Both are true, but the first is truer because it isn’t taken
out of context. Someone could infer from “Charter Schools are Improving…” that they were better than public schools,
particularly since many falsely believe that already, either because they have
swallowed the “free market is always better” Kool-Aid or because they have read so much derogatory
right-wing nonsense about public schools and teachers’ union.
Here are the facts: “The National Charter School Study”
by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) is
the gold standard for comparing the performance of charter schools and public
schools. CREDO released its original
study four years ago and released an updated version yesterday. In both
studies, neighborhood public schools win over charter schools hands down.
But charter schools are improving—from very bad to mediocre:
In 2009, 37% of charter schools performed worse than the neighborhood public
school and only 17% did better. Now 31% do worse than the neighborhood school
while 29% do better. As the Times underscores, charter schools range
in quality from state to state: doing better in New York, Michigan and Louisiana,
and worse in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Texas, among other states.
What’s so fascinating to me is that the New York Times would have a misleading headline to a story that was
on the whole fairly balanced. The lead sentence, for example, stated that
charter schools did poorly in the 2009 study and that the 2013 update merely
showed that “in a few states, charter schools are
improving in some areas.” When the headline clashes with the story content, it is
often a sign that the editorial opinion of ownership or the editorial board
favors the view expressed in the headline.
The continued mediocre performance of charter schools is not
surprising. The business model for the charter school dooms it to failure.
While parents may people a board of directors of a charter school, the school
typically hires a for-profit company (or a for-profit parading as a non–profit)
to run the school. Charter schools pay teachers less money than public schools
do, primarily because charters are typically non-unionized. While some of the
money saved by paying teachers less may or may not finance more equipment, new
books or more teachers, we know that a good part of it is going to higher
executive salaries and company profit. Now teachers are like attorneys,
accountants, engineers and other professionals. While the highest paid may not
be the very best, in general the best get paid the most. So with the best
teachers taking the public school jobs, charter schools are left with the least
experienced and the less competent.
Let’s face it: The sole purpose of the charter school
movement is to destroy teachers’ unions and thereby lower the wage rate of all
Americans. It’s part of the 30+ year campaign to transfer wealth from the poor
and middle class to the wealthy. This political
agenda, shared by virtually all Republicans and many Democrats, has four main tenets:
- Lower taxes on the wealthy.
- Reduce government spending on social welfare programs for the poor and near-poor.
- Privatize traditional government services, leading to profit-making opportunities for the wealthy
- Destroy unions.
There are many things wrong with the American education
system. But charter schools don’t really solve any of them. The charter school
movement is a failed experiment.
Let’s pull the plug. Let’s ask our elected representatives
to outlaw and dismantle charter schools and instead increase aid to education
that will put more teachers in the classroom, reduce the size of classes, give
students everywhere access to the Internet and computers, extend gifted
programs to lower grades and level the playing field between schools in rich
and poor neighborhoods.
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