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Voices in the Wilderness

 
 

Soapbox

According to a New York Times article today (2004 August 17), charter schools performed significantly worse than traditional schools in a nationwide intense study. The data was sliced and diced many ways -- by ethnicity, socioeconomic status, region, etc. -- and "[i]n virtually all instances, the charter students did worse than their counterparts in regular public schools." The report was released with uncharacteristically little fanfare and no emphasis, "buried in mountains of data the Education Department released without public announcement".
 
What's goinig on here? Well, charter schools have been the darlings of the right (including the current Administration) for some time, the panacea to correct for the "institutionalized failure" of the public school. Inspired in part by free market dogma and in part by instinctive revulsion against public school teachers (often seen as noticeably liberal), charter schools were supposed to offer havens of sanity where local control and market principles would combine to ensure high quality. Supporters have contended for years, without evidence, that students in charter schools would perform better, faster, than those "trapped" in traditional public schools.
 
It was a wonderful vision that provided fiery inspiration to many a screed. Sadly, then the data came in. The take-no-prisoners standardized testing movement used to insist that scores be simply compared, not explained. Now all of a sudden, it's important that we "adjust for many different variables to get a sense of what the effects of charter schools are" (Robert Lerner, federal commissioner for education statistics). Scores must be placed in context, with consideration for the economic and academic background of the students surveyed. If these excuses sound familiar, it's because they are the ones that charter supporters have always claimed public school backers invoke without justification.
 
But at least charter schools are models of private oversight of education, right? Well, not so much. From the same Times article, "Around the country, more than 80 charter schools were forced to close, largely because of questionable financial dealings and poor performance". It seems it isn't quite so simple to run a school for advancement and profit at the same time.
 
I don't deny that American education faces a lot of problems, and no one could contend that the public school system is perfect or that it meets the needs of all its students fully. There are legitimate issues of centralized incompetence, poor oversight, unethusiastic educators, and simple mismanagement. But now we see that these same concerns afflict the silver bullet of charter schools. Maybe it's time to re-examine public schols rather than -- as No Child Left Behind encourages -- give up on them. There's a hard lesson in this first comprehensive comparision, and it's worth learning:
 
Education is hard and expensive.
 
Until we come to grips with that reality, all of our schools -- private, public, charter -- will continue to underperform.
 
-=- Bernard HP Gilroy
2004 August 17