these families think that by being anti-charter they’re defending America’s institution of public education. In reality, they’re defending a specific model of public education, one developed more than a century ago: an industrial-era model built around top-down management and bureaucracy, in which control and decision making belong to the central office rather than the practitioners. This model is a poor fit for today’s world because it treats all kids the same, often assigns them to schools based on their neighborhoods, and produces cookie-cutter schools that educate most children in the same way. It isn’t working well for the majority of urban students. And here’s the irony: it doesn’t always work well for suburban students, either.
It comes from a report by Emily Langhorne for the Progressive Policy Institute. I would add that today’s suburban public schools are not what they used to be. Many of the challenges that we used to associate with urban public schools, including large numbers of students from low-income backgrounds, are now prevalent in the suburbs.
Personally, I am not so optimistic that charter schools will produce significantly better outcomes. But I do think that it is more humane to allow families to opt out of the large-scale school districts that empower bureaucrats at the expense of parents.
Since charters can’t change the IQ of attendees, they can’t change test scores or adult SES by much. That isn’t their purpose. Their purpose is the happiness and satisfaction of the attendees, and hopefully that effect continuing on past attendance.
Let me give a simple example. When I attended local middle school I got the shit kicked out of me by bullies and was massively under challenged at school. When I went to magnet school for high school bullying wasn’t as big a problem and the school material challenged me. Most importantly, I was around people who wanted to learn and accomplish things, which I didn’t think was possible at the time.
I tested in the 99th percentile before and after, so according to progressives neither environment affected me at all. I can tell you it was a massive difference though.
Also, while I have no doubt anyone with high IQ will make a lot of money as an adult, there is a huge difference between doing so in a career that is a good fit and doing so in whatever career you fall into because you didn’t go to some place where they taught you how to figure that out.
Charters primarily help pick out the diamonds in the rough amongst NAMs (that’s what most charters do) or provide high quality magnet education to high IQ but low wealth first/second generation Asian immigrants that can’t afford private schools or real estate in high end districts.
“Personally, I am not so optimistic that charter schools will produce significantly better outcomes. But I do think that it is more humane to allow families to opt out of the large-scale school districts that empower bureaucrats at the expense of parents.”
Families can opt out of large-scale school districts any time they like. It’s called private school.
What you’re proposing is private school at public expense. And the opposite of “large-scale” is “small-scale”.
So there are three problems I never see you acknowledge, as you always just say “let’s let parents opt out! Kids won’t do any better, but so what?”
Problem 1: Charters are still public schools, so the charter bureaucrats are still empowered at the expense of parents.
Problem 2: opting out is either a right or a privilege. If it’s a right, then charters have to accept everyone. If it’s a privilege, then large scale districts will still have to exist to educate all the market failures. This is inequitable, and it’s what we have now. You are proposing ever more inequity, far more small schools to meet demand. So you will still have large expensive districts as well as small private but public ones, all still empowered over parents, all sucking up additional money in administrators, overhead, and so on.
Problem 3: the more small schools that exist, the more teachers that are needed. The more teachers that are needed, the more salaries increase. Moreover, the more small schools that siphon off the easy-to-educate students, the harder it will be for poor large districts that catch the rejects to staff–also increasing salaries. This is already a problem; it’s very likely charters are exacerbating the existing teacher shortages. https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2017/12/24/wherefore-and-whither-the-teacher-shortage/
People with your views often argue that teachers are overpaid, but increasing charters will simply increase teacher demand, and good luck with ending tenure, automatic raises, or beginning merit pay so long as teacher scarcity exists.
It’s just insane how otherwise smart people think existing charters are a good idea, much less the sort of ramping up the fantasy folks want. Good lord, donate to a fund that gives private school scholarships to poor kids. While you’re at it, argue for everyone to have their own bodyguard instead of using the large-scale police force that empowers bureaucrats.
“What you’re proposing is private school at public expense.”
People already pay significant taxes towards “public school.” If they had those taxes returned to them they could afford private school. What you are talking about is “double taxation” where someone must pay the equivalent of private tuition TWICE. Once to a public school they do not attend because it sucks and then again to a private school. By definition this makes private school something that only the very rich will be able to afford, which is morally wrong. Smart middle class kids ought to get a decent education that their parents are already paying for, not be sacrificed on the alter of public education ideology.
Some kids just don’t get a lot of value out of education, and society pouring money into a pipe dream is morally wrong. At best “school” is just daycare for them, and should be structured as such. It’s especially wrong to hold smart kids back and put them through environments that make them miserable and don’t bring out their talents just to maintain a fiction. Don’t sacrifice smart kids so you don’t have to tell dumb kids they are dumb.
The Internet is full of people whose entire life was so unbalanced by getting beat up in high school that they can’t think.
So you don’t have any kind of response.
Bad discipline. Bad curriculum. No results. But hey, it’s public!
Sure, I have responses. I just don’t think your emotionalism is worth feeding, and you didn’t address a single point in my comments.
Bottom line, you want the taxpayers to pay for schools so that kids like you won’t be miserable.
I addressed your point dead on.
Bottom line is you want people to pay for schools that don’t educate their children properly. When push comes to shove and people want to use exit to get a good education for their child you want to deny them exit (making people pay for education twice effectively denies exit to most of the population).
You frame this as people “stealing” money from others, but it was their money in the first place. They simply want their money back so they can spend their own money in a way that actually helps their children.
You are stealing money from them to support a system of public education you prefer at their expense. Worse, you have the gaul to blame them rebelling against such injustice.
” (making people pay for education twice effectively denies exit to most of the population).”
Yep. If you’re not rich enough to pay for it yourself, then take what’s given. And quit whining just because kids were meaaaaan to you.
They could pay for it themselves if you didn’t already tax the money away once. Hand people a check for what they have paid in taxes to the public schools and they will be able to afford it. You ignore this and mischaracterize the effort to keep ones own money as theft.
You’re immaturity about facing up to the failures of the public schools only damns your own ideology. That’s all you got to defend your failing system.
The school district portion of my property tax payment is nowhere near what it costs to send one child to private school for one year.
education realist: “Yep. If you’re not rich enough to pay for it yourself, then take what’s given. And quit whining just because kids were meaaaaan to you.”
Wow, what a lousy attitude!
“The Internet is full of people whose entire life was so unbalanced by getting beat up in high school that they can’t think.”
What’s your excuse?
I’m generally not a fan of charter schools, but I’ll note that going from a one-size-fits-all approach to a choice-based approach is necessarily going to increase inequality by design. That’s considered a feature, not a bug. Equality is an important value, but it has to be balanced against other compelling values such as ensuring that each student gets educational services that are appropriate (neither far above nor far below the student’s ability).
Equality should probably be defined as equal spending, not equal schools, because that is impossible.
“the more small schools that exist, the more teachers that are needed”
That assumes that charters are staffed as inefficiently as public schools. I don’t see that in high quality charters, where teachers are better classroom managers and can therefore handle larger class sizes (with fewer paraprofessionals) with no negative impact to student learning.
There are a lot of staffing and program models that are possible but they don’t emerge in district run schools.
Charter teacher turnover is high in every single state. Most charter teachers either leave teaching or move to public schools where they get better pay and better hours.
Class sizes in charters is smaller on average than class sizes in public schools. They often use two teachers per classroom.
Moreover, charters are allowed to cap enrollment. Charters can expel more easily, which means that classrooms are sculpted towards behavers.
So you’re wrong–they aren’t more efficient, they don’t use staff more effectively, their turnover is the stuff of employer nightmares, and the only reason their smaller classes are easier to manage is because they can expel.
But thanks for actually engaging with the argument!
Charter turnover would be higher almost by definition, since public schools – we’re told – can’t get rid of teachers even if they want to. And, presumably, in the presence of charter schools and public schools, bad teachers would self-select into public schools for precisely that reason.
Voluntary turnover tends to be higher among more capable employees, because they have other options.
So, if public schools have little or no ability to cause involuntary turnover, and they have low voluntary turnover, that would be entirely consistent with them having a higher population of (self-perceived) weaker teachers.
Low turnover does not prove that public schools are better, and high turnover does not prove that charter schools are worse. Nor, I think, the reverse. Just not enough information.
I used to work at a government ‘campus’ which used to run its own cafeteria with government employees, in a situation in which most of the employees were, as a practical matter, a captive audience. Turnover was low, and wages and job security was high. And of course private restaurants have low pay, low security, and very high turnover. Yes, that’s tough on the employers, but the industry is used to it, accepts it as the cost of doing business, and copes just fine without locations constantly teetering on the brink of collapse.
There’s just no question of where one would rather be an employee. (And yes, before ER accuses of me of thinking something I don’t believe, these types of employees aren’t comparable to teachers in terms of credentials and the pool of people potentially qualified to perform the tasks, still, it’s worth considerting the example).
The cafeteria’s prices were higher, and quality much lower. Lots of people would just bring their lunch as a result, (I suppose analogous to home-schooling), or, whenever people had options, their revealed preferences were for those restaurants (the analogy would be “private school”)
Of course the difference is that people had to pay for the “public option”, but it was subsidized and they weren’t paying the full price, because the facilities and overhead weren’t counted as costs the food prices were supposed to reimburse. (An analogy could be public university, which still charges tuition).
Now those government-employee cafeterias are quickly going extinct. Either they are being replaced with practical-monopoly contractors (still expensive and low quality, but now also worse conditions for employees), or if the space and demand is large enough, A “food court” with lots of normal fast food options like Subway, Pizza Hut, etc., and at some particularly large facilities, both a private food court and a contractor-run cafeteria, in open competition with each other.
Well, in all these transitions, guess what, the sky fails to fall, management adapts and adjusts, and the market clears, just like we would expect.
Again, the GI Bill benefit provides a good example of a voucher which the veteran student (or now, his or her designated family members) can use as they wish, at private (secular or religious) or public colleges, or even for certain kinds of vocational courses or more unconventional training. Each of these institutions has different packages of wages, benefits, job security, turnover rates, etc. and … the market clears.
I agree. I was not arguing that low turnover means public schools are better.
I would observe, however, that the very things that make people like the commenters on this blog hate public school teachers (tenure, reasonable hours, union protections) are what keeps public schools better staffed than charters.
To Handle:
Remind me, does the federal government mandate that every employer have a cafeteria? Does it require several sorts of services that come with all sorts of staffing requirements?
As you note, teachers aren’t low paid, unskilled cafeteria workers. They have other options. But while an employer can shrug and say “oh well, cafeterias got too expensive because we couldn’t staff at a price that was profitable” a state and a school cannot. They’ll have to continue paying.
Also, you appear to be unaware that for the past 16 years, education reformers on both left and right got everything they wanted. In Colorado, they were all set to take a case to the Supreme Court seeing if they could challenge voucher restrictions.
And the public HATED it. Hated reform. Hated the nonsense of accountability. Hated Common Core. Coloradans were utterly outraged at what was happening to their schools (I think it was one specific district, a big one).
Unlike your employers cafeteria, where the employers have their say, the public voted. Every thing that reformers got in 16 years of two pro-reform presidents was rolled back in ESSA. And the Colorado school district had an election in which all the reform school board members were voted out of office, and they are refusing to take the case to the Supreme Court.
In other words, sure, Americans could make do with crap employees. But they don’t like it, and they vote out the jackwits who try to make them take it.
In short–your ideas are terribly unpopular.
I suppose I am not one of the “education reformers on both left and right” because I certainly didn’t get everything I wanted the last 16 years.
Interestingly, one of the “reforms” people have rejected are high stakes tests. From the rhetoric, the idea seems to be that tests given by the state are inaccurate and unnecessary, a waste of time and unduly stressful. However, tests given by teachers are the opposite.
Of course, one of the reasons for high stakes tests in the first place was that so many students were getting passed on even though they hadn’t learned much because 1) if you fail too many students, you will not get past your probationary period, 2) if a good part of your class thinks they will fail, “classroom management” becomes virtually impossible, 3) teachers are basically nice people and they worry, “you can’t do anything without a high school diploma.”
“I suppose I am not one of the “education reformers on both left and right” because I certainly didn’t get everything I wanted the last 16 years.”
Amen!
The charter school I attended worked the way I would prefer and it had excellent results at less expense. As far as I can tell the reforms I would like have succeeded. If someone else reforms didn’t work you can take it up with them.
Turnover is a garbage artifact of bad labor practices in public school seniority systems that trap teachers in the system to get benefits.
Most private companies don’t like a lot of turnover, and many have systems that try to keep turnover low. Of course, public schools may take that to excess.
Problem 1: Agree it’s a problem relative to the best case scenario of greater parent empowerment, but it’s better than the status quo. It’s odd to claim a concern for greater parent empowerment as a rationale for reducing one avenue of parent empowerment. Parents appear to be lining up for charters, Don’t make the best an enemy of the good.
Problem 2: Correct. The current system will have to continue in place. This is inequitable. Just as it is currently inequitable that most parents in the public system exercise choice through the real estate market. Charters simply provide one more avenue for choice within the public system. Along with “move to the suburbs” we would add “send your kid to a charter.” Many districts might actually want that choice added to help enhance the tax base (better to pay extra for charters than lose families to other towns).
Problem 3: It seems entirely possible charters could increase demand for teachers and increase teacher salaries. And for sure the teachers teaching the charter rejects may demand hardship pay. Why is this a decisive objection? Education is a budget item like any other. Maybe the public would be willing to pay more to get some feature they want. A bait-and-switch (great schools for free!) is a problem, agreed.
What other objections do you have?
As I note in the comment above, politicians love education reform, and we had two pro-reform presidents in a row. And the voters kicked out every idea they pushed. The only one that still has any popularity is charters, and only because people feel it’s worth giving low income kids a safe place for school–but aren’t willing to take on the lawsuits that would be necessary to allow public schools to ensure safety.
Yes, it is worth giving low income kids a safe space. Why isn’t this end around acceptable? If we could wave a wand and get public school safety, maybe that’s preferable. But lacking that wand, why not allow charters as an exit.
” opting out is either a right or a privilege. If it’s a right, then charters have to accept everyone.”
This is a disgusting lie. There are public magnet schools that require students to test in. We need more competitive admissions schools, to get good kids out of schools that aren’t at their level, and charters are a good way to do that.
Public school teachers like you want to drag everyone down into the swamp with them. Yeah, there are some kids that are barely educable. There are some that destroy the learning environment for everyone else in the class. Just because you get paid to teach them doesn’t mean we need a public school system that forces all kids to be in class with them.
It’s not about large scale vs small scale, it’s about schools that rely on pleasing the parents to stay in business vs. those that don’t care. The charter model is experimental, the ones that work are already starting to scale. They’ll do a mix of charter and private (like BASIS).
The problem with public schools is the pensions. When the pension collapse hits, we may see some changes.
Not just more humane, but one of those “political tension defusing mechanisms” I keep talking about. You do your thing your way over there, and I’ll do my thing my way over here, and we don’t interfere with each other via the state’s coercive powers.
That way we don’t have to get into big, zero-sum arguments about curriculum, tracking, transgendered bathrooms, racial disparities in disciplinary measures or test scores, and so forth.
I do feel a lot of sympathy for the good public school teachers who would be left holding the bag after their student bodies have the cream skimmed off the top by cherry-picking charters (which is pretty much what happened to those teachers who stayed in urban schools after the suburban flight era). That’s not a fair result. But the status quo is even worse.
“I do feel a lot of sympathy for the good public school teachers who would be left holding the bag after their student bodies have the cream skimmed off the top by cherry-picking charters ”
You do notice that public school teachers get paid much more than charter school teachers (those who aren’t on public pay scales), and that charter school turnover is up to ten times greater than that of public school teachers, right?
Most charters aren’t dealing with “cream”. They are dealing with low-skilled kids. The only advantage charters have is probably a slightly higher ability level and the ability to discipline.
Oh, but private schools–they get the “good kids”, right? Teachers are just lining up to work in private schools? Oh, wait. Private schools have far higher turnover, too.
What planet do you all live on?
As for not having arguments about transgender bathrooms and curriculum–are you serious? Charters will have the same problems. They already do.
“As for not having arguments about transgender bathrooms and curriculum–are you serious? Charters will have the same problems. They already do.”
Oh please, are you kidding with this argument? Try reading again. No “have arguments about”, but instead, “interfere with each other via the state’s coercive powers.” Big difference.
Either all schools of every type will always be synchronized and completely identical on these matters (which is obviously false), or there will be some variation, and people will have at least some opportunity to choose and sort according to their preferences. Or maybe help start their own new schools. You know, just like the set of public, private, and religious colleges have all kinds of different policies (see, e.g., the recent fracas at Azusa, which is still somehow distinguishable from Oberlin).
It’s absurd to be on the side of captive audiences and uniformity with a system as crazy and politicized and with as diversely capable a student body as ours.
If your position is that competition and consumer choice never makes any difference in the variety of offerings in sectors with highly diverse character of demand, then you’re just ignoring reality.
The precise problem here is that there is no longer any consensus on what the public funding of K-12 education is really supposed to be about, which makes it a terrible candidate for monopolistic collectivization.
If it’s supposed to be about “subsidizing students from families who otherwise couldn’t afford it and so we don’t discourage procreation”, then we can means test, set some (hopefully sane and minimal) standards, and give out vouchers, just like we do with a bunch of other programs.
The question is whether you are so wedded to the status quo system that you would still oppose these changes even if there were ways to deal with your other objections.
For example, if there’s a mandate to deal with all the bad apples, then we might subsidize special alternative ‘bad apples academies’ and give ordinary public schools the same ability to kick bad apples out.
Or, if it’s about pay, then we could pay all teachers at all schools out of a public fund according to similar seniority formulas or whatever.
If you’re against choice in principle, just say so. If you’re against vouchers in all the other welfare instances and thing if the public is going to fund it, then everybody should just the same government cheese, composition to be determined by USDA committees and flavor to be changed with every election so everyone who can’t afford private school (given that they have to chip in to the universal public system) have to become obsessed with politics or choke on Limburger, then say so.
If you don’t disagree in principle to reform in this direction, then we’re just arguing about what other implementation details would ensure fairness and quality, or about the unfortunately stubborn political constraints that stand in the way of a better, saner system.
It’s really not productive of anything to accuse people of ignorance and stupidity and holding opinions they don’t actually have.
I’m not against choice. People aren’t required to send their children to public school. Nor are they forbidden from educating their kids at home.
But am I against what you ludicrously call choice, but is actually giving private education at public prices? Yes. Categorically. My first comment said so.
In what other matter are you in favor of letting people use tax payer dollars for a publicly provided service and choose their own solution? As I pointed out above, are you in favor of letting people reject police services and take money for their own private body guards? Are you allowed to take money away from the park service and create your own parks?
It’s idiotic.
“No “have arguments about”, but instead, “interfere with each other via the state’s coercive powers.” Big difference.”
There’s no difference between the state’s coercive powers in charters and public schools. The more charters that are available, the more demands people will be able to make and win. This is already happening in New Orleans, where they are no longer allowed to expel students without scrutiny. Charters are already being pressured to take special ed students. Everything you think will be solved is just a lawsuit and a lot more charters away from happening.
You’re a fool if you imagine otherwise.
“If you don’t disagree in principle to reform in this direction, then we’re just arguing about what other implementation details would ensure fairness and quality, or about the unfortunately stubborn political constraints that stand in the way of a better, saner system.”
No, I absolutely disagree in principle. It’s a foolish idea made by fools who have no idea what will happen, what’s already happening, and how much more money your system would cost.
“In what other matter are you in favor of letting people use tax payer dollars for a publicly provided service and choose their own solution?”
Any good or service that isn’t a technical monopoly is a reasonable place to start. Food, transportation, housing, medicine, education, etc all belong on the list of things where it makes more sense to use subsidies to provide access to private services instead of access to a self-serving government cartel.
Even in the case of public assets like parks, there is no technical or ethical case for insisting that government employees perform functions like maintaining the park when the work can be done at least as effectively by private contractors.
FWIW – do you object to the de-facto voucher system we have for higher education?
We have private provisioning of all sorts of goods and services. There is not a government grocery store that people are required to pay taxes to support. Imagine passing a law which said, “everyone has to pay $1000 a month to the government grocery store. If you don’t like the products there you can’t opt out. You have to pay for your own groceries with whatever money you have left, and if you don’t have any left to pay for groceries twice you have to live with the government store no matter how inadequate you consider it.”
No, we don’t have that system. Deal with it. Not everything has to be a public good paid for with involuntary taxes.
“Charters are already being pressured to (insert whatever the fuck you want here).”
Then we’ll fight. My school got sued seven times to shut it down. We fight people like you that want to destroy the few working institutions we have to achieve what again. Oh right to achieve nothing but living in a fantasy world.
Your system is a failure. If you have no intention of fixing it then wallow in your own failure. We do no accept that your way of doing things is legitimate or that we should pay for it and we will opt out whenever possible by any means available.
“Then we’ll fight. ”
You’ll lose. You’ll keep losing. You’ve got the courts and politicians on your side, but you don’t have the people and you’ll never have the money.
“Your system is a failure. If you have no intention of fixing it then wallow in your own failure. We do no accept that your way of doing things is legitimate or that we should pay for it and we will opt out whenever possible by any means available.”
Cue the dramatic music. Jesus, dude, get over yourself. Besides, if the bullies were so easily able to beat you down, how much of a fight can you put up?
But in any event, you’re wrong. Education reform got everything it wanted for 16 years and for its troubles got roundly rejected by the people and all the laws put in place to support it have been removed. Why? Because the people loathed those ideas.
And the system’s not a failure. There’s not another country in the world that educates all its citizens, much less all its black and Hispanic citizens, better than America. That’s not jingoism, it’s just a fact.
“There’s not another country in the world that educates all its citizens, much less all its black and Hispanic citizens, better than America.”
Then why are we so far down on all the international education rankings?
British transplant here. In a “very good” public school district; one that is much better than the national average.
The standard is below the average state (public) schools that I know in the UK. And 2-3 years below the “very good” state schools.
We won. My school is still there.
And if we are to lose we have morality on our side.
People don’t hate our ideas. I don’t talk to a single person that is in favor of failing schools. I do think people are afraid of changes to the status quo that might harm their interests, and that they are in favor of vaguely worded statements about the public good. When push comes to shove though their actions show they support us. Everyone ACTS like we are right when it comes to their own kid.
“Besides, if the bullies were so easily able to beat you down, how much of a fight can you put up?”
Not much. I had surgery on my chest in 5th grade and several ribs were removed. I had to wear something to protect my chest because my heart was directly exposed. On several occasions the beatings nearly resulted in damage to my heart that could have killed me. The school did nothing.
But hey, I’m just a pussy who deserved it, right. That’s the kind of world you want for us.
Then why are we so far down on all the international education rankings?
If you “control” for ethnicity, we aren’t. One of the world’s most depressing graphs:
http://www.unz.com/isteve/2015-pisa-mean-scores-in-perspective/
Ricardo,
British schools track ferociously, and by high school a big chunk of students aren’t allowed to take advanced courses. Americans do everything quite differently.
Also, Britain is considerably different in demographics. You have high achieving African immigrants and low-achieving working class whites. No one’s suing you.
asdf makes me want to play the law school hypothetical game. If there were a system of government food provision, with everyone assigned a depot (generally a local one) they have to get food from (paid for out of taxes), with the state Superintendent of Food and local bureaucrats deciding what each person has to get, would you oppose steps to “voucherize” it?
If not, what is different about public schools?
Our “education realist” claims turnover is bad?
• Teacher turnover may be less in public schools because private/charter schools tend to have non-union teachers. New York schools are famous for their rubber rooms where teachers who can’t teach or shouldn’t be be near kids are paid to play pinochle or doze all day; they can’t be fired. Less turnover results.
• Seniority rules in public schools also tend to reduce turnover.
• Ditto, administrative laziness in seeking and hiring top rank teachers.
Turnover is not a bad thing…upwardly mobile people moving on to better things as their skills improve. The only reason public schools show better turnover numbers is because they trap people into abusive seniority based compensation schemes.
When they see pensions start to go to 50%, we’ll see some changes.
And just because people seem not to understand, I’ll try to write it one more time:
We could end public schools. Give people a small amount of money to supplement their own income and let private markets rule. This would lead to huge number of students not entering school, increased crime, whatever.
Or we can try to educate everyone, which is an imperfect solution, and we should do it at minimum cost to the taxpayers.
Now, when we talk about reducing costs, I have all sorts of suggestions. Let’s don’t educate immigrants, for example. Let’s dramatically reduce immigration, leading to far more jobs, which would lead to far more students leaving school at 16 to get those jobs. Let’s stop giving federal guarantees to students with a random list of disabilities. Let’s stop using school as daycare for severely handicapped students, and instead centralize full-time life time institutions for people who will never get out of diapers or wheelchairs or understand the letters a, b, and c. Let’s stop teaching foreign language. Let’s stop demanding students take courses beyond their cognitive ability.
All of these things would reduce expenses, reduce the need for teachers, driving down costs, making it more attractive to fire teachers because there would be others eager for the job.
But let everyone craft their own special school and you’ll do exactly the opposite of what you want, and cripple school for everyone.
“This would lead to huge number of students not entering school, increased crime, whatever.”
How do you know this is true? You don’t. It’s propaganda.
“Or we can try to educate everyone, which is an imperfect solution, and we should do it at minimum cost to the taxpayers.”
“Educating” everyone means very different things to different people. Some people can’t be educated in the manner you want, so we are just wasting resources doing so. It’s also not clear that educating people in the manner you preach is a minimum cost to taxpayers.
“Now, when we talk about reducing costs, I have all sorts of suggestions. Let’s don’t educate immigrants, for example. Let’s dramatically reduce immigration, leading to far more jobs, which would lead to far more students leaving school at 16 to get those jobs. Let’s stop giving federal guarantees to students with a random list of disabilities. Let’s stop using school as daycare for severely handicapped students, and instead centralize full-time life time institutions for people who will never get out of diapers or wheelchairs or understand the letters a, b, and c. Let’s stop teaching foreign language. Let’s stop demanding students take courses beyond their cognitive ability.
All of these things would reduce expenses, reduce the need for teachers, driving down costs, making it more attractive to fire teachers because there would be others eager for the job.”
How are you going to get any of that without exit? The answer is you aren’t. You haven’t for decades. Reforms don’t happen because nice people talk about them. They happen because bad models die and good models grow. Exit is the best path for people to get the best possible outcome.
“How do you know this is true? You don’t. It’s propaganda.”
Propaganda? Do you have any fricking clue how much money is spent hunting down kids whose parents don’t send them to school? Do you have any idea how much more that would be if school weren’t mandatory?
“How are you going to get any of that without exit? ”
Pretty sure you didn’t read what I said. In any event, the primary impact charters have had on public schools is not to improve them (they weren’t bad to start with, save for the meeeeean kids who beat you up), but drive up teacher salaries.
“Do you have any idea how much more that would be if school weren’t mandatory?”
If the goal is to keep malcontents off the street, there are a lot cheaper and more effective ways to do it than our current K-12 education system.
You just haven’t sold me on the idea that our system achieves the goals is lays out in the best manner possible.
“the primary impact charters have had on public schools is not to improve them”
I don’t know what impact my charter had on my local public school. I know that attending my charter vastly improved my life, and the lives of everyone who went there.
We had a giant meeting where the school tried to convince parents to stay in the local high school. The parents went through a litany of problems with the local high school. The school officials ignored and downplayed all these concerns, offered no road map to fixing them, and used bullying to try and keep us from leaving (including threats of retaliation against of younger siblings still attending the local school system).
Those people are beyond redemption and the proper response is to let people escape their clutches.
“but drive up teacher salaries.”
I’m glad that the teachers at my school earned more than average teachers. You had to have a PhD in STEM to teach at my high school. The instruction was excellent. Despite these higher salaries per student expenditure was lower than my local public.
“there are a lot cheaper and more effective ways to do it than our current K-12 education system.”
Wrong. Literally, schools are cheaper than prison guards, and have more upside.
“You just haven’t sold me on the idea that our system achieves the goals is lays out in the best manner possible.”
I’m not trying to. I’m uninterested in selling you on public schools. I don’t particularly care if people are happy with public schools, or if they understand that they do pretty well.
What I’m doing is pointing out how moronic it is to support charters unless you want infinitely more expense, particularly in pensions, and even less teacher quality than what you complain about now–and none of the freedoms that the existing charters have now.
And oh, lord, spare the board all the details of your petty little trauma/drama. No one cares, and they aren’t relevant. You’re fighting for a charter in a world where they’re random, about 5%. And none of the things you think it will do will occur. But if it makes you happy, great. Just stop confusing your little story with evidence.
“And oh, lord, spare the board all the details of your petty little trauma/drama. ”
You can’t provide what people want so you bully them. That’s your only go to.
“No one cares, and they aren’t relevant.”
The people who started my charter school cared enough to overcome people like you. The people who tried to stop us from leaving thought it was relevant too.
“And none of the things you think it will do will occur. ”
My charter school did achieve everything I wanted out of it. It’s not a utopian fantasy, it’s a lived reality.
So we make the public policy decision that everyone should be educated up to some level. The follow on question is how. In other areas we do this by subsidizing expenditures. In schools we mostly chose a government monopoly.
I generally favor breaking up monopolies. Natural monopolies make economic sense because they lower infrastructure costs, but schools are not a natural monopoly.
Vouchers would be best. Charters are a second best alternative.
Said another way, I see advocating for a government monopoly in schools as rent seeking.
A public school is, by definition, a government monopoly. We also have a government monopoly for armed services. We have a government monopoly on tax compliance and legislation. The latter two are far more restrictive–citizens can’t rent out their own armies or make laws.
So by your definition, the Army, the cops, Congress, the Supreme Court, the IRS–all rentseeking.
Of course, sane people think that’s moronic. The government loses out on paying for schooling, whether it’s done through vouchers, charters, or genuinely public schools.
“Vouchers would be best. Charters are a second best alternative.”
Charters are government funded schools, subject to all the laws that public schools are but one: they aren’t required to accept everyone. Once you do away with public schools, charters will have to accept everyone. For now, they’re just a free private school for the educationally desirable. The minute they’re the only option, they’ll have to take everyone.
No, a “government school by definition” need not be a monopoly. Higher education clearly is not. Even though lots of higher education at non-government schools are paid for with taxpayer funds.
Higher education are far more monopolistic in their public offerings than K-12 is.
In both k-12 and higher ed, people can choose between public and private. In higher ed, people still have to pay for their education in public universities, but it’s subsidized by tax payers. In k-12, the whole cost of public schools is subsidized by tax payers.
No private university is allowed to offer a public education with “vouchers” from public universities. Your public university is a total monopoly. Meanwhile, in k-12, private schools are offered with public dollars for free.
Your mistake lies in thinking that private schools are somehow less an option in k-12 than in universities, but that’s simply wrong.
No higher education is not more monopolistic than K-12. Higher education is far more competitive between both private and public colleges.
Who gets a voucher from one school to attend another? You get the voucher from the government and use it at the school of your choice. The GI bill worked that way. So do other programs.
Taxpayers subsidize a lot of education. The percentage varies. In some cases it is 100%.
Allowing consumers to spend their education subsidy at the school of their choice increases benefits for everyone.
“Higher education is far more competitive between both private and public colleges.”
There are more private universities. There are not more private universities that are free with public money.
As I said, you want more private K-12 schools, go ahead! Then people who want more options can pay for them out of their own pocket. The more private K-12 schools, the more competition, the lower the tuition.
Charter schools, in contrast, kill private school competition, because they are private schools at public expense–totally free. Charters have killed about a third of private schools. So all those teachers that used to be paid by tuition and private companies are now paid for by taxpayer dollars.
So the one area where the graduate level education is more competitive is precisely *because* they don’t have charters, the method you are encouraging so that we’ll spend more taxpayer dollars. Great idea.
“Allowing consumers to spend their education subsidy at the school of their choice increases benefits for everyone.”
First, that’s vouchers, not charters. I’m not terribly in favor of vouchers–I’d rather make private school tax-deductible–but they’re in an entire different area from charters. And the reason vouchers won’t ever work well is because established private schools won’t accept government control, and “private schools” that are just intended to hoover up voucher dollars are horrible, and the public gets fed up.
But you are arguing about charters, which aren’t vouchers.
Besides, you don’t want *consumers* to spend their education subsidy. You want *parents* to spend their subsidy. All citizens benefit from educating the populace, and thus all citizens both pay for and are subsidized by it.
So if you want to give money back, give it back to all taxpayers, and end all public education. But don’t pretend that parents are consumers. Parents are those who already benefit from the public option which is far cheaper than any other education method available. If they want something better than public, then they can pay for it. They don’t have a *right* to a private school at taxpayer expense. Since charters would vastly increase the expense of public education, they definitely shouldn’t have the right to demand small public schools for their particular snowflake.
” All citizens benefit from educating the populace”
I do not believe the education your system is providing is better then if we sent each parent a check equal to what we spend per pupil today and said “figure it out on your own.” It’s not a public good we benefit from, its a racket we are stuck with.
“Parents are those who already benefit from the public option which is far cheaper than any other education method available. If they want something better than public, then they can pay for it. They don’t have a *right* to a private school at taxpayer expense.”
Over the course of my life I will pay taxes towards education that equal (in fact likely exceed) what is spent educating my children. I’m getting less than I pay for. I’m not an expense to anyone, other people are an expense to me. And the supposed benefits I get from subsidizing others are laughable if not flat out negative. Give me back my money!
“Higher education are far more monopolistic in their public offerings than K-12 is.”
This is a completely ridiculous sentiment which you provide zero evidence for.
“Meanwhile, in k-12, private schools are offered with public dollars for free.”
Not in my neighborhood. I pay $30k in annual property taxes for schools my kids don’t use.
Education realist obviously likes her public school job.
I had assumed education realist was a man. This was either stated or implied somewhere, or perhaps I jumped to conclusions.
This is an interesting food fight–not sure how many minds are being changed.
Education realist’s most persuasive work is probably not in this comment thread. Many of his (her?) essays are worth reading.
= – = – = – = – =
To change the subject a bit, there is definitely a problem of “motivated reasoning.” I suspect that as soon as you start working within the public schools you are are tempted to support them in some manner. Only if you are not employed by them in any manner, and don’t expect ever to be involved, are you able to be more objective and dispassionate. Then the cynicism and animosity starts to sink in and you think “This is really the best we can do?”
If you are outside looking in, the problem of “producer interests,” labor market rigidities, barriers to entry, defined benefit pensions that many others can’t get, ideological subversion in the classroom ethos in which falsehoods are bandied about with students as if they are probably true, the folly of not letting some students just work for a living at an earlier age and maybe they’ll learn more on the job than they are learning in school–all these become more evident.
= – = – = – =
Consider this half-assed example from my personal life. I have a retail job at a liquor store. As the saying goes, “Wine is from God, but drunkenness is the work of the devil.”
A lot of people would be better off drinking less rather than more. As soon as I started working at the store I became more accepting of the tendency of some people to drink to excess. Had I never taken the job, I’d still be more strongly convinced in my suspicion that we should make it harder for the average individual to buy their next magnum bottle of cheap booze.
The metaphor of “drinking the Kool-aid” exists for a reason. We are all consumers of some form of occupational kool-aid.
We know this generally–don’t ask the barber if you need a haircut. Don’t ask the teacher about alternatives to the current structure of schools.
Milton Friedman’s old observation is still relevant–he saw Cadillacs on Chicago’s South Side, but where was the educational equivalent?
“I suspect that as soon as you start working within the public schools you are are tempted to support them in some manner.”
This is stupid. While I do support public schools, my arguments are simply factually true, while all you libertarians are fantasizing about delusions that are simply not borne out by fact.
I don’t think I’m a libertarian. I live in one of upstate New York’s best school districts (Brighton) next to what is most possibly its worst (Rochester City School District).
A pet hobby of mine is just wondering how things got so bad and what, if anything, can be done about it. People were talking about it in the 1980s, and it seems like things have not improved since then.
Perhaps they have gotten worse, driven (anecdotally) by external shocks such as the collapse of well paying factory work (Kodak, Xerox, Bausch and Lomb), the crack epidemic, cohort succession and reproduction, functional two parent families tending to move to the suburbs.
The findings from the old Coleman Report (s.v., Wikipedia) explain much of the gap but not all, methinks.
You got any ideas? Money isn’t the issue, or it is certainly pretty far down the list. Teacher pay is not the issue as I understand it–teacher rank and file are paid pretty well, in part from a bargain struck 20-plus years ago partly in hopes that it would improve things.
Producer interests seem to soak up increments of money thrown at the problem. Teacher pay and pensions is a factor, as is physical plant rehabilitation. So is busing students around, as many don’t go to “neighborhood schools” anymore.
What’s left to try? We need more policy variables and more experimentation.
What are the policy variables we can resort to?
Perhaps there are none. Perhaps the question, “How can we educate all 18-year-olds to have the academic skills and knowledge that I have?” is like the question, “how can we condition all 18-year-olds so that they can complete triathlons?”
(Spandrell has no idea whether I’m male or female. As I’ve written before, anyone who talks about my gender publicly has heard about it from someone else. So some people think I’m a woman, most think I’m a man.)
Oh, and spandrell, whoever he or she is, is a fool, as is Charles Abbott, for thinking I’m defending public schools as opposed to pointing out how moronic people are for thinking charters are in any way a scalable solution.
I’ll ponder the posts here for a while, including my own, looking for foolishness. It’s possible. Certainly I don’t have any direct experience in public school teaching, though I’ve taught and T.A.’d sleepy undergraduates and done some tutoring of both elementary school kids and adults. But that’s different. Very different.
A friend of mine always liked the claim that “Doing Thus-and-Such is Like Re-arranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic.” Perhaps (putting words in Ed Realist’s mouth?) “promoting charter schools is simply like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
The metaphor breaks down quickly–the school district is not about to hit an iceberg and and sink. I wonder if school districts are more like rafts–stable, not going anywhere in particular, impossible to steer, not likely to tip over.
One analytical point that I consider to be important: the size of the school matters. When I went to School Without Walls in the early 1980s, it was a magnet school that maxed out at 175 students in grades 9-12. The cap of 175 was a hard ceiling set by fire code. 175 is roughly what Robin Dunbar estimates the “Dunbar Number” to be.
We can argue anything, of course, with arm waving. I wonder if the size of the school (not just classroom size) is important. Also, self-sorting of students matters.
Quite possibly we are talking past each other. I’m quite possibly a fool because the definition of charter schools is so narrow that I don’t realize how narrow it is, and how little it effects most policy variables.
I suspect we are restricting the solution space somehow.
It would help me to have a big long list of policy variables and a table that demonstrates which variables can or can’t be altered with more charter schools. Without that list I may be the fool!
My understanding is that educational realist is concerned with improving the aggregate value added of a district. Since charter schools simply re-allocate students and resources, it can’t really be much more than re-arranging, or sorting. The gains to one school are the losses to other schools which become “dumping grounds” for residual problem students after everyone else has demonstrated initiative by going elsewhere.
It’s an empirical question.
I’m not entirely sure that’s likely. To make a massive leap, economic growth as Robert Solow defined it is getting more output with the same amount of inputs. Some of us are convinced that schools are within the production possibility curve from either management issues or discipline or ethos or something. In a dynamic sense, the production possibility curve may be moving outward with time, and it’s a non-trivial exercise for schools to keep improving.
The best students (and their parents) want to be allowed to get ahead. The worst students (parents) don’t want to fall behind. This is an actual divergence of interests; a conflict in which reasonable people come into conflict simply because each wants what’s best for their kids. In the best cases, charter schools represent a victory by the first over the second; as a former smart kid who spent 12 years sitting in a chair while dumb kids learned stuff I already knew very, very slowly, I can relate. But I can also understand why parents of dumb kids feel threatened by the idea that the smart/conscientious/well-behaved kids might go off to schools where their kids can’t follow, leaving their own kids in a terrible school. Even more than they already do, I mean.
While I can understand the interests involved, you have to wonder if putting these people together is morally or pragmatically justified.
1) Any environment with large difference of ability will mean many people not getting appropriate education.
2) It seems easier for those at the bottom to drag people down than those at the top to lift the bottom up.
3) When you get right down to it, how we do as a society is mostly determined by bringing out the talents of those at the top. That’s where the ROI is.
4) The kind of things that people at the bottom need to do better are so radically different than what people at the top need that it makes little sense to put them together, even if you care a lot about the bottom. We base a curriculum and social/cultural rules on a formula wholly inappropriate for them.
So while it might always be slightly marginally better for someone at the bottom to force someone at the top to share a school district with them in a sort of parasite relationship, the net results of this on society just don’t seem to justify it or make people better off in aggregate.
“But I can also understand why parents of dumb kids feel threatened by the idea that the smart/conscientious/well-behaved kids might go off to schools where their kids can’t follow, leaving their own kids in a terrible school.”
This is idiotic, too. It’s not “smart kids” who are going off to charters, but well-behaved kids, and only because charters can expel. To a lesser extent, charters can also “discourage” dumb kids by flunking them.
Both of these privileges would disappear in a world of all charters, or even *more* charters. Every commenter in this thread is a fool assuming that the situation would remain static with unlimited charters, when in fact New Orleans proves otherwise: they can’t expel, they are facing unionization of teachers, they have to take sped kids, and so on.
So everything you want about charters will disappear if you get your wish and there are more of them, but meanwhile getting your wish will send education expenses sky high in ways that we can’t recover from.
And all because the Internet comment section is overrepresented by smart people who think it’s sooooooo unfair they had to sit among stupid people.
Public schools can and do expel students. Charters provide another option for parents. And not just for the parents of the best and brightest.
I remember a long time public school board member talking about charters. He said that it was helpful to look at a parent and tell them that if the district couldn’t meet that parents demands, there were other options available.
“Public schools can and do expel students. ”
Sigh. I said “expel more easily” several times.
A student has a right to attend a public school, but has no right to attend a charter. Therefore, most charters can expel without any scrutiny whatsoever. This is changing in all-charter New Orleans, precisely because once only charters existed, their expulsion rate became unacceptable.
So now, charters in New Orleans have to go through the same long, legalistic expulsion process that public schools do–and it’s likewise limited in scope. Expulsion from one public school takes months in many cases, and the kid can attend another school in the district after a year. Charters–except in New Orleans–can expel permanently.
Anyone discussing charter schools who is not aware of that fact really isn’t able to discuss the topic.
“He said that it was helpful to look at a parent and tell them that if the district couldn’t meet that parents demands, there were other options available.”
Of course. Nagging parents are a pain, even if the school has no legal obligation to give them what they want. So send them to the charters–who have even less legal obligation to give them what they want. I don’t see why you’d consider that in any way relevant.
And all because the Internet comment section is overrepresented by smart people who think it’s sooooooo unfair they had to sit among stupid people.
1) Making a child sit still through redundant, useless education for 12 years is actually pretty bad for the kid. Almost everybody I know with IQs over 150 is pretty messed up. And these are the kids who could go much, much further if the system was set up for them to do so. Taking curious kids and teaching them not to engage with the curriculum is pretty much the opposite of what schools should do.
2) I don’t know who will ultimately make the educational policy, but I’m pretty sure that it will not be meaningfully influenced by by this comment thread. I’m posting my opinions according to the Reverse Spider-Man Rule: with negligible power comes negligible responsibility. If I thought my opinion mattered, I would speak much more carefully.
3) What little I do know about education strongly suggests that selection bias is the strongest effect in educational research by far. It’s not much of a stretch to think that student population probably has a very strong effect on school quality/outcomes. This is consistent with the research that indicates that “shared environment” (parents and schools, mainly) has a very weak impact on kids’ life outcomes. It’s likely that for most students, the specifics of the school really don’t matter all that much.
“Making a child sit still through redundant, useless education for 12 years is actually pretty bad for the kid. ”
That assumes every single day of education is utterly useless, which is absurd. Smart kids get considerably more investment via college, so it balances out.
“Almost everybody I know with IQs over 150 is pretty messed up. ”
First, who says you know that many? Second, I doubt it. Third, even if true, your own personal friends list is no reason to believe that it’s because school sucks.
But all of these comments are pretty irrelevant to charter issue.
Charters aren’t designed for smart people. Very few charters focus on high iq kids. They’re designed for low income black and Hispanic kids, in no small part because they’re really just a trojan horse for teachers unions, which the proponents hoped to destroy with charters. To no avail.
We destroy dogs when they’ve mauled a child.
Spoken like someone that doesn’t have a 150 IQ.
Do a daily, M-F, 8 hour commute on a highway built for speeds of 70mph. Do it while being limited by the traffic around you to 25mph. Do that for just the 4 years of high school. You have to learn to shut your brain off just to stay sane. It is not useful training.
“That assumes every single day of education is utterly useless, which is absurd. Smart kids get considerably more investment via college, so it balances out.”
It isn’t useless, but it only takes so long to figure out how to tune out stupid teachers.
I’d be more tolerant of the public school system if there wasn’t massive mal-investment, in the bottom 20% of students.
Look, I have an IQ well in excess of 150. I, too, was bored in school. I am unmoved by all the wailings about bright kids bored in school because the simple truth is that the kids who are bored and unwilling to comply are pretty small, and a generally obnoxious group (raises hand).
Yes, we could do better. I’m happy to talk about ways. It ain’t charters.
The point is not that they are unwilling to comply. That’s a red herring. I, for one, just slept through class and got As anyway.
I eventually figured out that if I aped the social behaviors of the ‘cool kids’ and stopped using my intelligence as a weapon I could gain a measure of social acceptance. So I also figured out how to not get bulled. I’d go so far as to call that a useful life lesson. Though growing over 6 inches one year probably helped.
The point is that the top 1-5% of high-potential, high-functioning kids are very poorly served in the current system. Much to their detriment and the detriment of society at large.
Also, so far I’m not seeing a lot of suggestions on how to improve things. Or even a coherent exposition of the limiting issues. I’m seeing a lot of internet smart-guy put downs. If your intent is to help people understand the issues and iterate to real-world solutions you’re doing a poor job.
I’ll bite. The biggest “limiting issue” is that most students do not learn most of what they are supposed to–and they never will. Learning is hard, especially if you’re not interested in the subject matter. And most students most of the time are not interested in the academic subjects they are supposed to learn in high school.
So everybody plays their part in the high school drama. Teachers try to get kids interested, emphasize what they think is important, then test of what they’ve emphasized. Students watch out for what teachers emphasize; they then can answer some questions on a test about it, at least if the test is quickly given after the unit or after a review. They then forget. Rinse and repeat.
It is a very stable system.
I literally attended a charter that took in kids from this demographic and did a superb job educating them at less expense. And my school isn’t the only one like it in the country. It is the solution. It’s a solved problem. If only people like you would get out of the way.
“The point is that the top 1-5% of high-potential, high-functioning kids are very poorly served in the current system. ”
That’s simply not true. Remember, “internet smart guys” are a very tiny percentage of all smart people.
the world spends lots of money on smart people. Be grateful and, while it’s certainly appropriate to talk about improving school, understand that making school better for a tiny percentage of smart but obnoxious kids isn’t high on the agenda. And they weren’t as bored as they thought they were.
“an industrial-era model built around top-down management and bureaucracy, in which control and decision making belong to the central office rather than the practitioners”
Funny, that sounds a lot like the Democratic model for healthcare.
Ed, my friend, the weakest part of your argument is your suggestion that charters and private schools both do and don’t drive up teacher pay. It seems unlikely to be the case that those schools offer extremely low pay and accept high turnover and yet also force public schools offering tenure and unionized featherbedding to compete for staff by greatly increasing salaries– unless other working conditions in public schools are much more horrible than you describe.
Yeah, you aren’t reading well. Privates and charters pay less. They are, nonetheless, reducing teacher supply, which drives the price up for everyone. Public schools have more mandates and respond to pay increases more quickly. Privates and charters move more slowly, take more short-term teachers, and have horrendous turnover.
” It seems unlikely to be the case that those schools offer extremely low pay and accept high turnover and yet also force public schools offering tenure and unionized featherbedding to compete for staff by greatly increasing salaries– unless other working conditions in public schools are much more horrible than you describe.”
This doesn’t follow from what I’ve said. Everyone is increasing salaries–and it’s not *just* because of charters and privates, which are still too small to do much damage.
But it’s pretty clear you don’t understand what I’m saying or how the pressure is occurring, so try again.
Ed, if charter schools are a bad idea because they divert well-behaved students from other government schools without actually saving taxpayers money, what should parents ask for when their children encounter the incompetence and peculation protected by teachers’ unions and their pet politicians?
You want to dismiss all complaints as trivial anecdotes but that isn’t fair. The plural of anecdote is data– and I can cite to all kinds of data. In my neck of the woods teachers go on illegal wildcat (mid-contract) strikes (in the Fall right after school starts and all the summer camps are closed so parents have no place to send their kids while they go to work) and the Superintendent and the B of E and the Governor and the State Board just chuckle because they are totally in the pocket of the union (State law requires wildcat-striking teachers to be fired– but they aren’t); and the District literally (and arguably illegally) gave the textbook money from the State budget to the teachers as extra pay so the students now don’t have books; and unionized teachers get large raises every year which private sector workers do not; and elementary teachers have parent classroom-volunteer aides who are not native English speakers “correct” student homework incorrectly then tell parents who complain to “demand better pay for teachers” (!); and HS student schedules are determined in June but embargoed until the weekend before school starts in the Fall specifically so students won’t have a chance to contest assignments to the classrooms of the retired-in-place and the genuinely nutso teachers who are protected by the very administration which is legally supposed to dismiss them.
” if charter schools are a bad idea because they divert well-behaved students from other government schools without actually saving taxpayers money, what should parents ask for when their children encounter the incompetence and peculation protected by teachers’ unions and their pet politicians?”
They won’t just not save taxpayers money. They will dramatically increase the money spent on education.
And you’ve created a false premise. I’m under no obligation to convince you to like public school. I don’t care one way or another if you do. My sole objective here is to deride the idea that expanded charters will improve educational outcomes or decrease spending, since expanded charters would lead to the elimination of the very freedoms you all find so yummy, and massively increase the cost of staffing all schools.
Besides, if you don’t like public, go private. If you want affordable private school, more charters ain’t the way to get it.
“You want to dismiss all complaints as trivial anecdotes but that isn’t fair. ”
Oh, boo hoo. Sure it’s fair. Education in America is huge. Rely on data, not your own little tales of woe. Your anecdotes are pointless.
“I’m under no obligation to convince you to like public school.”
If you want to maintain the illusion that this is a voluntary public good and not a special interest racket, you damn well have an obligation to convince people.
“since expanded charters would lead to the elimination of the very freedoms you all find so yummy”
If you force charters to become just like the public schools then indeed it would be an exercise in futility. But you’re assuming something that doesn’t have to be. Only in the context of your education racket that fights tooth and nail to eliminate and real competition are charters prevented from being what their advocates want.
“Besides, if you don’t like public, go private. If you want affordable private school, more charters ain’t the way to get it.”
My charter was free to students and spent less per pupil than the local school district. If it weren’t free then I could not have attended. That was the case for most children who attended my school, it was the only school for smart kids whose parents couldn’t afford private school (but were middle class taxpayers who had already paid for their kids schooling once via taxes).
I’m uninterested in convincing you of anything. But in order to assert that charters will increase costs because they put additional pressure on teacher supply, I am not obligated to convince you of anything about public school. Only that your moronic ideas will make it worse if they were allowed to scale, which fortunately isn’t allowed because the general public actively opposes your goals.
Ed, I would love it if you would calm down and engage instead of shouting your previous points again.
You claimed charters pay teachers poorly and have high staff turnover, and you also claim they drive up salaries. How do they do both?
You suggest every complaint about public schools is irrelevant “anecdote” set against a “huge” and, you imply, much rosier backdrop, but that is untrue and you should acknowledge it. You are spoiling your own credibility here. I could link to newspaper articles or District publications for all of my “anecdotes”* showing how they affect thousands of students in my district (and similar issues affect hundreds of thousands in the State’s other districts) and the only reason I don’t is that I fear attacks from union partisans if I out myself geographically (akin to the reason nobody knows your sex).
As for charter schools, I am not here to demand them– but I think denouncing them without any consideration of the good reasons many people want them– namely the hideously compromised and bad management of the standard public schools– comes across as Marie Antoinetteish.
I don’t want “affordable private school” nearly as much as I want properly-run public schools, and one thing with a chance to produce that would be competition of some kind. We know exactly what public-school monopoly plus politically-weaponized teacher unionization gets us: schools that divert all funds not used to pay the heating bill to salaries,** officials who won’t even make the teachers honor the astonishingly-generous contracts they have “negotiated” with the officials whose elections they finance, and teachers who don’t teach but are never disciplined.
(By the way, my use of “fair” referred to your intemperate and shameful dismissal of facts, not to whether it is “fair” to tell ill-treated students and their parents just eat cake, I mean, pay for private school.)
*Okay, except the one about elementary teachers outsourcing “corrections” of student work to incompetent volunteers; that is absolutely true but I don’t think it ever got into the newspaper.
**My district has a “charitable foundation” which begs for donations of money to buy textbooks– because the B of E spent all the textbook money on extra pay for teachers.
I’m not shouting. But you’re not doing much to make conversation interesting. You don’t understand what I’m saying. Perhaps Jay’s description, below, will help you comprehend.
Here’s what I’m getting from this discussion:
1) EducationRealist (“Ed”) argues that charters are more expensive than public schools. Ed is probably right about that.
2) Lots of people assign a very low value, often a negative value, to what public schools are doing.
2a) Public schools spend a disproportionate fraction of their very limited resources on the disadvantaged. Achieving a very basic standard of education for the bottom quintile is prioritized over challenging the average or above-average student. Parents of at-least-average students dislike this set of priorities, which seems to be a main source of the conflict.
2b) A lot of people are thinking in terms not of saving public schools, but of escaping them. Many parents consider private schools a tax they have to pay to protect their kids from the other schools their taxes pay for.
2c) When a sufficient slice of the population hates what you’re doing, calling them whiners and ignoring their concerns is not a useful strategy. If enough people oppose a public institution, it collapses. The process seems well under way.
As an aside, I’m concerned about the impact that charters will have over time on our society. The shared experience of school is one of the few common experiences we still have (that’s why so many TV shows are set in high school).
Jay,
Much of what you say makes sense, but I want to be clear: I’m not saying charters are more expensive than publics. What I’m saying charters can cap and set class size, they are going through a lot more teachers. So in the past 4 years, the teaching population has grown much more than the student population. But 75% of that growth came in the charter sector, while public school teachers increased by far less.
That growth occurred in large part because charter schools use more teachers per kid than publics. Publics use more *staff* than charters, because they offer all the expensive and often wasteful services that charters can bail. But on a teacher basis, charter classes are smaller and thus use more teachers.
Separately, we have a tremendous teacher shortage already. Almost every state has a tremendous shortage. While we produce too many elementary school teachers, the fact is that a huge chunk of them aren’t interested in teaching in at-risk, high poverty schools, so those schools always go wanting–whether charter or public. Math and science, sped, and “bilingual” teachers are also commonly missing. But at every level, for reasons unknown, ed school enrollment has plummeted.
If, at some point in time, we can offer private school at public school prices, get all the teachers we want without having to pay expensive pensions, well, then maybe there’s something to talk about. But we’d be better off reducing demand for teachers. One way would be to reduce charters, but I’m more interested in ending sped for normal IQs, restricting or eliminating education for immigrants, etc.
Ed, I see your points. If anything I’m more skeptical of charters than you seem to be; the ones we have in Florida are often pretty sketchy.
On the other hand, I’ve read The Innovator’s Dilemma (highly recommended). The sorts of changes you’re suggesting for public schools are disruptive innovations in that book’s sense; they’re not the sorts of changes that incumbent organizations can make. A public school trying to eliminate sped would face the same problems that Kodak had with cameras that eliminated film – its stakeholders are too heavily invested in the current system. This is the sort of change where building a new set of institutions to gradually replace the old ones makes sense.
Charters can’t eliminate sped. They can only make it less likely that speds will want to attend them–except charters set up purely for speds, but those are for the severely disabled. And if we go to all charters, charters would no longer be able to avoid sped students.
Innovator’s Dilemma won’t really work, because public schools aren’t doing things out of habit, but by law or lawsuit. It’s like Uber and Lyft. They both achieved market share because they weren’t bound by the laws that had been placed on cabs in order to make them fair and equitable. So cabs had medallions to limit the number, making it possible for drivers to make a living. Cabs couldn’t refuse service. Cabs had to charge a certain rate. And so on.
Uber and Lyft violated all those rules and are in the process of driving cabs out of business. But once that’s the case, then people will demand the same protections from Uber and Lyft. This is already happening, of course–the complaints about car saturation in cities due to more cars on the road, the complaints about racism, etc. Eventually, they’ll be bound by the same laws and there will be the same complaints. The difference, at least, is that Uber drivers aren’t paid by the government.
Charters aren’t doing any innovation. They’re just sculpting their population through selection and expulsion.
What should have happened with Uber, but didn’t, is that they should have been forced to abide by the same laws. And then–when they were early on in their business development–they should have pushed people to *change* those laws, take on the court cases, and so on.
Changing the laws of public schools is what needs to happen. But allowing small little schools to skate the law and then bragged that they’ve fixed the problem will just make things worse.
A few people have touched on this. No system of vouchers or charters is going to be “without strings.” It might be something as minimal as, “students cannot get a state diploma unless they pass the state school leaving test.” But even that substantially constrains what schools can offer.
And there are so many other things. Should charters be allowed to discriminate? Of course not! Then you’re into the question of what is discrimination in regard to, say, trans people and bathrooms.
To a good extent, charter schools now “fly under the radar.” If most schools were charters, or education was largely voucherized, I suspect there would be substantial limitations on what charters can do or what vouchers can be spent on. Cf. education realist slightly above, October 21, 2018 at 11:59 am, and October 21, 2018 at 2:46 pm.
It’s true of course that if charters aren’t allowed to be different from public schools….they won’t be any different from public schools.
However, this assumes that it is politically impossible for charters to be different. This is merely assumed. It’s not some law like 2+2=4.
Charters have the benefit that it doesn’t force people to accept an educational model that they don’t want for their own kids. This is a lot easier of a policy goal then, “I’m going to change the way every single public school in the country works.” With public school we need to tell others what to do, since we are all going to be forced into accepting it. With charters we merely need to convince others to leave us alone.
There are of course ideological barriers to overcome. Try to propose real change and EdRealist types will be telling you it will mean juvinile criminals roaming the streets or crazy christians starting madrassas to raise their bigoted hate children or whatever. I don’t think most people buy that bull though. What they would like most is the freedom to educate their children how they want. I think they want that more than the right to dictate to other people how to educate their children.
“However, this assumes that it is politically impossible for charters to be different. This is merely assumed. It’s not some law like 2+2=4.”
Actually, it is a law. K-12 ed law guarantees lots of things, and if there’s no publics around to fulfill them, charters will have to.
The rest of it will come through lawsuits.
And there is evidence: New Orleans.
Then change the law. Elect the necessary politicians. Fight the lawsuits. My school got sued plenty of times, it won.
People are to there fighting every day. Fighting for my school. Fighting to Stuyvesant. They are fighting for their childrens future, and they are on the morally correct side.
Will we win, that’s a maybe. But we are right to fight.
asdf once again wins some medal for sassy prose off the top of of his (his/her?) head. asdf and Handle both should get medals for meritorious comment posts over the years.
“With public school we need to tell others what to do, since we are all going to be forced into accepting it. With charters we merely need to convince others to leave us alone.”
asdf, that is a keeper. Well stated.
Change the law, you won’t want charters.
Well, thank god. Where have you been? I’ve been holding down this debate all by myself.
Well, thank goodness. Where have you been? I’ve been holding down this debate all by myself!
Oops–dupe.