A Cheer for Some Charter Schools

I agree with Patrick that charter schools have been oversold. But I think it is important to stress that there is much to learn from those charter schools that have been successful (beyond the recognition that public schools need to be more fully funded).  The claim that public schools generally lack success is simply false. Certainly, suburban public schools have been highly successful. On the other hand, even otherwise very good school districts do not have a record of success with regard to students from poor backgrounds and racism persists in school districts that regard themselves as liberal.

I do not accept (and I do not believe that Patrick accepts)  the view that socio-economic background dooms students to failure. I think schools of education have done an exceedingly poor job of teaching teachers how to teach.

There are methods of inspiring students to learn while maintaining effective classroom discipline. Doug Lemov is the Founder of School Performance, an Albany-based non-profit that provides diagnostic assessments, performance data analysis, and academic consulting to high performing charter schools.  He has a new book called Teach Like a Champion that in my opinion should be required reading for all teachers in k-12 and all parents of young children. Before the book was published, a teacher I know, who as a part of Teach For America was teaching in a public school in the Mississippi Delta, heard a lecture by Lemov. Last year the lowest increase in reading levels of any of his students was a grade level and a half. That was the lowest. He credits Lemov for a significant part of his success and the success of other friends who adopted his techniques. Lemov’s techniques are increasingly being used in Teach for America and the Kipp schools. And I am happy to report that his book is currently being read by elementary school principals in Ithaca (though many of his techniques are applicable at higher levels).

I recently visited kindergarten classes at a Kipp school in Austin, Texas. One of the teachers teaches at different times in English to two groups of Spanish speaking children from low socio-economic backgrounds. Another teacher teaches the same groups of children at different times in Spanish.  One thing is obvious. Young children quickly pick up languages. These children will emerge as fully bilingual. When I was President of the Ithaca City School Board, I urged the Superintendent to try a similar program. She agreed to do so at one school, but worried that schools of education were not producing teachers who could do this. I am not sure how much training is needed, but our schools of education are not doing this and our schools are woefully weak in teaching languages.

Finally, Kipp schools (which by the way do not charge tuition) have very long school days. I, at least, am persuaded that longer school days are beneficial to the education of children. But selling that idea to the President of a teachers’ union would be extremely difficult particularly in a climate where the public is unwilling to support fair teachers salaries even in a district like Ithaca’s.

Comments

[Marie Lewis]

Publicly funded yet privately managed – Charter School fraud is an easy concept. Charters can be succesful it depends on the “agenda” of the the managing company. Accountability has not caught up to the growth of the Charter movement. In the USA we have an Islamic Imam – Fethullah Gulen (Gulen Movement) that manages over 130 US Charter schools they have taken over $1 billion in Educational monies in the last 10 years and are growing like rapid fire.
The Gulen schools have a network of foundations and instutitions layered over the schools and much of our educational money is going to non-educational expenses such as: Turkish Olympiads, trips to Turkey for the students and local politicians, H1-b Visas of over 2,000 uncredentialed teachers from Turkey (while American teachers are handed pink slips) this money is to fuel the grand ambition of Fethullah Gulen who lives in exile (for a reason) in the Poconos, PA area with his $25 billion in wealth from inflitration in: education, media, police, poltics and military. Seems the same model works very nicely in the USA. Do your research!!!
http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com
http://www.charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com
http://www.gulencharterschools.weebly.com

[Jimbino]

In this and other reports of the disappointing results of charter schools I see no side-by-side comparison of costs. Am I wrong to assume that far less taxpayer money is spent on miseducation in a charter school than on miseducation in a standard public school?

It also seems to me that teacher certification and the seniority pay system are directly responsible for the poor performance. I am a physicist who has taught overseas and would love to teach in this country, but at an early age I was put off by the fact that teachers here are taken from the bottom of the educational barrel, that certification effectively denies entry to non-statist, non-unionist libertarian teachers, that a physicist or mathematician would earn the same pay as an English, history or psychology major who studiously avoided all difficult classes in college and who would earn 1/4 the scientist's pay in any fair market, and that earnings are effectively not based on merit, but on seniority.

[Steve Shiffrin]

Patrick, I look forward to your post. I should have said that it is
indefensible for schools to excuse student failure on the basis of
socio-economic background. I believe good teaching can prevail despite
such backgrounds and the assumption that such students are doomed to
failure is self-fulfilling.
Steve

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Steve,

I'll speak to the question, more or less, of "the view that socio-economic background dooms students to failure," in a later post discussing Alan Ryan's book, Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education (1998).

[Jim]

See comments here on Lemov method:
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2010/03/teachers-are-built-non-school-of.html