D.C. schools open their doors Monday morning for the start of a new year, and charter parents and advocates say a new problem is compounding an old one. This school year, the D.C. Healthy Schools Act mandating new feeding and physical-education policies takes effect. But charter schools are scrambling to meet some requirements of the new law, which says schools must feed students locally produced fruits and vegetables and offer students overall healthier meals. The act also raises the bar on physical fitness.

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Charter schools might not offer a magic pill that can cure all of Kentucky’s public education ailments. However, it’s tough to ignore the growing amount — and credibility — of evidence that charter schools offer opportunity for change that could transform the lives of many of Kentucky’s neediest students.

The charter concept has existed for only 20 years. So opponents for a long time often claimed charter schools lacked proven success.

But parental attitudes are changing. Parents of children in underperforming schools throughout the country are increasingly taking advantage of charter schools. More than 1.5 million students now attend 5,000 charter schools in the United States.

Critics have drawn on a charter-challenged public to convince reform-illiterate legislators and the media that charters represent “uppity” private schools that threaten public education. But residents and many legislators who represent them are “learning” the truth:

â–  Charter schools are publicly funded schools managed in a way that gives many students falling through the cracks of traditional public schools a chance to avoid welfare rolls, street corners, prisons or worse.

â–  These schools often do it for 33 percent to 50 percent of the cost of their public school counterparts, and in schools with Taj Mahal facilities that lack costly bells and whistles.

But you can’t always judge a school by its facilities. And you also can’t ascertain charter-school success by listening to fear mongering.

Mary Ann Blankenship, executive director of the Kentucky Education Association, recently wrote in her KEA News column: “Research by Stanford University shows that most students in charter schools perform about the same or worse than similar students in regular schools.”

Blankenship wasn’t the only one to jump on the study conducted in June 2009 by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcome. But she joined many embarrassed by data found deeper in the report: Students in charter schools for at least three years outperformed their peers in traditional schools. They closed gaping academic-achievement chasms between black and white students.

One of the problems with Stanford’s first study involved a flaw in its student sample: 60 percent of the national sample was first-year students. Like any remedy for a long-standing illness, charters take time, and the first Stanford study showed that.

Blankenship wrote that charters were “an unproven strategy.”

Ironically, Blankenship wrote that in January — about the same time a second Stanford report focused on the performance of charter schools in New York City.

The respected Education Week publication summarized the second report: “On a school-by-school basis, 51 percent of New York City charter schools are producing academic gains in math for students that are statistically larger than students would have achieved in regular public schools.”

Education Week also reported: “Black and Hispanic students (in New York City), as well as struggling learners, do better on average in charter schools than they would have in their regular public schools.”

Look at KIPP Academy Nashville: “The average fifth-grader begins two grades below the national averages,” stated a recent report on the charter school by Paducah’s WPSD-TV. But KIPP Academy Nashville doesn’t close the gap with magic.

Students attend school until 5 p.m. each weekday, on Saturdays and during the summer. Is it any wonder that more than 90 percent of these students scored “advanced” or “proficient” on the standardized Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program tests?

“Educrats” and union bosses might want you to ignore these results.

But I’m betting the thousands of Kentucky parents with children trapped in failing schools would render a favorable verdict about the need to bring charter schools to the commonwealth.

Lexington Herald Leader June 21 2010

If I have two apples from the same tree — the same color, same ripeness, same size, same taste, and same nutrition — “choice” between them is meaningless. Public education, all growing out of the same government “tree” and mandated to be equal, is nonetheless being subjected to “choice.” Why? Because public schools are not equal and interchangeable like the apples, but directly reflect the socioeconomic inequalities of our larger society — and so are, themselves, unequal.

This unacceptable, undemocratic inequality in a public system results in part from a uniquely American phenomenon: the funding of public education through local property taxes. Such funding obviously results in the wealthier communities with the higher tax base getting better schools than the poorer communities with the lower tax base. Throughout the U.S., people strive to move into upper-end communities to give their kids the advantage of the “better” public schools — the kids of the less affluent be damned.

This distortion of a public system is clearly not working to the benefit of our greater society. In Europe, for example, where public education is centralized and funded directly by the government, students far outperform U.S. kids in basic skills such as reading, writing, math, science, history, etc. Recognizing our educational delinquency, we employ all sorts of gimmicks to catch up: “No Child Left Behind” legislation, charter schools,vouchers, and that wonderfully American paean to freedom, “choice”!

We needn’t document the disaster — to students, teachers, and the system itself — of the “No Child Left Behind” debacle. It was so bad that our new government is desperately trying to reform it — probably to no avail in the long run. As to charter schools — which have been espoused by our president — an in-depth Stanford University study of the nation’s 5,000 charter schools revealed that “fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education, and more than a third, 37 percent, were ‘significantly worse’” (The New York Times, 5/02/10). The people’s government, instead of addressing the underlying problems of the people’s educational system, abdicated its reponsibilites and turned the people’s money over to entrepreneurs to solve what only the government could. And of course, they didn’t — thereby wasting the people’s money yet again.

The voucher proposal is another avoidance. Instead of doing what should be done to bring underperforming schools up to standard, the government will pay parents to have their kids leave those schools. School “choice” is another ultimately ineffective variation on the same theme.

This is not to suggest that solving America’s public education problem is simple. The profound economic inequalities in our society manifest not only in the unequal funding of public education, but in the educability of the different social classes. The more affluent people are usually the more educated, the more cultivated, the more “successful,” and the better role models for education. This group, through example, imbues its children with higher expectations and aspirations, provides a more propitious environment for education, and, through its elevated position in society, opens more doors for them. The not-so-privileged majority do not fare as well in school and may need extra programs to bring them up to par.

Should we submit to these unfortunate realities and interminably cobble together a patchwork of ineffective “reforms” to make it look like we’re doing something? Many think so. For example, in a historic case in which the City of New York sued the State of New York for more educational dollars, the judges ruled against the city. Their rationale was astonishing in that they had the courage to publicly articulate it: the city had no further obligation than to provide its children with the rudiments of “reading, writing, & ‘rithmetic” needed to perform society’s most menial tasks! In other words, keep the poor majority dumb and doing the dirty work while the affluent minority continues to coopt the earth’s abundance.

These class divisions will not suddenly stop imposing themselves on our public education system. But because it is public education, we can neither bow to an inequitable status quo nor serve it. Our obligation is to create, as far as we can, equal apples from the same tree. Every public school must have the same facilities, the same highly trained and equally-paid teachers, the same basic curricula, the same athletic, cultural, and extracurricular programs, and the same tutorial programs. In other words, we must arrive at the highest possible educational standard and universalize it — a true reform that would render school “choice” meaningless.

It’s discouraging, within the context of these overall social realities, to hear a professional educator like Darren Houck, headmaster of the Mountain School at Winhall, lead the chorus for school “choice” that perpetuates the underlying inequities rather than addressing them (Manchester Journal, 4/30/10). It’s hard to see his position doing anything more than hawking the kind of boutique education he’s in charge of.

Andrew Torre, The Manchaster Journal, 20 May 2010

Sweden has had the free school system that the UK Conservative party are advocating for some 15 years now. And during this time a number of serious problems have become evident that mean urgent reform is now necessary. In fact, it is exactly those parts of the system the Tories want to implement in Britain that we are proposing to put an end to in Sweden.

The reforms will not work without extra investment. The Labour party and the Swedish Social Democrats propose rising schools spending when the Conservatives in the UK and Sweden propose less. Spending alone won’t always improve standards, but creating surplus places like this without providing the funding to allow for the surplus capacity you need could seriously harm standards.

A country’s future lies in how well we educate and take care of our children. Every parent knows that special blend of excitement, pride and worry that you feel when your child goes to school for the first time. How will it go? Will they make friends? Will there be a teacher who sees the potential within every child?

Yet the Swedish authorities’ own research has concluded that over the last fifteen years since the free schools were introduced, the number of low performing pupils has increased in Sweden, while the high performing pupils have neither increased in numbers nor have they become more successful.

That is why it is worrisome when the Tories want to copy our system by picking out the bad apples of the basket.

The free school system, implemented without imposing clear standards, has seen schools opening with sub-standard facilities, often without libraries, and with a far greater number of unqualified teachers.

What’s more, the introduction of free schools has led to increased segregation where pupils from the same social background increasingly concentrate in certain attractive free schools.

This matters because segregation and poorer facilities serve no-one but the Conservatives seem to specifically think that these “freedoms” are positive aspects of the policy. This is a serious mistake.

To some extent, there is an irony in the fact that the British Tories are looking towards Sweden as an example for educational policies, when at the same time Swedish politicians – progressives as well as liberals and conservatives – are finding answers to some of our challenges in Britain. I am not only thinking about the British universities, but also the primary school system. We are deeply impressed by the one-to-one tuition and catch-up support, but also how you have been able to raise attraction to society’s most important profession: the teacher, by the Teach first-program, which now is investigated and advocated both by us in the red-green opposition and by the conservative government. These and other Labour-initiated programs serves as examples for us.

If we win the Swedish general election in September, we won’t prevent parents from choosing free schools for their children. But we will reform the system in order to reverse the serious problems that have become evident over in this system, increasing spending on schools. Spending alone won’t always improve standards, but creating a free market as the Conservative proposals do without providing the funding to allow for the surplus capacity you need will certainly harm standards.

I sincerely hope there are aspects of the Swedish school system – especially how a system aiming at cohesion and equality in the system raises the performing results – that you can learn from us. But implement our successes – do not repeat our mistakes.

Mona Sahlin, The Guardian, 2 May 2010

Education historian Diane Ravitch is half right.In her March 14 Times Op-Ed article, “The Big Idea — it’s bad education policy,” Ravitch warns that there is no silver-bullet solution to our education problems.She is correct.

Having been an ardent supporter of the standards-based accountability strategy of the last 25 years and a champion of school choice, she has seen the light and become a convert, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus.

Specifically, one big idea Ravitch once supported but now denounces is our national test-driven approach to school improvement, recognizing that it is harmful to schools, to kids and to teachers.

Again, she is correct.

The other big idea she once championed but now rejects is school choice, saying it is a fad and won’t work. She is wrong.The evidence that our overemphasis on testing is not improving schools and is actually having a negative effect is so persuasive that Ravitch doesn’t elaborate on it in her column. But she does make a case against evaluating teachers on the basis of their students’ test scores. That, of course, is a logical result of our obsession with testing that she has helped fuel for decades.

It should be apparent to those who make education policy that students’ test scores are influenced by much more than teachers. If we really want better educators, we should change teacher preparation programs to include much more clinical experience. We also should improve teachers’ working conditions and share our leadership roles with them as professionals, not union members.

Ravitch devotes much of her article to criticizing choice and, particularly, charter schools. Her arguments are not new:

Charter schools are no better than public schools and aren’t really improving student achievement.

First of all, she obviously knows that charter schools are public schools that receive public monies. It is misleading to suggest, as Ravitch does, that district schools are public but charters are not.

Second, Ravitch cites research that relies solely on test scores as a measure of success. If “test-driven” reform is unacceptable, why should test scores be a reliable basis for judging charter schools?

One of the main justifications for charters is that they offer an alternative to conventional schools and encourage innovation and experimentation. Charters often do not mirror traditional public schools in their curriculum or standard 50-minute classes.

Researchers who compare conventional schools to charter schools might just as well compare one-story schools to two-story schools. Chartering is a form of governance that allows schools to be different. What matters is not the way schools are governed but what happens inside them.

Charter schools get better students because parents who apply obviously care more about their children’s education.

Again, Ravitch’s argument is strange. Don’t we want parents to care about their kids’ education? She also says charters admit by lottery and “counsel out” unwanted students; “public” schools, on the other hand, have to take all comers, including the students charters don’t want.

Charter schools are public schools and are therefor required to accept all students on a first-come, first-serve basis. They resort to lotteries when demand exceeds supply, which is better and fairer than following the example of private schools and colleges. She points to the widely publicized schools run by the Knowledge is Power Program as evidence of “counseling out.” Interestingly, KIPP schools are charter schools that are essentially traditional schools on steroids.

Ravitch cites studies in Boston, Washington, New York and Houston showing that district schools end up with a disproportionate share of the hardest to educate students. I haven’t seen the study, but its conclusions don’t surprise me. The student bodies in many big-city schools are made up almost entirely of poor and minority kids. For various reasons, the parents of those kids send them to the neighborhood schools without regard to educational quality. Charters attract students who are dissatisfied with conventional schools.

Charter schools will undermine (Ravitch says “destroy”) public education by luring students and draining funds that would otherwise go to conventional district schools.

I repeat: Charter schools are as much a part of “public education” as any other public school. If they undermine anything, it’s the bad schools entrenched in the system.

Students who choose a charter school do take their state funding with them. That is the way the system works. The migration of students to charter schools is no different than the migration of students to suburban schools. Affluent parents have long had school choice because they could afford more expensive homes, which is really the “tuition” for attending a suburban school.

Ravitch criticizes the notion of competition and “free market” forces that are often cited to justify charters. I’m with her on that. There is little evidence that those forces, if they really exist, have made much of a dent on the larger system.

But choice is less about competition than it is about providing a diversity of educational opportunities for the most diverse student body in American history. Conventional schools offer the 50-million-plus kids who attend them the same one-size-fits-all education. This is no longer tolerable.

Ron Wolk, Los Angles Times, 23 March 2010