest public school teachers are the biggest obstacle to kids’ civil rights?
http (colon) //www (dot) huffingtonpost (dot) com/joel-klein/transforming-the-teaching_b_200616 (dot) html

You’re a thoughtful guy. I look forward to your suggestions as to how to improve the lot of the OTHER 97%.

School’s Open (for a while more anyway).
Drive carefully.

These folks are well-versed in the art of semantic dodging,diversion and misdirection. Stuart Buck’s comments are one example of many, with its nit-picking but ultimately pointless contortions over the term “panacea” and whether ed deformers and privatizers see charters as such. They will always leave themselves a rhetorical escape hatch, whether its about charters, unions (with my favorite: “I’m not anti-union. Unions were once necessary, but they’ve outlived their usefulness”) or school governance.

While the rhetoric of education privateers is worth noting, it’s far more instructive to observe their behavior. The old adages, “watch what they do, not what they say,” and “follow the money” come to mind. Far better to analyze their budgets and policies, since those are the ultimate markers for their values and intentions.

I am speaking for myself, not for Diane Ravitch. To me, the argument that choice will “lift all boats” seems tantamount to an assertion that choice is a panacea. (See, for instance, Caroline Hoxby’s “School Choice and School Productivity.”) The argument with its variations is by no means obscure; it is mentioned frequently in education articles and studies.

Much depends on how you understand “panacea,” but “universal cure” is a common and straightforward definition, and it applies here. If low achievement/productivity is the ill, and if choice (according to proponents of this theory) will “lift all boats”–that is, raise school productivity across the board, well then, wouldn’t that make choice a panacea? (I realize I am mixing metaphors of cures and boats here.)

Not many people will go around saying that choice is a panacea (in exactly those words). Chubb and Moe stuck their necks out. But many have said it in other words.

Ravitch’s book says (p. 229): “There are no grounds for the claim made in the past decade that accountability all by itself is a silver bullet, nor for the oft-asserted argument that choice by itself is a panacea.” She claims that choice and accountability were sold as “panaceas and miracle cures,” as an “elixir that promised a quick fix to intractable problems.” (p. 3).
Apart from one line that two authors (Chubb and Moe) wrote some 20 years ago, Ravitch does not identify anyone who has ever claimed that “choice by itself is a panacea.” Describing this claim as “oft-asserted” strikes me as a falsehood, much as with other of Ravitch’s claims (i.e., she has claimed that there “is not a shred of evidence , , ,  in the research literature” in favor of mayoral control, even though one of her own articles was published in a book along with Kenneth Wong’s study finding that mayoral control benefited student achievement).  

“…there is very little evidence of the phenomenon you describe (charter school invasions of public schools) anywhere else.”

That’s because almost everywhere outside of NYC charters have their own facilities, and are less likely to have an citywide administration that encourages and enables their aggressive turf conquests.

As for Moskowitz, I mentioned her only because Harlem is Ground Zero for this process and she’s the poster girl for it. But the process is epidemic all over the city.

By the way, why no response to the main substance of my argument?

Why bother?  My main point, which doesn’t require refuting anything, was that Ravitch needs to make up her mind whether charter schools are to be judged based on test scores or whether she really believes what she says elsewhere that it’s not fair to judge schools based on test scores because they’ll then narrow the curriculum and there’s more to education than reading/math skills.   

But if I wanted to refute what Ravitch actually says about charter schools: 

1) CREDO study: Ravitch’s inaccurate description of that study has been refuted elsewhere.  See http://www.nyfera.org/?p=23

2) NAEP scores: no serious scholar would suggest that NAEP scores mean anything here, without controlling for demographics, income, etc.

3) Two charter school operators make too much money.  So what?  Yes, there are bad apples in the public sector, including the public charter sector.  But isolated anecdotes don’t prove anything about a nationwide movement, any more than this webpage [http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=39783] proves that public schools are all bad.   

4) Charter schools have too few special ed students or English language learners.  Maybe so (Ravitch doesn’t have systematic evidence of this claim).  But Ravitch ignores the fact that charter schools nationwide tend to enroll students with lower test scores than their traditional public school peers.  If the goal is to prove that charter schools are stealing all the good students, that just isn’t true.