Evaluating the free market by comparing it to the alternatives (We don't need more regulations, We don't need more price controls, No Socialism in the courtroom, Hey, White House, leave us all alone)
"Of the nearly 2,000 public school students beginning high school in
the South Bronx (District 8 of NYC public schools) in 2015, only two
percent graduated
ready for college four years later. A shocking 98 percent of students
either dropped out of high school before completing their senior year—or
they did manage to graduate, but would still be required to take
remedial classes in community college due to low math and reading scores
on state exams. By contrast, charter public schools in the South Bronx
continued to outperform
their district peers in both math and reading for third through eighth
graders by a substantial margin in 2019, as shown in the figures below.
Figure
1: District v. Charter school proficiency in English/Language Arts and
Math, 2019 (Source: New York City Charter School Center)
It comes as no surprise that parents in this predominantly black and
Hispanic community, encompassing two of the poorest Congressional
districts in the country, are desperate for higher quality education
options. The NYC Charter Center reports that in the Bronx alone, more than 25,000 families applied for just over 9,000 available seats in Bronx charter schools.
Even so, in an attempt to curry favor for his failed presidential bid, NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio angrily attacked charter schools as part of his opening statement
at the 2019 annual forum of the nation’s largest teachers union, the
National Education Association. “I hate the privatizers and I want to
stop them,” he said. “Get away from high-stakes testing, get away from
charter schools. No federal funding for charter schools.”
These are not idle threats. DeBlasio, along with teachers unions and
many Democrat elected officials, have consistently blocked legislation
that would lift the numerical “cap” on new charter public schools in New
York City. This all but ensures the nearly 16,000 Bronx parents on a
waitlist for charter public schools will be forced to enroll their kids
in district public schools that have been failing their community for
generations.
The Education of Children
Why is there so much irrational opposition to low-income families who
want nothing more than the opportunity to choose a high-quality public
school for their child?
In his richly researched new book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies,
author and economist Thomas Sowell poses the dilemma in this way: “Even
the most successful charter schools have been bitterly attacked by
teachers unions, by politicians, by the civil rights establishment and
assorted others. How can success be so unwelcome?” Sowell answers this
question with painstaking detail, revealing that these forces are really
focused on protecting “adult vested interests in traditional unionized
public schools,” and are committed to “limiting the exodus of students
from traditional public schools to public charter schools.”
Throughout the book, Sowell attempts to correct falsehoods and
distortions that anti-charter advocates keep repeating in hopes that
lies ultimately become accepted truths. For example, given the frequent
tendency for DeBlasio and allied opponents to falsely accuse charter
schools of attempting to privatize education, Sowell offers a definition
of these schools:
Public charter schools are public
schools not created by the existing government education authorities,
but by some private groups who gain government approval by meeting
various preconditions set by the authorizing agencies. These agencies
issue charters enabling these schools to operate as public schools
eligible for taxpayer money and to enroll public students who apply.
On more than one occasion, Sowell feels he must italicize and remind the reader that “schools exist for the education of children,”
not to “provide iron-clad jobs for teachers, billions of dollars in
union dues, or a captive audience for indoctrinators.” Sowell reasonably
establishes a singular general principle for evaluating any proposed
reform to the education system: “How is this going to affect the education of children?”
In the words of Sowell, “those who want to see quality education remain
available to youngsters in low-income, minority neighborhoods must
raise the question, again and again, when various policies and practices
are proposed.”
Struck by the accomplishments of charter public schools, Sowell is
compelled to envision the potential of the American system if all
public schools adopted the same practices that have driven charter
schools’ success. But he raises one important note of caution: “The
implications of [charter schools’] existing achievement can be a
game-changer in the field of education—to the extent that facts are
known and heeded.”
Herein lies Sowell’s central aspiration and basic plea for fairness:
if more people can “know and heed” the overwhelming evidence detailing
the positive impact of charter schools on the education of children,
perhaps more poor and minority students can have access to a “good
education which is their biggest opportunity for a better life.”
In the
current moment of riots and protests demanding racial justice, charter
leaders must stress their legacy of accomplishment, particularly in
educating low-income, black and Hispanic students.
That is why Sowell so meticulously sets up a data framework to
contrast the achievement levels of students in district public schools
to “truly comparable” students in charter public schools. Sowell uses
the results of the 2018 New York State Education Department tests in
Math and English Language Arts, which are administered to all students
in grades three through eight—whether those students are in district or
charter public schools. He drills down even further to ensure he only
compares students who share the same grade, racial, ethnic and
socioeconomic characteristics. Finally, he compares district public
school students and charter public school students who are “co-located,”
meaning their respective schools share the same building, and often
even the same floors.
Applying all of these filters, Sowell identifies a significant sample
of 23,000 district and charter public school students, all being
educated in the same buildings. Sowell’s Appendix alone has more than
100 pages of charts detailing the 65 co-located charter public schools
in the city and how their respective students performed on state tests
compared to similarly situated district public school students.
The results of this truly “apples-to-apples” comparison are
impressive. While not every charter public school outperformed its
co-located district public school in every grade, the difference was
decisive in an overwhelming number of cases. For example, in the five
buildings in which they were co-located with district public schools, a
majority of the students in the KIPP charter network passed the 2018
math exams in 12 of their 14 grade levels. By contrast, among the
students in the traditional public schools sharing the same buildings, a
majority passed the math exam in just one of their twenty grade levels.
Sowell’s analysis of charter school prowess is hardly an outlier.
Just recently, Harvard Professor Paul Peterson published a
comprehensive, longitudinal study, finding:
Student cohorts in the charter
sector made greater gains from 2005 to 2017 than did cohorts in the
district sector. The difference in the trends in the two sectors amounts
to nearly an additional half-year’s worth of learning. The biggest
gains are for African Americans and for students of low socioeconomic
status attending charter schools.
The success of charter schools cannot be denied.
Fighting Enemies, Within and Without
Yet, to anti-charter advocates, these facts are to be ignored,
distorted, or discredited because the success of charter public schools
has been achieved through unallowable means. And while the purveyors of
these attacks remain an ominous and external threat to charter schools,
there is a new development coming from within the sector that
has the potential to undermine both the legacy and future of charter
schools. Sowell refers to a “particularly striking—and perhaps
dangerous—institutional change” occurring within leading charter schools
to “promote anti-racist practices” that are much more likely to
diminish the importance of individual student effort, sow greater racial
division, and worst of all end up perpetuate disempowering stereotypes
of black Americans.
Perhaps a letter by Dave Levin, founder of the KIPP network,
best exemplifies these new dangers. He recently apologized for how,
over 25 years, he “as a white man . . . and others, came up short in
fully acknowledging the ways in which the [KIPP] school and
organizational culture we built and how some of our practices
perpetuated white supremacy and anti-Blackness.” Towards this end, KIPP
has retired its longtime slogan “Work Hard, Be Nice,”
because “working hard and being nice is not going to dismantle systemic
racism. . . it suggests being compliant and submissive. . . and it
supports the illusion of meritocracy.”
It is not clear where these revelations from charter leaders are
going. How can the practices that have yielded unbelievable gains for
low-income, black and brown children symbolize the perpetuation of white
supremacy? These newly woke forces from within the charter sector
threaten to inflict an even greater wound than the external oppositions
that charter schools have now weathered for more than two decades. One
has to hope they will not.
With formidable opponents attacking from the outside and corrosive
ideologies now festering from within, it is a wonder the charter sector
has managed to survive at all. Yet, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools,
“charter schools serve 3.3 million students in America, and there are
five million more who would attend a charter school if space were
available.”
It is this part of the story—the David versus Goliath nature of the
charter sector—that I wish Sowell had also chronicled. The enemies of
charter school may be formidable, but the battle is not lost. There are
successful strategies the sector has deployed to push back against the
gargantuan opponents arrayed against it.
I would know. For the last decade, I was CEO of a network of charter
public schools in the heart of the South Bronx and the Lower East Side
of Manhattan. Our faculty had the solemn responsibility to educate more
than 2,000 students—primarily low-income, black and Hispanic kids—whose
parents chose our schools because they want their children to develop
skills and habits that would help them achieve a better life, becoming
the agents of their own uplift. I am now designing Vertex Partnership
Academies, a new network of character-based, International Baccalaureate
high schools that will open in the south Bronx.
Leaders in the charter sector do not take on the grueling work of
launching these schools because we are anti-union or ruthless
“privatizers.” We are motivated by families who do not have time to sit
around while their child languishes and wait for the public school
system to transform itself. What do you tell the 22-year-old mom of a
five-year-old who needs a great elementary kindergarten class for her
child, today?
In the current moment of riots and protests demanding racial justice,
rather than embarking on a white guilt trip down memory lane, charter
leaders must stress their legacy of accomplishment, particularly in
educating low-income, black and Hispanic students. And we have to
elevate the voices of parents themselves as a force that unions and
other anti-charter advocates cannot dismiss or ignore any longer. Our
families do not believe their children are doomed to be shackled by the
horrors of America’s legacy of slavery. That is why they crave the
ability to choose the good schools that middle- and upper-income
families take for granted.
When the charter sector faced an existential threat in New York in
2013, leaders mobilized nearly 17,000 parents, aunts, grandmothers and
other family members to march across the Brooklyn Bridge wearing shirts
that said “We Fight Inequality” and “My Child, My Choice.” A few months
later, caravans of busses with 11,000 family members trekked to bitter
cold Albany to advocate for school choice.
Parents, mostly black and brown, argued that hundreds of thousands of
kids were trapped in poorly performing schools, and that low-income
families like them must be given the option to choose charter schools.
Even Democratic politicians, who now had concentrations of
high-performing charter schools within their districts, publicly
signaled their support. Those efforts led to amazing legislative
victories for increases in per pupil funding, permanent public funding
for leasing private facilities, and more flexibility in how charter
schools could recruit and professionally develop our faculty.
Perhaps Sowell desired for Charter Schools and Their Enemies
to paint the most dire picture of the sector, lest we forget how
fragile our hard-fought victories are. But, on behalf of the 16,000
children in the South Bronx, and the more than 5,000,000 families
nationwide who are waiting for their child to find a spot in a charter
school, let’s hope his sequel publication is entitled “How Charter
Schools Overcame Their Enemies”—all while focusing on the education of children."
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