Link reblogged from Give Me Something To Read
The Myth of Charter Schools →
American public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them, but they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools, especially to charter schools, which are mostly funded by the government but controlled by private organizations, many of them operating to make a profit.
A few points
Ravich points out a number of issues with charters as they currently exist. The system is in need of reform - and I’d love to see the elimination of for-profit charters, greater financial accountability (i.e. no more million dollar principals), elimination of “cherry picking” (i.e. not enrolling or exiting students with disabilities), and increased accountability to school boards for failing/substandard charters.
But Ravich also helps perpetuate a number of myths about charters by insisting on calling them “privately managed,” when the vast majority are run with public dollars, by non-profits, and are accountable to school boards.
I think Ravich throws up a straw man when it comes to poverty. Absolutely no one is denying that poverty matters. Absolutely no one is arguing against fighting poverty. The reformer argument as I see it is that we can’t wait for poor students to overcome poverty before we educate them. The power of the charter schools shown in Superman (or the school I teach at!) is that they are all places where poor students have succeeded despite the challenges they face at home. They give us hope that we might be able to get the chicken before the egg.
Ravich seems really mixed about whether we ought to listen to parents or not. She cites the high percentage of parents giving their public school an “A” or a “B” as means of supporting the existing public schools system, yet she doesn’t seem to see the outrageous number of parents entering lotteries as justification to scale up the successful charter models (i.e. KIPP/Harlem Success Academy/etc) of the world.
There is a clash of ideas occurring in education right now between those who believe that public education is not only a fundamental right but a vital public service, akin to the public provision of police, fire protection, parks, and public libraries, and those who believe that the private sector is always superior to the public sector. Waiting for “Superman” is a powerful weapon on behalf of those championing the “free market” and privatization. It raises important questions, but all of the answers it offers require a transfer of public funds to the private sector. The stock market crash of 2008 should suffice to remind us that the managers of the private sector do not have a monopoly on success.
Here, Ravich becomes absurd. Charter schools in no way call into question every students right to a public education. If Ravich is so upset about the for-profit charters (and she has every right to be!) she should focus her attention on changing the laws that allow them to exist, rather than broadly painting all charter schools as part of the private sector.
Source: givemesomethingtoread
Quote with 3 notes
I used to think that policy was the solution. And now I think that policy is the problem.
I used to think that people’s beliefs determined their practices. And now I think that people’s practices determine their beliefs.
I used to think that public institutions embodied the collective values of society. And now I think that they embody the interests of the people who work in them.
Richard Elmore, on education, as quoted here
(via the choi)
Post with 6 notes
Learnings of a first-year teacher
In my year-end survey, TFA asked me what I’ve learned about education. Here are a few things I put down:
Socioeconomic status does not prevent students from learning. (I work at a charter with high achievement and growth rates, and a very high free/reduced lunch population).
There’s no silver bullet in education - even policies that I support (charters, alternative certification programs like TFA, extended school day/year) - are only a small part of the solution, and will only work when implemented by competent and passionate administrators/teachers.
We still really don’t know what students know. I’m a believer in the power of data, but I feel like the assessments available to me (as a middle school science teacher) are rather awful - from the CSAP to the SAT 10 to my self-created end of year assessment. So many strategies (incentive pay, student accountability, growth tracking, targeted interventions) depend on high-quality assessments, aligned to standards, and the quality of these assessments needs to improve dramatically.
Probably all obvious truisms to those who study education (and are in the same nebulous pro-reform camp that my school/myself fall into), but I don’t think I really believed any of these things prior to teaching.
I also have a growing belief that the way we hire, train, promote educators in the US is entirely fucked… but more on that later.
KCFR (my local NPR station) had the person in charge of Colorado’s state curriculum on this morning, to talk about what has changed in the new state standards.
The whole interview was a gem (I can’t seem to find it online though), but the definite highlight came when the standard-maker gave an example of what a new 4th grade math standard would look like:
“The new standards are very specific. One example might be that a fourth grader needs to know the difference between the denominator of a fraction, and the nominator.”
