The High Cost of Resegregation: Charters Cost PA Taxpayers Billions for Worse Test Results

Erica Frankenberg has some fascinating research on charter enrollement costs and resegregation via charter schools in Pennsylvania.  Below are a three charts worth spending a few minutes on letting the data soak in.  Bottom line:  

1) charter schools are more segregative than traditional public schools (TPS)

2) charter schools have cost Pennsylvania taxpayer over $4 billion over 6 years (that's more than the entire amount of cash included in Race to the Top)

3) a large majority of charter schools have lower test scores than their public sending schools.

What a deal!  But wait--there's more! Plus, the State has passed the entire weight of paying for charters to local governments!  

Sign up for your new charter school today!!

Hearings on Charter Schools in NY Focus on Corruption

Valerie Strauss at WaPo has posted Diane Ravitch's testimony yesterday before the hearing called by State Senator, Bill Perkins. And while Ravitch provides good facts within her thumbnail history, she misses three crucial points that have to be considered in assessing any program receiving public dollars:

1) Charter schools operate without public oversight and are anti-democratic. Teachers, parents, and children are subjected to the will of a corporate CEO (non-profit or for-profit) and a hand-picked Board that is chosen for its capacity to rubber stamp CEO decisions.

2) Charter schools have a documented segregative effect on communities, a fact that has been documented by two recent studies (press release page here and here) and thoroughly ignored by everyone from Diane Ravitch to Arne Duncan.

3) Charter schools seek to destroy public education and replace it with a deregulated form of corporate welfare that will make our schools worse than they are now (see Wall Street).

With that, here's a clip from Ravitch's comments:

Mr. Perkins, you must be a very dangerous and powerful man. Yesterday the tabloids were filled with editorials and articles denouncing you for holding hearings about charter schools; today, there are even more.

If charters are public schools and receive public money, why should they object to oversight hearings by a legally constituted body of the New York State Senate?

I am a historian of education, so allow me to provide a brief overview of the origin of charter schools.

Charter schools were first envisioned in 1988 by two men who didn’t know one another. Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, had the idea, as did Professor Ray Budde of the University of Massachusetts.

Both of them thought that public school teachers could get permission from local authorities to open a small experimental school and then focus on the neediest students. The school would recruit students who had dropped out and who were likely to drop out. It would seek new ways to motivate the most challenging students and bring whatever lessons they learned back to public schools, to make them better able to educate these youngsters.

The original vision of charter schools was that they would help strengthen public schools, not compete with them.

By 1993, Shanker turned against his own idea. He concluded that charter schools had turned into a form of privatization that was not materially different from vouchers. From then until his death in 1996, he lumped vouchers and charters together as a threat to public education and a distraction from real school reform.

Today, there are 5,000 charter schools with 1.5 million students. This is 3% of the nation’s public school enrollment of 50 million. In New York City, charters enroll 30,000 students, or about 3% of the city’s enrollment of 1.1 million.

Charters vary widely in quality.

Last year a national evaluation by Margaret Raymond of Stanford University (including data from 2,403 charters and 70 percent of all charter students) found that only 17% outperformed regular public schools; that 46% had learning gains no different from regular public schools; and that 37% had gains that were worse than regular public schools.

Raymond concluded, “This study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well as their TPS [traditional public school] counterparts. Further, tremendous variation in academic quality among charters is the norm, not the exception. The problem of quality is the most pressing issue that charter schools face.”

She went on to say that “If this study shows anything, it shows that we’ve got a two-to-one margin of bad charters to good charters.”

When Raymond studied New York City charters last year, she found a better record, but it was still a mixed record. She compared charters to regular public schools and concluded that 51% of charters got significant gains in math, while only 29% outperformed regular public schools in reading.

Conversely, 49% of New York City’s charter schools did not outperform regular public schools in math, and 71% produced no significant gains in reading. She also reported that students who were either special education or English language learners made no significant gains in New York City charter schools, nor did students who had previously been held back a grade.

She did not point out in her study that New York City’s charters have a smaller proportion of students in special education and students with limited English proficiency than the neighborhood public schools.

New York City has 50,000 homeless students, but only about 100 are enrolled in a charter school. If a proportionate number were in charters, there would be 1,500, not 100. In East New York, where there are nine homeless shelters, there is a successful charter that enrolls not a single homeless student.

We have to abandon the naïve belief that charters are a panacea for education; they are not. Since 2003, charter schools have been compared to regular public schools by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, the federal testing program.

In 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009, NAEP found no significant difference between students in charter schools and students in regular public schools. No significant difference for black students, Hispanic students, low-income students, or students in urban districts. Like Margaret Raymond’s study, NAEP shows that charters, in the aggregate, do not outperform regular public schools.

Some charters are as idealistic as the original vision, but many others now see themselves as competition for public schools. They want to take over public school space and replace public schools. They revel in stories about beating public schools, not helping them.

As the number of charters grows, public authorities must ensure that charter operators are responsible. We have seen stories in the press, especially the New York Daily News, about charters that produce astonishing profits for entrepreneurs and investors, while storing children in trailers with meager facilities. This is not right.

Just last month, on March 9, the New York Times described how public schools in Harlem now must market themselves to compete with charter schools for new students.

The regular public schools have less than $500 each to create brochures and fliers; the charter firm with which they compete has a marketing budget of $325,000. That’s not fair. We have seen stories about non-profit entrepreneurs who are paid $400,000 a year or more to run charters for 1,000 children.

That’s more than the Chancellor of the New York City schools is paid, and more than the U.S. Secretary of Education. That’s not right.. . . .

Corporate Charters Pillage Public Property: Can the Media Be Bothered to Report It?

From Danny Weil's new offering at Dissident Voice:

The Los Angeles Board of Education, little more than a managerial club belonging to LA Mayor Villaraigosa and his privatized charter crew, including Green Dot Schools, other educational maintenance organizations (EMO’s) and deep pocket entrepreneurs approved a resolution in August of 2009 to turn over 12 long-struggling campuses and 18 new ones to bidders from inside or outside the district, including some charter operators.¹ The effort is all part and parcel of the capitalist “reform of education” that is sweeping the nation below the radar screen of any national news. It includes using the government, which the neo-liberals say they abhor, to asset strip the public realm; in this case to orchestrate the legal seizure of actual public buildings that house public schools paid for over the decades by public taxpayers.

The insurgency is brutish and the mugging unconscionable as the hostile takeover of public schools is happening precisely at the same time that many schools are being closed and shuttered under the insidious No Child Left Behind provisions that allow for such pernicious disinvestment. Of course the efforts of the neo-liberals are hastily moving along with the disastrous loss of public funds for public schools and the horrific budgetary crisis slamming the state like a virtual Tsunami. Feasting on disaster is the model for these corporate market fundamentalists who see huge profits in the for-profit or non-profit ownership and management of public schools by educational maintenance organizations who want the actual building titles for the public schools and thus the imminently the facilities themselves. This is asset stripping done in broad daylight, a public pillaging that goes unreported by national media on both the ‘left’ and the ‘right.’

Coupled with this is public pillage is the huge amount of authority and autocratic decision-making that the Race to the Top, the neo-liberal brainchild of Arne Duncan and his corporate advisors, will have for the privatization of education. In order for states to qualify for any federal monies under Race to the Top, itself an insidious yet logical rhetorical label for the super-competitive ethos underlying capitalism and its ideological culture, they must meet four assurances that will open up a huge private market in teacher and student surveillance, ala longitudinal test score tracking, supplemental educational materials, merit pay for teachers tied to NCLB accountability and a chokehold on learning and assessment. Reconfigurating education in accordance with Race for the Top will also, of course, be a godsend to the makers of canned curriculum (“best practices”) that will need to be produced in alignment with the new state and federal standards to assure students pass the regimented tests which scores will be then used to rate the teachers and the new primary providers, the charter school EMO’s. Then there is the test prep industry that will dine like vultures off the new assessment obligations imposed on the states by Race to the Top.

UTLA files suit

The good news is that the union representing Los Angeles Unified Teachers (UTLA) filed a lawsuit December 21, 2009 to block the potential hand-over of new campuses to charter school EMO’s and their minions.. . . .

Read the rest here.

Hoxby Study Gets Kicked After Smackdown

On November 14, we reported on an assessment of Caroline Hoxby's unpublished charter study paid for by Mike Bloomberg. The independent evaluation boiled down to these specific criticisms:

• 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.

This month's District Administrator has another level of criticism offered by Jonathan Gyurko:

A report issued by the New York City Charter Schools Evaluation Project in September, and since been held up as clear evidence that charter schools are doing a better job than traditional schools, is now facing criticism that its claim of being an “apples to apples” study just isn’t true.

The report, How New York City’s Charter Schools Affect Achievement, examines the performance of students who applied for openings in New York’s charter schools, which are 94 percent filled through random lotteries. When researchers compared the academic performance of those who were “lotteried in” with those who were “lotteried out,” they discovered a higher rate of achievement in the charter group.

Critics claim the report does not take into account the “peer effect,” whereby a child learns not only from teachers but from fellow students. Writing in Edwize, a blog sponsored by New York’s United Federation of Teachers, Jonathan Gyurko says, “Charter schools benefit from the fact that 100 percent of their students hail from motivated families; as a result, a charter student is surrounded by peers who are there by choice—rather than by attendance zone.”

Alexander Hoffman, writing in GothamSchools, an online news source about the New York City public schools, says the report is flawed because, in contrast to a medical study, it has no placebo group. Both groups—students in charter schools and students in traditional schools—know what kind of education they are getting. “I know from my own experience teaching that students who get their choice of schools take a bit more ownership,” Hoffman says. “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.”

Led by well-known school choice advocate Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University, the researchers claim that since these two groups were essentially the same—both comprised of students who sought admission to charter schools—they were able to make a comparison in which where students were educated, charter school or traditional school, was the only variable.. . . .