Are Charters Under Attack? Facts Show Otherwise

from the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools
January 30, 2018

Charter CEOs and supporters held a rally at City Hall on Tuesday January 30 to ask for a “seat at the table” when the new school board replaces the School Reform Commission. Several City Councilpersons attended the event, held in the Mayor’s Reception Room.

APPS members have said consistently that district budget problems stem not just from a lack of funding, but from the spending priorities of the SRC which keeps resources out of classrooms. Consulting fees, faux graduate school, training by outsourcing by unqualified and inexperienced people: Teach For America, The New Teacher Project, Relay Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, Boston Consulting, Jounce, Institute for Student Achievement, etc.

But the biggest waste of money in the SD budget is the funding of malfunctioning charters. Report after report, including the latest from Philadelphia Citizens for Children and Youth (PCCY), shows that district schools outperform charters. Charter supporters say that they only support “high-quality” charters, that they want the failing charters closed. But when they have the opportunity to prove that, they are nowhere to be found. Some examples:

Click here to read the rest of the article 

and a Philadelphia Notebook report about the rally 

and comments about the new school board procedures.

Jay's Missing Footnote for Today's KIPP Ad

As the oligarchs' leading print media promoter for more tests, more charter chain gangs like KIPP, and more data to back up the data that produces the data, Jay Mathews uses his WaPo column to pump these causes on a daily basis.  Today he returns to a snippet from a 2008 SRI California study of KIPP schools to make the case for longer school days:

On the longer-school-day side, we have programs such as KIPP, whose charter middle schools usually have nine-hour school days that last until 5 p.m., plus required three-week summer school and many Saturday sessions. A survey of KIPP students who completed the middle school program showed a 42 percentile gain in math and a 28 percentile gain in reading over four years.

Actually, Jay has chopped off a half hour for some reason (embarrrasing maybe?), since the study he refers to above, “San Francisco Bay Area KIPP Schools: A Study of Early Implementation and Achievement,” clearly notes the 9.5 hour school day (almost half of which is spent on math and reading), the 60 percent increase in school time overall,  and the 65 hour work week for teachers.  What Jay does not mention, too, is the winnowing effect over time that eliminates the weak and recalcitrant "miscreants" in order to maintain the KIPP brand that people like Mathews promote without noting KIPP's abusive psychological sterilization program or the KIPP attrition rates for both students and teachers that would be entirely unsustainable and unacceptable in regular public schools. 

From a 2008 post, quoting the SRI Bay Area KPP study:

Together, the four schools began with a combined total of 312 fifth graders in 2003-04, and ended with 173 eighth graders in 2006-07 (see Exhibit 2-3). The number of eighth graders includes new students who entered KIPP after fifth grade (p.12).

That amounts to a 55% attrition rate, even when adding all the new enrollees during the three years. Imagine what the attrition rate might be if the "researchers" took a measure of the beginners vs. completers without the new recruits.

And who are the students most likely to stick with KIPP? The ones with higher test scores when they entered, of course. And who are the students who are leaving KIPP? You guessed it, the low performing students:

We found that students who remained at KIPP had higher incoming scores in both reading and mathematics than did their peers who entered KIPP in fifth grade but exited before completing the program (see Exhibit 2-5). We also considered the question from another perspective: Are students with lower scores more likely to exit KIPP? We used fall fifth-grade SAT10 scores to predict those exiting KIPP and found that the probability of a student’s leaving KIPP before completing eighth grade is higher for those with lower entering scores (pp. 15-16).

If the segregated, total compliance KIPP containment schools represent the best that Mathews and the urban mind engineers can come up to recommend as the replacement for urban public schools, what does that say about corporate America's unacknowledged racism, classism, and utter lack of imagination and understanding of human needs, of children's needs?  But then these "postivized" hacks are the philosophical descendants of the 20th Century visionaries who inspired 30 states to adopt eugenical sterilization laws.

Charter Industry Sends Out Their A Team Against Civil Rights Leaders, Part I

The dollarbots inside the education reform industry mainframe have been ominously humming since the NAACP, the Urban League, and seven other civil rights organizations came out swinging against the Gates-Broad-Walton racist blueprint that Arne Duncan is trying to pass off as the inheritor of the NCLB debacle.  NCLB 2.0 is planned as a policy built on the conclusion that large swaths of the American population will be losers in the Race to the Top.  One of my favorite lines from the 17 page civil rights framework for education reform notes that

"If education is a civil right, children in “winning” states should not be the only ones who
have the opportunity to learn in high-quality environments."

But the voices of privilege are not going to give up without a battle, apparently to be waged from the protection of the editorial pages of the Oligarchs' scream sheet, the Wall Street Journal, even if they have been outed by the civil rights community that they lamely purport to represent.  Of course, Bush did the same thing, using the racism of impossible school goals to blow up public education while attacking any sane critics for the "bigotry of low expectations."  Well, the civil rights groups have finally seen through the smoke and broken mirrors of the Billionaire Boys' Club, and it doesn't matter if the Boys have a top guy who happens to be black.

The latest strategy by the Boys is an old one of divide and conquer, this time to put black parents on one side and the the NAACP with the teachers' unions on the other.  With no evidence and no argument to debunk the wilting critique by civil rights groups of the Duncan Deform plan, all that is left is to use divisive propaganda.  Enter stage right, Harvard dons Peterson and West, called down from their ivory tower to do what they do best: cook survey data and then serve up just the parts they want to feed, just as Dr. Petersen did some years back when he voided his academic reputation with an influential voucher study that was later called out for design and analysis flaws.

The evidence by Peterson and West that the NAACP is out of touch with what minority parents know, or don't, as the case may be? An annual survey designed by edu libs and cons to gauge the power of the sludge tank operators to shape the public attitudes.  Evidence that black parent love charter schools, and that the NAACP should, too?  

Support for charters among African Americans rose to 49% in 2009, up from 42% in 2008. 

More impressive numbers are in store from the 2010 survey, but we will wait for the release to report those.  What Peterson and West leave out is the inherent mushisness of that African-American support (complete support only 14% in 2009 and 15% in 2008) and the uncertainty expressed by parents who neither support nor oppose (48% in 2009 and  42% in 2008). Just a couple of details that you will never find in editorials made possible by Rupert Murdoch.  

In Part II, I will try to explain to Peterson and West why organizations charged with Civil Rights protections could be opposed to the the apartheid-enabling policies of the Boys.

Public Charter School Dollars and Turkish Political Conversions

Did you think KIPP was the largest charter chain in the U.S. with its 82 schools?  Think again.  It seems that charter schools are not just for corporate indoctrination and happiness training of poor children, anymore. 

Sharon Higgins has been doing some digging on a confederation of charters in a bunch of states that are making test score headlines while doing political conversion work among tens of thousands of schoolchildren.  Read Sharon's piece.  Any reporters out there at the EWA interested in something other than press releases from Arne Duncan?  A clip:

. . . .From an article in The Irish Times (January 2010) about Gülen schools in Ethiopia which quotes Hakan Yavuz, a Turkish professor who co-edited a book on the Gulen phenomenon and describes the movement as the "most powerful force in Turkey." He says its main goal has been the "Islamisation" of Turkish society:

Yavuz argues that there is a wider agenda as manifested by its increasingly global reach.

"The movement, which is rooted in selective vision of the glorious Ottoman past, has its own imperial vision of turning Turkey into a global power," he says.

This piece from the official Web site talks about the progress of the movement and concludes:

At that point, it should be noted that, the history of the movement in Europe and in Muslim World is quite short, but as a beginning, they have a good start in the Netherlands with almost all sorts of institutions and activities, in the United States with a striking rise in the amount of state-financed charter schools and in Kurdish controlled Northern Iraq with seven schools and despite a pretty slippery ground.

Yup, the official organization writes about there being a "movement" on behalf of another nation, and that American charter schools can be used as a vehicle for furthering its cause. . . .

New Charter Philosophy for the Corporate Celebrity: Let A Few Chain Gangs Flourish

When charters first came on the scene, the idea was to let a thousand flowers bloom and let innovation reign. The best instructional and curricular ideas could then be spread to other schools, and children and parents and teachers would be the beneficiaries.

Those days are as long gone, and the only innovations that remain in the segregated urban chain gangs that the Secretary of Education advocates are the innovative extinguishing of due process for teachers and students, the innovative application of total compliance techniques, and the innovative bookkeeping that makes the corporate leeches who run these outfits wealthy.

It has taken the New York Times 10 months to report on the CREDO charter study that shows the bankruptcy of the national policy obsession with these undemocratic containment camps, but the facts are not enough to dampen the Times's enthusiasm. Rather, reporter Trip Gabriel focuses on the test score production camps of KIPP and the KIPP knock-offs that have adopted the same brainwashing techniques designed for military precision, the elimination of resistance, and parrot learning.

What Mr. Gabriel does not mention is the attrition rate among students who cannot or will accept the degradation of spirit that is required by the contracts that must be signed by students and parents. In some of these chain gangs, the attrition rate is 60 percent, which, of course, makes the survivors' test scores seem all the more remarkable.

The other gaping hole in the Times charter story is the segregation and cognitive sterilization chapter, a modern day tale that has its origins in the eugenics movement that went wild in this country a hundred years ago. Corporate urban charters are about segregated containment and psychological sterilization of the brown and the poor. That's the scoop that the Times missed once again, preferring (as its Editorial Board demands) instead to spout the Hoxby hoax study that has been discredited, even as it was never made available for peer review.

A clip from today's story (do read the whole thing):

. . . .That movement includes a crowded clique of alpha girls and boys, including New York hedge fund managers, a Hollywood agent or two and the singers John Legend and Sting, who performed at a fund-raiser for Harlem charter schools last Wednesday at Lincoln Center. Charters have also become a pet cause of what one education historian calls a billionaires’ club of philanthropists, including Mr. Gates, Eli Broad of Los Angeles and the Walton family of Wal-Mart.

But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”

Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools.. . .

Fact Checking the Bill Gates Blog on KIPP

Whoa, Mr. Gates blogs! And his Jan. 21 entry does a creditable job of squeezing some more propaganda mileage from the Jay Mathews KIPP celebration that I reviewed last March. The first misleading thing about the post is the photo (above), which shows a Seth-and-Caitlin-looking pair of white children, when, in fact, almost all the children in the KIPP total compliance camps are brown and black. Score one for misleading.

Point 2: Mr. Gates thinks middle school includes grades 5-9: "Great teaching in 5th-9th grade is very hard because it’s challenging to get all of the kids engaged and because dealing with kids who cause trouble or are bored requires special skills." But, yes, Mr. Gates, total containment and force-fed doses of positive psychology requires special skills, indeed. Score one for ignorance.

Finally, on the subject of who goes to college and who doesn't, Mr. Gates's information appears to be based on the same Jonathan Alter lies published in Newsweek in 2008, which were subsequently debunked by reporter, Caroline Grannan. From Mr. Gates:

One example of KIPP’s success: while only 20 percent of low-income students in the U.S. attend college, the rate for former KIPP students is 80 percent.

On the other hand, here are the facts from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, 2008:

In terms of family income, 91% of high school students from families in the highest income group (above $100,000) enroll in college. The enrollment rate for student from middle-income families (from $50,001 to $100,000) is 78% and for those in the lowest income group ($20,000 and below) the rate is 52% (p. 7)."

Mr. Gates is also incorrect about the number "80 percent" of KIPPsters going to college. Based on information supplied by KIPP's home office and reported by Caroline Grannan, “the actual number of KIPP alumni who had started college [by 2008], KIPP spokesman Steve Mancini said at that time, was 447.” Score two big ones for irresponsible lies.

New York Times Confirms Loyalty to Bloomberg's Charter Propaganda Machine

Brent Staples has been stupid about education for a long time, and today's NYTimes Editorial on charter schools in NYC shows that he is only getting stupider by the day. A recent report on NYC charters showed 51% of students in NYC charters do better in math than the public schools, which means of, course, that in 49% of charters, they do worse or no better than the publics.

In reading, only 29% of NYC charters have higher reading scores than the public schools, which means that in 71% of the charters, reading scores are no better or lower than the public schools.

Now here is how Staples and Co. reports these findings in their corporate editorial today:

. . . .A new study from the center [CREDO] has turned up a brighter picture in New York City, where students at more than half of the charter schools are showing more academic improvement in math than their traditional-school counterparts. The reading numbers were not as strong, but still nearly 30 percent of charters outperformed traditional schools. . . . .

The Bloomberg Spin Reported by Bloomberg News for Bloomberg Schools

The charter school crusaders and spin merchants at Larson Communications were sending out multiple emails to the media to set the spin on the release of the a CREDO report that shows some very mixed results for NYC charter schools. That fact, however, did not deter Larson and Bertelli from concocting this whopper as the first sentence in their media advisory on January 1:

A new report by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University commissioned by the New York City Department of Education found that charter schools in New York City are demonstrating significantly better results for their students in reading and in math than their traditional public school counterparts.

First, note who commissioned this study and who, I would imagine, is paying Mr. Larson and Mr. Bertelli for their dissembling PR. The last part of that sentence is, in fact, simply a lie that was repeated in the intro to the press release and that was negated a few sentences later in the press release, itself:

On a school-by-school comparison, the report found that 51 percent of New York City charter schools are showing academic growth in math that is statistically larger than students would have achieved in regular public schools, with 33 percent with no significant difference and 16 percent with significantly lower learning. In reading, the report found that 29 percent of charter schools are showing statistically better gains, with 59 percent with no significant difference and only 12 percent significantly lower.

Just to translate here for the Bloomberg reporters, the previous sentence from the findings makes Mr. Larson and Mr. Bertelli liars. Get it? NYC charters squeaked out an edge over the publics by ONE PERCENT in math, i.e., 51%. That means, Bloomberg reporters, that 49% of NYC charters did either no better or worse on math tests than the public schools. On reading, now pay close attention, Mr. Staley and Mr. Kaufman, your boss's schools in NYC did better in reading in only 29 PERCENT. That means, Mr. Staley and Kaufman, that 71% of Bloomberg schools did worse or no better in reading than the public schools. Got it?

Not yet, apparently. Here is the way that Bloomberg's boy, Oliver Staley, is reporting it, beginning with the Larson and Bertelli same lie from the earlier spin lit:

Jan. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Students in New York City charter schools outperformed their public school counterparts in reading and math, according to a Stanford University study.

Fifty-one percent of charter school students showed gains in math that are “statistically larger” than they would have achieved in conventional public schools, according to the report released today by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which is based at Stanford, near Palo Alto, California. The study, which analyzed six years of data at 49 charter schools from 2003 through 2009, also found that 29 percent of charter schools students showed greater gains than their public-school counterparts in reading.

Charter schools are publicly funded institutions that are privately managed under contracts with school districts and may be exempt from certain state and local regulations. The report follows a June study of charter schools in 16 states from the same Stanford center, which found nearly half did not perform better than local public options. . . .

Lastly, have a look at that final sentence just above for some fine, fine dissembling. Could that last sentence be intended to mean that, since "nearly half did not perform better than local public options," then just over half did perform better than local public schools? I think I figured it out!

Unfortunately, this, too, is a lie by Mr. Staley and his editor, Mr. Kaufman. Here is what can be found on page 3 of the National Charter School Study - Full Report:

The Quality Curve results are sobering:

• Of the 2403 charter schools reflected on the curve, 46 percent of charter schools have math gains that are statistically indistinguishable from the average growth among their TPS [traditional public school] comparisons.
  

• Charters whose math growth exceeded their TPS equivalent growth by a significant amount account for 17 percent of the total.
  

• The remaining group, 37 percent of charter schools, posted math gains that were significantly below what their students would have seen if they enrolled in local traditional public schools instead.

Casino Capitalist Hedge Funders Move All In on Corporate Welfare Charter Schools

(Photo by Nicholas Roberts for The New York Times)

With unrestrained Wall Street greed having devoured the American economy and most of the Wall Street monster's own appendages, new opportunities for casino capitalitsts to cash in are much harder to come by. With encouragement, however, from the Oligarchs who run the U. S. Department of Education, a new gold mine has opened up in the lucrative corporate charter movement, with big opportunities for vulture philanthropists to collect huge tax credits, for charter real estate dealers, bond bundlers and investors, and for charter school management corporations, which are paid millions from tax dollars meant for public education. Happy Days are here again, as reported in a story today in the Times.

What impressed me about the story was not its predictably sychophantic coverage on this new sub-species of corporate bloodsucker, but, rather, the fact that the New York Times has finally mentioned the Stanford charter school study that has so effectively exposed the truth about the vaunted charter school solution:

• Of the 2403 charter schools reflected on the curve, 46 percent of charter schools have math gains that are statistically indistinguishable from the average growth among their TPS [traditional public school] comparisons.
  

• Charters whose math growth exceeded their TPS equivalent growth by a significant amount account for 17 percent of the total.
  

• The remaining group, 37 percent of charter schools, posted math gains that were significantly below what their students would have seen if they enrolled in local traditional public schools instead.

How did the Times report the Stanford study after 6 months of ignoring the biggest charter story of the year? Only by giving the Hoxby hoax top billing and with no facts or analysis of that "suggestive" CREDO study. Stunning:

Whether charters do a better job of educating children, even with the extra help from private donors, is much debated. A study released in September by researchers headed by Caroline M. Hoxby, an economist at Stanford who is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, concluded that on average New York City charters outperform local schools. But another study by a different group of Stanford researchers last summer suggested that nationally the numbers are muddier.

Charter School Magic Bullet Hits a Brick Wall

The evidence grows each week that the Business Roundtable's latest magic bullet for killing off public schools has failed to fully penetrate its victims. What has penetrated the thinking among states and municipalities is the realization that the corporate charter movement promises big tax saving for philanthrocapitalists like Gates and Broad, big profits for educational management organizations, total social control by corporations of the scary black people in the slums, and huge, huge losses to dollar-starved public coffers that must fund the charters AND the remaining public schools. From Town Topics in Princeton, NJ:

. . . .The board also unanimously approved a resolution to “direct and authorize the Superintendent of Schools to express the Board’s opposition and concerns regarding current application(s) and future applications made to the Commissioner of Education for the establishment of charter schools that target Princeton Borough and Princeton Township school-aged children.” The resolution noted that “the basis for this opposition is to protect the Princeton Regional School District’s fiscal ability and organizational capacity to maintain programs of excellence for all public school students in our community.” Ms. Wilson said that “we will be very specific in our opposition to charter school applications,” noting that “each differs in the target populations it proposes to serve.” There is currently an application for a Mandarin language, International Baccalaureate-granting charter school in the district.. . .

And from the Buffalo News:

Claiming that charter schools drain dollars and students from Buffalo’s traditional schools, the Board of Education voted, 6-2, Wednesday evening to seek a state moratorium on new charter schools in and around the city.

While it is not immediately clear what impact the vote might have on charter school licensing, the vote underlines the growing frustration Buffalo Public Schools officials have with the state’s decade- old charter school law.

“I have a moral and ethical obligation to the public school system of this city,” said board President Ralph Hernandez, who voted for the moratorium. “This is having a serious impact on the Buffalo public school system.”. . .

These events coincide with a the backing off by Duncan and the RTTT guidelines, as well as the new hard look that editorial boards are taking in terms of the corporate kool-aid they historically have swigged on the charter school issue. The latest from the LA Times editorial page (my bolds):

. . . .After a decade of rapid growth, charters have begun delivering on some of these promises. They were among the first smaller, more personal schools; "smaller" has become a rallying cry among urban school districts. Families in low-income areas flocked to the new schools, where expectations were higher and children felt safer. Some have delivered impressive test scores.

All of these accomplishments have been particularly noticeable in Los Angeles Unified, where reform in the traditional public school system has come slower than in other large urban districts, and where charters have been a lifeline for students trapped in schools with high dropout rates and miserable achievement levels. That's why this page has supported the growth of the charter movement in L.A., as well as a new district initiative that will open perhaps 250 schools to outside management, including charter operators. Drastic change is needed, and the record of several local charter organizations, such as Green Dot Public Schools and the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, at least offers hope for better management.

Less clear, though, is whether charter schools offer real, long-term solutions to fixing public education in America, or whether the Obama administration should be relying on them so heavily as a means of turning around the nation's record of academic mediocrity. Studies of charter schools have been mixed; some researchers give higher marks to charters, others to public schools. One of the most recent and most comprehensive longitudinal studies, released by Stanford University in June, found that charter schools were uneven. More than a third perform worse than nearby public schools, and about half do about as well as public schools, the study found. Only 17% provide students with a "superior educational opportunity."

Built-in advantages

Clearly, it's difficult to generalize about charter schools. By their very nature as independently run schools, they vary widely in their programs and goals. But they're all supposed to do a good job of educating students -- in most cases, a better job than surrounding schools.

That's especially true considering that, at least theoretically, charter schools have a built-in advantage. In California, most charter schools fill their seats through lotteries, to give all students an equal chance and to prevent the schools from enrolling only the most promising students. It's a fair system, but it skews enrollment because the lotteries attract motivated, involved families. In addition, charter schools can require extra responsibilities for students and parents, such as volunteering time on campus, and can close enrollment when they are full. They also have more authority to expel students who do not meet their standards for behavior. Families that are unable or unwilling to invest that much in their children's education will end up at public schools, which have to accept all students within their boundaries.

Middle schools operated by the respected Knowledge Is Power Program, for example, run a highly regimented program during their 9.5-hour school days and longer school year. KIPP schools dramatically outperform public middle schools that enroll students of similar demographics, and that's due in large part to the extra instructional time and the intensive teacher training the charter chain invests in. But KIPP also draws the parents and students who are willing to accept regimentation, high expectations and long hours; its formula might be less successful at public schools, where many families might be less enthusiastic about its methods. In addition, the KIPP program spends significantly more per student than the public school system does, relying on private contributions to make up the difference. Its educational model couldn't be expanded to all of the state's middle schoolers even if every preteen yearned for it.

Another unknown is the extent to which charter schools serve as models or competitors and encourage positive change at public schools. Along with the trend toward smaller schools, the success of charters has prodded several school districts, including L.A. Unified, to start "pilot schools" -- schools that stay within the district but have more autonomy and accountability.

At the same time, now that the number of charter schools is reaching critical mass, they are having a disproportionate negative impact on funding for public schools. Through the lottery system, charters enroll students from various schools and grades. Most of the state funding for those students follows them to their new schools. The public schools they leave receive less money, but their operating costs don't necessarily go down. Giving one student the opportunity to attend a charter should not mean leaving another with fewer resources.

Showing the way at Locke

That's why Green Dot's takeover of Locke High School last year was a pioneering step for charter schools, in terms of both leveling the playing field with public schools and minimizing the disruption caused by student transfers.

Under its agreement with L.A. Unified, Green Dot agreed to enroll all students within Locke's attendance boundaries. That meant taking the gang members, the teenagers who rebelled against the uniforms and hundreds more students than it had room for. It also meant taking less money from other public schools in the area. But Green Dot's goal is different from that of many charter operators. Its management isn't looking to supplant public schools, but rather to push L.A. Unified into following its blueprint for educating disadvantaged children: small schools with a high emphasis on safety that give teachers a stronger role in decision-making but require more flexible contracts. Green Dot also spends the same amount per student on day-to-day operations as L.A. Unified.

At the end of the year, Locke's test scores were at the same bottom level the school has long been known for -- in marked contrast to achievement at other Green Dot schools that drew students through lotteries and were able to control their size. But Locke did become safer and more orderly, with lower truancy rates and higher student retention. Students almost universally praised their new teachers. In theory, such changes should lead over time to better learning -- and test scores -- for all students in the neighborhood, not just those whose parents took the initiative to sign them up for a lottery.

Still, it's puzzling that Green Dot has announced that founder Steve Barr is "taking on a leadership role in the national dialogue on education reform" and drafting a plan for state and national educational policy based on the Green Dot experience. The charter operator might well prove to have valuable lessons for real-world public education, but we won't know unless and until Locke's academic achievement improves. . . .

Barr is moving up into the philanthrocapitalist hierarchy where the money is better and where his pathetic experiment cannot touch him. Peter Principle in practice. Will he emerge as Arne Duncan's lapdog now?

John Merrow Takes the Road Most Traveled, By Corporate Charter Advocates

John Merrow is better served when he sticks to putting the best news face possible on corporate education reform atrocities, all in the name of fair and balanced reporting. But he has a predictable habit of interjecting himself into educational debates that he feels he should know something about, even though his latest entry into the charter controversy shows once again that Mr. Merrow should take fewer naps and do some current reading in areas for which he obviously cares more about than he knows.

Merrow's latest commentary in Ed Week, "When Roads Diverge: Tracking the Charter Movement," shows Merrow doing a little backtracking, in fact, to a time in late summer 2009, before Caroline Hoxby's shoddy charter "research" for Mike Bloomberg had been thoroughly discredited as an expensive advocacy piece by an expensive advocate. Merrow, in this commentary, offers us a celebration of the "gold standard" that Hoxby might have brought to bear on the charter question, had she not been compelled to distort, manipulate, exaggerate, and extrapolate her findings to fit her commission. And the small issue of the Hoxby "study" never receiving peer review before becoming the gospel according to Eli Broad and the corporate press? No problem, for Merrow had lunch with Caroline, and she assured him the peer review would happen soon. Which it already has, but which Merrow never mentions for fear of damaging his own variety of George Babbitt boosterism that drives this pro-charter screed to its illogical conclusion.

If Merrow had written all this out of ignorance, I could look the other way. After all, it is common practice for education writers to go for a couple of months without reading anything about the subjects they report on. But it is in the way that Merrow abuses the PDK/Gallup findings that convinces me clearly he has a few things to teach even the most polished propagandist like Caroline Hoxby. From Merrow:

The general public clearly wants more charter schools—64 percent in the 2009 Gallup poll on education. And a 2009 survey conducted by Education Next reports that more than a third of public school teachers support charters, a number that jumps to nearly half when respondents are told of President Obama’s support.

First off, if I wanted to know what teachers think, I would not go to Education Next, which is sponsored by the union busters at the sludge tank, the Hoover Institute. Secondly, there are no teacher questions in the survey that is connected by Merrow's link. Thirdly and most importantly, Kappan/Gallup poll did not ask the public if they "want more charter schools." The question actually asks, "do you favor or oppose the idea of charter schools:"

TABLE 11. As you may know, charter schools operate under a charter or contract that frees them from many of the state regulations imposed on public schools and permits them to operate independently. Do you favor or oppose the idea of charter schools?

Quite a different question, wouldn't you say, Mr. Merrow?

Arizona Charter Schools Accept Average As Excellent

Kudos to Nick Anderson at WaPo for reporting some of the facts about corporate charter schools. A clip (my bolds):

. . . .Advocates say charter schools . . . have influenced regular schools for the better. Critics call those claims overblown. Arizona State University education professor Gene Glass said he could show a visitor "exciting stuff" in at least 50 regular public schools.

Through test scores, Arizona rates about 24 percent of charter schools as "excelling" or "highly performing." About 37 percent of regular public schools win those marks.

"There's nothing to learn from these charter schools," Glass said. "There's so much mythology about this."

Obama contends that there is much to learn. His $4.35 billion Race to the Top education reform competition aims to lure states to expand the number of high-quality charter schools, which the president said in July would "force the kind of experimentation and innovation that helps to drive excellence in every other aspect of life."

It remains unknown whether states will heed Obama's call, though some have taken modest steps to ease charter restrictions. Eighteen years after Minnesota passed the first charter law, 4,700 charter schools are in operation nationwide. But 10 states have no charter laws, and many have caps on charter schools or give sole authorizing power to local school boards, which are often reluctant to approve a competitor.

The rapid growth of D.C. charter schools shows their appeal in urban areas where regular schools often struggle to lift the achievement of disadvantaged students. Arizona is an example to states such as Virginia and Maryland that good charter schools can compete anywhere. But weeding out weak schools and boosting underperformers can be tricky.

Dropping and flunking out
Arizona has revoked four charters since 2007, one for academic problems and the rest for management issues. Two dozen other charters were surrendered for various reasons, some academic. Now the State Board for Charter Schools, which oversees the sector, is preparing for the first round of charter renewals in state history.

Much is at stake. Arizona charters last 15 years -- longer than it takes a kindergartner to finish high school. Renewals last 20.

In South Phoenix, NFL YET (for "youth education town") College Prep Academy is preparing to apply for renewal next year. Latino leaders launched the school in the mid-1990s. They sought to create a safe harbor in what co-founder Armando Ruiz recalled as a dangerous neighborhood of junked cars, vacant lots, tire dumps and dilapidated apartments.

The school won a $1 million grant from the NFL when the Super Bowl came to Phoenix in 1996 and an additional $1.5 million when it returned in 2008. The grants funded an academic building, two athletic fields and a campus expansion.

Self-esteem and character education are big at this school of roughly 300 students in grades 7 to 12. The word of the week, written one afternoon on whiteboards, was "moral." Some of the uniformed students study leadership in addition to taking honors classes.

"How many of you have eaten in a restaurant where there's a basket of bread?" the leadership teacher asked in a lesson on manners. "What do you do? Where does it go?" She followed up: "You have a little bowl of little balls of butter -- what do you do with that?"

Frank Duarte teaches pre-calculus and aims to start what would be the school's only AP class within a year. "My job is to get to know them and to hook them," he said. "After that, I don't let 'em breathe. It's bam-bam-bam: 'You are going to learn. You can learn.' "

"People don't think we can do as much because we're from the Southside," said Samantha Gardiner, 17, a senior who aspires to attend Northern Arizona University. "That's what's good about this school: They tell us, 'Even though you're from the Southside, you're going to do great things and change the world.' "

For all the zeal of teachers and students, Ruiz acknowledged that the school he leads hasn't lived up to ambitions. Its key state test scores are below average and stagnant, its course offerings somewhat less than challenging.

"We got off-track," Ruiz said. "Why? The hard thing to maintain is the intensity of excellence. About three years ago, we accepted average as being excellent."

The Three Stooges Go to School

(Since Michael Bloomberg won re-election, Moe will now be played by Arne Duncan. Photo by Jed Kirschbaum, AP).

The hilarious trio took their political antics on the road Friday to a KIPP school in Baltimore. There to lightheartedly promote their support for segregated total compliance testing camps that focus on fixing children's minds rather than their impoverished neighborhoods and schools, the wise-cracking trio sat in on a class that, ironically, was studying what it means to be enslaved. Talk about a teachable moment!

Between some "incredible" and "unbelievable" comedy by Moe, Curly, and Larry, Moe had this to say:

Everywhere we're going, we're seeing not incremental change, not slight change, but dramatic change - exponential growth. And our challenge, and our opportunity, is how do you take to scale what's working," Duncan said. "For all the challenges we face, and they are huge, I'm unbelievably hopeful about where we're going.

Unbelievable, isn't it. Incredible, too. Huge.

What is not incredible, but very credible, in fact, is that the "exponential growth" that the Stooges are seeing at the KIPP cults they visit comes with a big premium that is paid in the large number of children who become pushouts and dropouts. In the only KIPP schools that have been systematically studied (pdf here), five Bay Area KIPPs lost 60% of their students between 5th and 8th grade:

Together, the four schools began with a combined total of 312 fifth graders in 2003-04, and ended with 173 eighth graders in 2006-07. The number of eighth graders includes new students who entered KIPP after fifth grade (p.12).

And here is another unbelievably believable bit of data regarding teacher attrition that is never brought to light at the Stooges' media circuses:

Since 2003-04, the five Bay Area KIPP school leaders have hired a total of 121 teachers. Of these, 43 remained in the classroom at the start of the 2007-08 school year. Among teachers who left the classroom, at four of the schools they spent a median of 1 year in the classroom before leaving; at one school, the typical teacher spent 2 years in the classroom before leaving (32).

Do these numbers present a problem for the corporate education reform movement, which pretends to use KIPP as a "scalable" model for the perpetuation of segregated containment schools? An incredible and unbelievable one, I'd say.

Hoxby Charter Study Turns Hoaxby

I was at Substance News this morning enjoying the work of the Schmidt Team when I came across some important news I had missed. No doubt I would still be missing it if it were not for Substance News, for the research review by EPIC and EPRU announced below remains ignored by corporate editorial boards everywhere.

Jennifer Medina did have a brief, buried blog post in the NYTimes Saturday regional news, but you can be sure that the deflation of the gaseous Hoxby hoax will not be reported as news anywhere--it simply does not conform to the corporate education reform narrative, particularly since it is, yet, another loud smackdown to the anti-scientific approach to education policy being taken by Team Obama/Gates/Broad.

When the history is written on this sad episode of American educational policy, Arne Duncan will, no doubt, make Margaret Spellings seem, well, 99.44% pure.

The Press Release from EPIC at the University of Colorado:

Headline-Grabbing Charter School Study Doesn’t Hold Up To Scrutiny
Reviewer finds serious statistical flaws in research on NYC charter schools

Contact: Sean Reardon, (650) 736-8517 (office); (617) 251-4782 (cell); sean.reardon@stanford.edu
Kevin Welner, (303) 492-8370; kevin.welner@colorado.edu
Gary Miron, (269) 599-7965; gary.miron@wmich.edu

BOULDER, Colo. and TEMPE, Ariz. (November 12, 2009) -- A recent report on New York City charter schools found achievement results at the charters to be better than comparison traditional schools. But that report relies on a flawed statistical analysis, according to a new review.

The report is How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement and was written by Caroline Hoxby, Sonali Murarka, and Jenny Kang. When it was released in late September, it was enthusiastically and uncritically embraced by charter advocates as well as media outlets. The Washington Post offered an editorial titled, "Charter Success. Poor children learn. Teachers unions are not pleased." The editorial's first paragraph reads:

"Opponents of charter schools are going to have to come up with a new excuse: They can't claim any longer that these non-traditional public schools don't succeed. A rigorous new study of charter schools in New York City demolishes the argument that charter schools outperform traditional public schools only because they get the 'best students.' This evidence should spur states to change policies that inhibit charter-school growth. It also should cause traditional schools to emulate practices that produce these remarkable results."

The editorial argues throughout that the study provides unquestionable evidence that charters result in improved student achievement. It ends, "Now the facts are in."

The New York Daily News was no less effusive: "It's official. From this day forward, those who battle New York's charter school movement stand conclusively on notice that they are fighting to block thousands of children from getting superior educations."

Because of the declared importance of the new report, we asked Professor Sean Reardon to carefully examine the report's strengths and weaknesses for the Think Tank Review Project and write a review that would help others use the study in a sensible way. Reardon, like the report's lead author Hoxby, is a professor at Stanford University. He is an expert on research methodology.

The Hoxby report estimates the effects on student achievement of attending a New York City charter school rather than a traditional public school. A key finding, repeated in press reports throughout the U.S., compares the cumulative effect of attending a New York City charter school for nine years (from kindergarten through eighth grade) to the magnitude of average test score differences between students in Harlem and the wealthy New York community of Scarsdale. The report estimates this cumulative effect at roughly 66% of the "Scarsdale-Harlem gap" in English and roughly 86% of the gap in math.

In his review, Reardon observes that the report "has the potential to add usefully to the growing body of evidence regarding the effectiveness of charter schools." New York charter schools' use of randomized lotteries to admit students to charter schools offers the possibility that the study of those schools can roughly approximate laboratory conditions.

But Reardon points out that the report's key findings are grounded in an unsound analysis -- an inappropriate set of statistical models -- and that the report's authors never provide crucial information that would allow readers to more thoroughly evaluate "its methods, results, or generalizability."

Reardon's review notes these shortcomings in the report:

• In measuring the effects of charter schooling on students in grades 4 through 12, the study relies on statistical models that include test scores from the previous year, measured after the admission lotteries take place. Yet because of that timing, those scores could be affected by whether students attend a charter school. As a consequence, the statistical models "destroy the benefits of the randomization" that is a strength of the study's design. (The use of a different model makes the results for students in grades K-3 more credible, he notes.)

• The report's claims regarding the cumulative effects of attending a New York City charter school from kindergarten through eighth grade are based on an inappropriate extrapolation.

• It uses a weaker criterion for statistical significance than is conventionally used in social science research (0.05), referring to p-values of roughly 0.15 as "marginally statistically significant".

• The report describes the variation in charter school effects across schools in a way that may distort the true distribution of effects by omitting many ineffective charter schools from the distribution.

Reardon explains that, as a result of the flaws in the report's statistical analysis, the report "likely overstates the effects of New York City charter schools on students' cumulative achievement, though it is not possible -- given the information missing from the report -- to precisely quantify the extent of overestimation." This, as well as the lack of detailed information in the report to assess the extent of that bias, make it impossible for readers to know whether the report's estimated charter school effects are in fact valid.

"Policymakers, educators, and parents should therefore not rely on these estimates until the bias issues have been fully investigated and the analysis has undergone rigorous peer review."

According to Professor Kevin Welner, director of the University of Colorado at Boulder's Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC): "Readers of this review will understand that, while Hoxby's charter school study is a contribution, it has significant flaws and limitations. Unfortunately, the editorial reaction of otherwise-respectable media outlets trumpeted the New York City findings as the final and faultless word on charter school performance. In fact, the study used inappropriate methods that overstate the performance of the charter schools it studied."

Welner notes that the Think Tank Review Project also recently reviewed another charter school study, released in June by Stanford's CREDO policy center. That study encompassed 65-70% of the nation's charter schools. "Our review pointed out a number of limitations but also noted the relative strength and comprehensiveness of the data set, the solid analytic approaches of the CREDO researchers, and the important fact that the CREDO results were consistent with a large body of research showing charter schools overall to be performing no better than (and perhaps worse than) traditional public schools," Welner says. But he added that "the CREDO and Hoxby reports used different designs and covered different schools. They are not directly comparable, nor are we able to say which is 'better.' Neither report is definitive or without notable weaknesses."

Welner concludes, "the important thing to understand is that if, after an appropriate reanalysis of the data, we still find that New York City's charter schools are in fact bucking the national trend, the sensible next step is for researchers to explore the causes rather than to jump to broad conclusions that fly in the face of the overall research base. It would be irresponsible to use the NYC results -- even if they were valid and reliable -- to drive policy in places throughout the U.S. where charters are apparently underperforming their competition."

Find Sean Reardon's review on the web at:
http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-How-New-York-City-Charter

Find the NYC report by Hoxby and her colleagues at:
http://www.nber.org/~schools/charterschoolseval/

CONTACT:
Sean F. Reardon
Associate Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology
Stanford University
(650) 736-8517 (office); (617) 251-4782 (cell)
sean.reardon@stanford.edu

Kevin Welner, Professor and Director
Education and the Public Interest Center
University of Colorado at Boulder
(303) 492-8370
kevin.welner@colorado.edu

Gary Miron, Professor of Education
Western Michigan University
(269) 599-7965
gary.miron@wmich.edu

About the Think Tank Review Project

The Think Tank Review Project (http://thinktankreview.org), a collaborative project of the University of Colorado at Boulder Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) and the ASU Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU), provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think tank publications. The project is made possible by funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

EPIC and EPRU collaborate to produce policy briefs in addition to think tank reviews. Our goal is to promote well-informed democratic deliberation about education policy by providing academic as well as non-academic audiences with useful information and high quality analyses.

Visit EPIC and EPRU at http://www.educationanalysis.org/

EPIC and EPRU are members of the Education Policy Alliance
(http://educationpolicyalliance.org).

Hoxby's Fool's Gold Standard

It was a huge embarrassment to Gates, Broad, Bloomberg, and other corporate school charterizers when the first peer-reviewed national study of charter schools showed that charters outperform public schools in less than 20 percent of the cases. Since then the oligarchs have brought in the hired gun economist, Catherine Hoxby, who never saw a charter school she didn't like, to slime the study as best she can.

Bloomberg has even sweetened Hoxby's pot, asking her for a good-news study of New York's charter schools, a study whose methodology Hoxby immodestly refers to as reflecting the "the gold standard." Here, then, is a post from More Thoughtful that does a little rubbing to find out what is underneath Hoxby's shiny surface:

Did you hear about the big report that came out this week? You know, the one that "shows" that NYC charter schools are better than traditional non-charter public schools? It has gotten a ton of attention, probably because it uses "'the gold standard' method[ology]." The report is not subtle about this. It is right there in the very first sentence of the executive summary, "The distinctive feature of this study is that charter schools' effects on achievement are estimated by the best available, "gold standard" method: lotteries." It even uses the term "gold standard" four more times throughout the report.

Everyone wants to follow The Gold Standard -- or at least be able to say that they do. Of course! I mean, who wouldn't? But I do not think that we actually have a gold standard in education research. In fact, I am quite sure that we do not, and appropriating biomedical research's gold standard does not make it appropriate for us.

However, if we are going to borrow their standard, can we not at least get it right?

The biomedical standard uses double-blind experimental studies with random assignment. That means that some research participants get the experimental treatment and some get a placebo, and both are assigned randomly. It also means that neither the researchers nor the participants know who is getting which treatment. After all, expectations are important, and the mind can set us up for all kinds of things.

*****************

One of the latest ideas about The Gold Standard in educational research concerns charter schools.

We all want to know whether charter schools are better than traditional non-charter public schools. On one level, we certainly do want to know about individual schools. But on the policy level, we want to know about the average charter school, because we want to figure out if "charterness" helps a school be better. If it does, then we want more charter schools. If it does not, then we want fewer or none. And if we cannot be sure, we want to keep checking.

Let me say this quite clearly: Some charter schools are better than most non-charter public schools, and some are worse. And some non-charter public schools are better than most charters, and some are worse.

The Gold Standard crowd have a favorite method for comparing charter schools to non-charter public schools, one of which they are quite proud, but one that is so full of problems that I am shocked that they keep using it.

They rightly want to control for self-selection bias among charter school students. We know that children and families that apply to charter schools are different from those who do not, even if we do not know what all those differences are. This seems like the perfect time to do a randomized assignment, because that is the best method to make sure that these differences cancel out between groups. Luckily, we have some randomized assignments. Oversubscribed charter schools are virtually always supposed to accept students using a random lottery. This allows researchers to compare the outcomes of those were were randomly accepted, and those who were not.

Sounds good, right?

Well, it does sound good. But serious issues remain. Some are more obvious than others, and some are correctable by those interested in getting the correct answer, rather than the one that fits their pre-ordained conclusions.

Issue #1: No Placebo

Biomedical research does not just include randomization of treatment. It also is at least single blind. If some patients know that they are getting the new treatment, they might react differently. The mind is a powerful thing. They might be more diligent. Perhaps do their rehab exercises more often. Maybe pay more attention to diet. Who knows? And those who know that they are getting the new treatment might not lose hope.

If a student and/or his family do not get into the school of his/her/their choice, how might they react? I know from my own experience teaching that students who get their choice of schools take a bit more ownership. If they get their second choice, or last choice, or somehow do not get their choice, that's a big hurdle for their teachers and parents to overcome. If parents do not get their choice of schools for their students, are they going to be as supportive of their child's teachers? Of the assignments? Are they going to have the same kind of faith in their child's school? I think that the answer is really quite obvious.

The problem with these studies is that the students and families who "lose" these lotteries are no longer like the students and families who "win" these lotteries. There simply is no basis for thinking that their views of their schools are like those of the lottery "winners." In fact, one could quite simply argue that this method of analysis ensures that the "winning" charter school students are being compared to students who did not want to go to the schools they attend.

Obviously, that's not an even comparison.

Issue #2: Peer Effects

We all know that peer effects matter. Research, experience and common sense back this up. If you put a student in a class with a "better" group of peers, s/he will do better than s/he would have done in a class with a "worse" group of peers. The other kids all do their homework, or their parents were more likely to read to them, or they are somehow smarter, or harder working, or bring more cultural capital to school with them, or however else you think "better students" might be defined.

We also know that charter school students are not, as a group, like non-charter school students. That is how the Gold Standard crowd justifies their approach here. So: trying to control for applicant differences, but not controlling for ongoing peer effects? I don't know if that is just lazy or actually dishonest. The importance of peer effects is so well recognized that I tend to think it is the latter, especially because techniques to control for them are so well established.

Of course, there is another way to look at this. From a personal level, if you have a child, you don't care about controlling for peer effects. Actually, you want the effects to be left in so that you can take advantage of them. If charter schools have "better" students, that's a reason to send your own child to a charter school. However, if this analysis is done for policy purposes, to influence policy-makers, then peer effects do matter. If you are thinking about all students, not just the select few who can get into the "better" school, you need to control for peer effects.

Issue #3: Selection Bias on the School Level

The goal of this lottery-based study design is to avoid self-selection bias in the data. However, those who use it do not acknowledge the additional selection problems they create.

The most important problem is that not all charter schools are oversubscribed, so not all charter schools can be included in these studies. This wouldn't be a problem if we had good reason to believe that a random selection of charter schools were included, but that is obviously not the case. Clearly, the "better" charter schools are far, far, far more likely to be oversubscribed than the "worse" charter schools. This biases the sample rather severely towards better charter schools.

Unfortunately, the sample bias problem doesn't stop there.

A really strong traditional non-charter public school is not going to lose a lot of students to a simply above-average charter school. In order to be oversubscribed, a significant number of students and/or families have got to believe that the charter school option is superior to the non-charter public school option, which suggests a level of dissatisfaction with the local traditional public schools. This biases the sample towards inferior non-charter schools.

Issue #4: Generalizability

The hardest thing in educational research -- and perhaps research overall -- is to be able to generalize one's results to the broader population or wider world. And yet, that is usually the end goal of policy-oriented research.

These kinds of lottery-based studies only include the kinds of students and families that apply to charter schools in the first place. Even if the previous issues could be corrected, how can one know that other sorts of students and families would see the same benefits? The fact is that different populations might benefit less or more from going to a charter school. It is simply impossible to know from this kind of study. Of course, if you are only concerned about benefitting the kids of families who already opt for charter schools, then this is not a problem. But if you aim to help a broader population than that, you need a better methodology.

These generalizability concerns also apply to schools. Oversubscribed charter schools might well be better than average non-charter public schools, and I do not really question whether they are better than their local traditional alternatives. But on a policy level, we need to be concerned with charters more generally than that. If we raise or lift caps on charter schools, or approve new charter schools, we have to expect an average charter school to result, not an exceptional one. But these studies really tell us nothing about the majority of charter schools that are not oversubscribed. Nor do they tell us anything about the relative quality of non-charter public schools that lack charter school alternatives.

*****************

I understand the desire to find a Gold Standard for educational research. But simply grabbing that label because a methodology has some resemblance to biomedical research is not good enough, despite what Prof. Caroline Hoxby may claim. Moreover, the popular press really must do a better job of examining these claims critically, rather than cheerleading for them like this.

This, of course, means that researchers, journalists and the rest of us must be sure to take a more thoughtful stance than has become our habit.

Florida's Corporate Welfare Charters Want Ads on School Buses

From the Orlando Sentinel's blog:

This post comes from ace Sentinel reporter Mary Shanklin:

Charter-school accountability bills that passed the Florida Senate unanimously now face a number of House amendments, including one by Rep. Bryan Nelson, R-Apopka, to allow advertising on school buses.

The add-ons may be enough to sink any opportunity for the two legislative bodies to come together on making the publicly funded schools face similar regulations as traditional schools, said an aide to Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville. The senator has championed the reforms for the last two sessions following an Orlando Sentinel investigation into Florida’s 350-plus charter schools.

As approved in the Senate, the bill would prohibit nepotism and increase financial reporting among the schools, which are privately operated, often by management companies.

Nelson recently commented on the legislation, saying he was working with other representatives to strengthen the bill and “ensure that we have the strong safeguards necessary to ensure accountability of our charter schools."

Jeanne Allen Charter Propaganda Goes Unchecked by Washington Post

A couple of weeks ago it was George Will parading his ignorance and arrogance in an op-ed global warming denial piece that Washington Post sloppily fact-checked. Now we have another example from last Sunday's op-ed by Jeanne Allen, the Queen of charter school disinformation.

In a piece that shamelessly uses the South Carolina girl, Ty'Sheoma Bethea, who wrote the President about her crumbling school, to blame the girl's community for not fixing the problem themselves, Allen simply lies in order to paint the school community as lazy spendthrifts, a stereotype that lives on at least in the mind of Jeanne Allen:

Dillon's per-pupil expenditure -- $8,700 -- is higher than the national average. That funds more than 50 staff positions at her J.V. Martin Junior High School (including four custodians). That's a student-to-staff ratio of 9 to 1, meaning there are more than twice as many adults serving students as at most schools in the country. What if Ty'Sheoma had an opportunity scholarship, which would send $7,500 to the private school of her family's choosing?

It is bad enough that Allen would use this child to push her own corporate welfare solutions of vouchers and charters, but to make up stuff to perpetuate a cultural stereotype is really sad. It is doubly sad that the Washington Post would allow it. The actual per pupil expenditure at J. V. Martin Jr. High School is $7,322, while the SC state average expenditure is $9,466. The national average per pupil expenditure, WaPo factcheckers, is $8,701, which makes Ty'Sheoma's school $1,379 below the national average and $2,144 below the state average. By the way, the capital expenditures at this school are $149 per child per year, compared the $1,603 state average. I haven't been able to to check out the four custodians claim yet, but there would probably be plenty of work even if it were true, since the school was built in 1912.

Click to enlarge. You may see at left that the community of Dillon, SC is very poor, with 46% of households making under $30K per year. Chart from School Matters