by Adriana Villavicencio
Most Republicans and Democrats can only agree on three things: vacations in August, getting reelected, and charter schools. Charter schools – technically public schools that aren’t required to comply with all of the regulations imposed on regular public schools – have become a bipartisan hallmark of current education reform and have been portrayed as the salvation of failing schools systems in large urban districts.
The media is so rife with charter success stories, miracles, and models of achievement that it is easy to forget that only 17% of charter schools outperform public schools, while 37% of charter schools perform worse than public schools. The truth is some charter schools are great, some are terrible, and most are somewhere in between (guess what…the same can be said of regular public schools).
There are, however, some successful charters that stand out when compared to their district schools, but when you examine these schools more closely, you come to recognize that it’s like comparing apples to oranges. Advocates like to say that because these schools are located in the same neighborhoods (sometimes on the same block), they serve the same students and face the same challenges, but are they really the same?
Are they the same when a charter school can remove a student for disruptive behavior, while the school down the street must take everyone (often, the very students pushed out by the charters)?
Are they the same when a charter school doesn’t serve the same proportion of special education students that the school down the street is required to?
Are they the same when a charter school requires teachers to stay two hours after school and work on Saturdays (which, by the way, is easier is when the majority of your teachers are 24 and have no children of their own to take care of), while the school down the street must pay their teachers for working extended hours.
Are they the same when a charter school has affluent, well-connected philanthropists supporting extra programs, more staff, and well equipped facilities, while the school down the street is relying on bake sales to pay for supplies?
Are they the same when those extra resources allow you to keep your class sizes small, while the school down the street struggles to cap them at 33?
Are they the same when charter school parents must sign contracts to volunteer regularly at the school, while the school down the street sees only 7 parents at the monthly PTA meeting?
These differences aren’t true to the same extent in every charter school. Nor do any of these differences discredit the hard work of charter school leaders, teachers, and their students. Any time a student succeeds, we all win. At the same time, we must acknowledge that comparisons cannot be drawn between two unlike things. Understanding this may help us avoid pitting charter schools against public schools – that’s a battle for adults in which students end up losing.
To learn more about Adriana, visit The Radical Ideas.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and should not be understood to be shared by Being Latino, Inc.
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About Adriana Villavicencio
This article is absurd. Not only does the author cite only one study of comparison, she makes several sweeping assumptions on how charter schools operate without any sources.
We don’t know how many charter schools don’t take special needs children, mandates parental involvement (I know many of the charter schools featured in recent documentaries do not mandate parental involvement), how many have limited class sizes, and how many are supplemented with more funding in addition to the amount they receive fromtheir respective State.
We (the reader) are made to assume that many if not most charter schools’ successes are as a result of these characteristics. Sorry but that doesn’t cut it.
Regardless, the author neglects to mention a key fundamental difference between failing charter schools and failing public schools : the charter school is shut down. The public school remains, pumping out uneducated kids year after year with little or no accountability.
I have been doing research on charter schools for several years, so if you are interested in seeing tons of empiricial evidence on their relative performance, I can certainly provide that. This is an online magazine piece of 500 words….and their performance wasn’t my main point. I state that the hypothetical statements aren’t true of every charter school, but there is ample documentation of these differences in the urban cities in which they are prolific. To your last point, that is actually not the case. Only a small percentage of charter schools are closed for poor performance; most are closed for budgetary malfeasance. Check the Center for Education Reform (a charter advocacy organization) for national statistics on closure.
Good post. I work with high school seniors across the spectrum of public schools, private schools, charter schools and home-schooled, and can attest anecdotally to the accuracy of the statements made in this article. Charter schools in my area are notorious for coming up with “non-traditional” grading methods that eschew the “confinements” of letter grades, which is fine and dandy, but then those students are thrown into a college environment that does NOT credit them for wrong answers or attendance or community service, etc. Difficult situation all around.
About that 17% and 37% number. What the study actually says is:
“When examined by market — that is, by each charter and its virtual school – more than half the charters have less growth in learning than what their students would have realized if they had remained in traditional schools in their community. This finding says nothing about how well the local traditional schools are doing; it merely assesses the expectation that whatever the level, charters serving the same population should produce results at the same level.”
So, this was not a comparison to actual schools, but a comparison to what they would hope would be the level of. What’s even weirder is that a lot of the things that you complain about with Charter Schools having an advantage, you say as though it’s a negative. Teachers staying longer, working Saturdays, the ability to remove children that are disruptive to the learning process, and making parents participate are all good things.