Charter Schools: A Reconsideration

In reviewing the film Waiting for Superman, I gave the impression that charter schools are uniformly superior to pubic schools on standard measures of educational achievement. That is the claim propagated in the film, one that is flatly contradicted by Diane Ravitch in a ringing critique in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.

Ravitch argues that the writer and director Davis Guggenheim failed to acknowledge evidence that “only one in five” charter schools are able to outperform comparable public schools. “Why propound to an unknowing public the myth that charter schools are the answer to our educational woes…when there are twice as many failing charters as there are successful ones?”

She claims that Guggenheim simply ignored the wide variation in the effectiveness of charter schools, the fact that some are run by “incompetent leaders” or [for profit] corporations, that others have been accused of “unsavory real estate deals,” or whose directors are paid fees that range from $300,000-$400,00 a year.

In support of her claims she cites a major study of half the country’s 5,000 charter schools that revealed only 17% achieved superior outcomes on math tests compared to a matched sample of public schools, while 37 percent were worse, and the remaining 46% were no different.

Ravitch says the film gives the impression that charter schools work so well because they hire truly excellent teachers. She counters with a study indicating “teacher quality accounts for about 7.5-10 percent of student test score gains.” While teachers may be essential to the success of any school, other factors like curriculum, student background, as well as family income and support of student schoolwork are more important. According to research cited by Ravitch, “…about 60 percent of achievement is explained by nonschool factors.”

I view Ravitch’s critique as a corrective to the depiction of charter schools in Waiting for Superman. The film is clearly designed to persuade viewers of their superiority. However, it does so by ignoring evidence that raises doubts about their effectiveness.

This is a common strategy in most persuasive campaigns. Yet there is much evidence that demonstrates presenting both sides of an argument is more effective. This approach not only enhances the credibility of the source, but also the strength of the message.

What is common to the effective charter and public schools that can account for their successes? To answer this question Ravitch points to the very excellent public education systems in Finland, Japan, and Singapore, widely recognized to be “high-performing” systems. She asserts they have “….succeeded not by privatizing their schools or closing those with low scores, but by strengthening the education profession. They also have less poverty than we do.”

These school systems often have a national curriculum that not only includes the basic skills of reading and math but also incorporates programs in the humanities, sciences, foreign languages, history, etc. They also have strong teacher training programs. Perhaps they can do all this so successfully because they are small countries with a fairly homogeneous population. Nevertheless, they represent an instructive model for those dedicated to designing more effective public education programs in this country.

I admit I have not read the reports cited by Ravitch. Rather my intent has been to report her views and thereby suggest a reconsideration of Waiting for Superman. In addition, I have not read the extensive literature comparing the effectiveness of charter and public educational programs. My account is based on secondary sources and the view of my informant who has read those studies and tells me that Ravitch’s claims are essentially correct.

"Failure Factories"

Early in the documentary film Waiting for Superman, knowing that it is going to be yet another ringing indictment of public school education in this country, we see David Guggenheim, the director and co-writer, driving past three run-down public schools in Los Angeles on his way to drop off his three children at an expensive private school.

We think, why isn’t he sending his kids to public schools and where he can get personally involved in improving them? Is he simply going to tell the all too familiar tale of the failures of public education in this country, as if there’s nothing any of us, nothing he can do about their deplorable state?

In his defense, he is making this film, one in a series he has made about education in America, in the hope that it will galvanize other individuals to band together to move the public school system out of its deep rut. He does this by illustrating successes that are possible within that system at publically funded charter schools in Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C. and Redwood City, California.

To set the stage, Guggenheim lays out the well-known statistics of the performance of children who are educated in the public schools of urban centers of this country. Charts are shown of decades of extremely low reading and math scores. More charts are shown of how American children compare with those in other countries. On some measures, they rank lowest, on others, near the bottom. The only one where the students in this country rank highest in on their personal confidence that they rank number one!

We are also shown the powerful role the teacher’s union plays in working to maintain their current contracts with school systems in this country. Teacher tenure is virtually guaranteed after two years of teaching. In contrast to other professions, it is virtually impossible to dismiss a teacher. We are shown a roomful of New York City teachers who have been charged with incompetence or misconduct but are still on the payroll. Some are sleeping, others working crossword puzzles, some reading, all the while they are being paid their regular salary.

Interweaved with all this is the story of five children and their parents who are struggling to educate their children and enroll them in a charter school. Because these schools can only accept a limited number of students, they must enter a lottery to see if they are selected. The film concludes with suspenseful, nerve-wracking lottery drawings to see who among these dedicated kids will be chosen.

More importantly though we are shown the very considerable successes achieved by some charter schools, in particular The Harlem Success Academy and the KIPP programs, now in several cities throughout the country,

The schools are characterized by highly qualified, highly motivated teachers who assume that every one of their students is capable of performing well. The data support this assumption. The teachers are generally well paid, concentrate from day one on preparing students for college, and give considerable personal tutoring when a student would benefit from it. The students in several of the schools located in poor urban neighborhoods often do better academically than those in the well-off suburban school districts.

While not all charter schools can report such positive outcomes, we are led to think education in this country would be significantly improved by increasing support for them.

When you enter the theater showing Waiting for Superman, you can take a short handout from a box affixed to a poster about the film. The handout tells you what you can do to “make a difference in education today.” What a good idea!

• See the film and get everyone you know to see it. OK, go see it.

• You can pledge to see it at www.WaitingForSuperman.com and receive a $5 credit from www.DonorsChoose.org towards a classroom project.

• By visiting www.DonorsChoose.org, you can donate to a public school class of your choice—pencils for poetry writing, microscope slides, etc.

• Volunteer to mentor a student --- www.mentoring.org

• Go to www.WaitingForSuperman.com to find other activities and resources that will help improve education in this country.

The Humanities Matter

In the latest American Scholar William Chace describes a disturbing downward trend in the number of students enrolled in English Departments, as well as other departments that study the Humanities. When I was teaching at Reed College, the English Department was always the most “popular.” There were years when Psychology ran neck and neck with English, but that was never for very long. And around the time I left the academic fray, the enrollments in the Biology Department were close to those in English.

Of course, this was at a liberal arts college where a common course in the Humanities is required of all entering students with an option to continue on in their sophomore year. But even when I left the college in the late nineties, I could see what lay ahead. When I began teaching at Reed, there were two students enrolled in the Economics Department and by the time I left, there were almost many Economic majors as there were in English. This is at a college where serious young individuals, even if a little quirky, come to study and where there are no courses in Business.

Yet Chace reports that the study of Business is now the most popular major in the nation’s colleges and universities. The figures say it all: In 1970/71 the percent of majors in English declined from 7.6 percent to 3.9 percent. In contrast, undergraduate majors in Business increased from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent. Chace writes,

In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent.

There are really two questions: What are the causes for this sharp decline in English and the Humanities? And second, what can be done to redress it?

To be sure these trends parallel the apparent decline of reading in this country, the steady demise of one independent bookstore after another, and the rising tide of mobile phones, social networks, and various modes of electronic communication. We are no longer a people of the book, but rather one of the screen.

Chace notes there are several reasons for the decline but the fundamental one “is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself.”

Pretty strong words, although they reflect those I often hear from others. I’ve not taken a course in an English Department and I have come to its subject matter through the back door so to speak. The love that I have for literature has nothing to do with critical studies or exotic theories of the text or its interpretation. Rather it is precisely for the very reasons Chace claims are missing from the current curriculum to say nothing of the great pleasure and truths that I gain from the reading experience itself.

Without a doubt, there is also the matter of the enormous cost of attending a private college where courses in English and the Humanities have always had their home. But there is still a place for instruction in these disciplines in the less costly public institutions that are primarily concerned in instruction in applied fields with direct economic payoff.

Chace suggests that to reverse the declining enrollments in the faculty must take pains to return to a more coherent curriculum and to the “rock-solid fact that [literature] can indeed amuse, delight, and educate.” He argues that courses in all the Humanistic disciplines should be taught in terms of the “intrinsic value of the works themselves, in all their range and multiplicity, as well-crafted and appealing artifacts of human wisdom.”

I concur: the courses in Humanities I was fortunate enough to take as an undergraduate continue to have an enormous impact on my life and on whatever understanding I have acquired about the world. I quote the writer, Orhan Pamuk: “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”

Detroit of Higher Education

In a New York Times op-ed piece last week, Mark Taylor, Chair of the Religion Department at Columbia, called for a major restructuring of graduate programs in this country. Because graduate education plays such a central role in the intellectual life of our country, his concerns deserve to be considered. Professor Taylor considers graduate education “the Detroit of higher education.”

He writes “Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research…publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).”

Taylor does not only criticize. In addition, he proposes a complete overhaul of graduate and, in turn, undergraduate studies tailored for the 21st century.

1. Replace the obsolete departmental structure with an integrated, interdisciplinary network of disciplines. “Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.”

2. Create problem focused programs around a broad range of topics such as “Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time Media, Money, Life and Water.”

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. Taylor comments: “With these tools [teleconferencing and the Internet], I have recently team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.”

4. Transform the traditional dissertation modeled on the medieval dissertation, into analytic treatments from hypertext and Web sites to films and other theses formats.

5. Expand the professional options for students since “Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained.”

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure with seven-year renewable contracts. This will avoid the current situation in which there is little turnover among professor with many “impervious to change.”

Taylor writes “For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with what I could never imagine doing…” He concludes: “My hope is that colleagues and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academic to a future we cannot conceive.”

For one not far removed the academic fray, I can only affirm the merits of Taylor’s portrait of graduate programs and the need for their radical restructuring. It was only after I began teaching that I learned anything about my discipline and it was only after I began teaching that I realized the great value of interdisciplinary, problem focused, courses. I taught better and the students learned more when I could offer them. And along the way they gave rise to research programs in which both my students and I learned a great deal and even nudged forward a little bit the areas we investigated.

I might add that I turned down the offer of indefinite tenure hoping to replace it with a renewable contract subject to periodic evaluation. I was duly informed that I could not remain at the college under those conditions. Since the college was in my mind a little Utopia, I had to settle for a permanent arrangement. However, in the end I departed from the college long before it was necessary, so in reality it wasn’t very permanent at all.

Knowledge is Power

I first learned about the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) college preparatory schools on 60 minutes a few years ago. More recently, KIPP was the subject of a section in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. Gladwell’s treatment highlights the role that the extra time (both number of days of the school year and in-class hours each day) plays in KIPP’s success. But KIPP involves far more than that.

In Work Hard. Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America, Jay Mathews writes about the extraordinary success that KIPP’s network of schools has achieved and some of the reasons why. In a nutshell he attributes it to a combination of the following factors:

“---its instituting high expectations for all students, a longer school day, a principal totally in charge, an emphasis on finding the best teachers, rewards for student success, close contact with parents, a focus on results, and a commitment to preparing every child for a great high school, and, most important, college.”

In a review of this book Charles Sahm points to several other factors. They include (1) devoted teachers who stay after school to work with struggling students, (2) “mountains of homework, (3) encouragement of students to call teachers at their home, (4) enriched curriculum, and (5) a strong sense of community among the students, faculty, and parents.

Because of its overwhelming positive results during a time when educators are struggling to improve student learning, KIPP deserves to be looked at closely. Currently the KIPP network consists of 66 schools in 19 states with an enrollment of over 16,000 students. The students represent a wide range of groups—80% are low income and 90% are African American of Latino. What a challenge teaching such a class in an inner city neighborhood must be.

According to the KIPP website, more than 90% of the KIPP middle school students have gone on to college-prep high schools and more than 80% of those who have graduated from the program have gone on to college. Can the KIPP model be widely replicated on a nationwide basis? Surely it will be difficult. But that is what its proponents are currently trying to accomplish.

Sahm concludes his review by writing “KIPP has proved that great teachers, high expectations, extra class time, and much encouragement and commitment can close American’s educational achievement.”

Based on my days of teaching in an academic community, I know how important each of those factors can be, especially in an institution that is primarily devoted to student learning. I also know that much of the pleasure of teaching in a place like that comes from seeing how much academic success can do for a young person.

I taught at Reed College, a liberal arts college in the Northwest, a place of great freedom and intellectual vitality that year after year attracted a group of bright and talented students. They had drawn me to the college and sustained me throughout the 25 years that I was there.

The Reed educational model is not unlike KIPP’s. It is an institution of high intellectual expectations, demanding courses, and a keen sense of community. In turn, it has year after year well surpassed its competitors in the success of its graduates. Reed has consistently ranked in the top five among schools whose graduates go on to earn Ph.D.s in all fields.

Student accomplishment like this is one of the reasons teaching at Reed was so satisfying. I cannot help but believe that teachers at KIPP schools feel much the same way about their students. Student successes contribute to better teaching, which, in turn, enriches the classroom experience. This creates a powerful feedback loop that can make an enormous difference in the lives of the students and teachers who have the good fortune of being in an educational setting like this.