The other day I watched a TYT interview with NY leftist Zephyr Teachout ( Nomi), which I recommend for anyone interested in NY politics. Anyway, it's pretty clear from this that both Nomi and Zephyr despise charter schools. I have little knowledge or opinion of them, other than a general distrust of the undercutting of labor and privatizing/individualizing a public good. Here is a solid left wing case against charter schools:

https://isreview.org/issue/71/case-a...harter-schools

It describes some especially unfavorable findings on for-profit charters, as well as the issues of racial segregation mentioned many times itt. That said, I wanted to look into New York charters specifically, since that's what they were discussing in the interview, which led me to this study.

https://credo.stanford.edu/pdfs/NY_S...01%20FINAL.pdf

I found it to be very thorough and accessible. It controls quite nicely for the selection bias you would expect in charter schools by only comparing a charter school student to his "clone" (what they call "VCR") in a nearby regular public school. The findings are interesting and undercut a lot of the leftwing critique, particularly with regards to racial unfairness. The study shows significant gains in learning growth among minority charter attendees when compared to their clones in typical public school, but even more interestingly shows them catching up to and in the case of Latinos even matching middle class white TPS students in learning growth. It's worth noting that NY charters significantly outperform charters nationally in the same measurements by the same group that conducted the above study.

So:

(1) Why do NY charters outperform their national counterparts? Do they have more regulations on charters? Are their regular public schools especially bad?

(2) For leftists, is the DVaut critique in post #11 sufficient to make you blanketly reject the charter school idea (note:not talking about vouchers at all, just lottery-based charters)? I take his critique seriously, but at the same time it seems wrong to renounce a proven, currently-implemented upgrade in the education of poor and minority NY kids purely on principle.

I haven't read your articles, but I don't disagree that some charters can outperform public schools, and some can even be racially egalitarian. But the latter isn't the design of many. Advocates argue that the competition identifies better methods, but we see so many examples where the competition is for better students rather than better schooling. As long as charters don't have to take and retain everyone, they won't.

Meanwhile, the competition for best schools (for everyone in the country) has already been won, at least compared to us, by numerous other countries with both better and more egalitarian systems. But considering those approaches as part of the competition for how we should educate our children is completely unacceptable to charter advocates. So I guess what I want to see is not how NY charters compare to NY public and other national charters, but how they compare to Finland.

That said, if NY charters are serving poor, minority, and special needs kids better than both publics and national charters, there is definitely something to be learned there. I am skeptical that the secret sauce requires the charter nature to work.

I know in Texas we have had something referred to as the Robin Hood law that was forced on state by a judge in 1993. It requires wealthier school districts to give funds to the less well off districts.

I have not been tracking this super close over the years but when it bubbles up it mostly involves richer districts and parents and students in those districts complaining about having to subsidize poor districts. A quick search showed me Texas remains horrible in education rankings and graduation rates have remained basically stagnant.

I think others have noted it’s more than just a money problem.

What I have not seen much of though, are stories of Robin Hood balancing out the disparity of achievement.

Doesn't a lot of the research regarding educational achievement in the US show that home factors (things like access to books, etc.) play a large part in determining how well someone does at school?

Seems to me to be another problem that could be simply solved by just giving poor people enough money so that they aren't poor anymore.

Yeah there are a lot of factors to tackle when it comes to beating poverty, but that doesn't mean our schools can't serve poor kids better.

We had the choice to put our daughter in the elementary school in the district or a less performing school (but still a good school). We chose the latter because we already live in a very white, pretty well-off area and wanted the diversity the less performing school provided.

We live in a really good school district though, so we're talking the difference between a grade A school and a grade B+ or B school.

FB

It’s really no secret to anyone paying attention that NYC charters are working well beyond expectations. It’s not a secret either in a lot of districts, NYC, Boston, and DC come to mind immediately, charter schools have done very well. In DC’s case, particularly for minority students.

That makes a lot of traditional hardcore left wingers extremely uncomfortable because it’s also no secret charter schools as a whole don’t want their teachers to join the union. Teachers, at least in NYC, for their part, at least from what my wife (NYC DoE UFT member) seem to treat charter and public jobs about equally and there are teachers voluntarily ditching tenures to join charters because the pay is close and charters tend to treat their teachers better on a day to day basis. That makes teacher unions even more uncomfortable.

I don’t think it’s an accident those districts heavily monitor charters. I think the bulk of the evidence is charter schools, when properly monitored and regulated, have in fact introduced competition that has introduced innovation and improved education. The problem is a lot of districts are allowing de facto frauds to thrive with no monitoring whatsoever.

PS: Although I think the competition argument has merit, I don’t think the effect by itself explains the success of charters, especially since the successful charters tend to be heavily monitored/regulated. I think a lot of what is happening, counterintuitively, is charters are INTEGRATING minorities into the larger/more main stream society.

I agree with the problem definition but the solution doesn’t work. Kids need role models and as it stands, many schools have virtually no parents to learn relevant skills/behavior necessary for more traditional tracks of success (college and so on.)

My on ground observation is minority kids in charter/magnet schools talk to friends still in public schools about going to college and about studying and there are spillover effects. Studies back this up. Despite fears of making public schools worse, the evidence is charter/magnet schools have tended to make public schools marginally better when there are effects.

I wouldn’t say this 5 years ago, or even 2-3 years ago. But at this point the evidence is clear, though understanding of mechanisms is not, charter schools work when properly monitored and regulated. I do agree the magic dust may not be “charter” per se and I suspect magnet schools can also do the job. I don’t think that’s relevant to the question of: “do charter schools work?”

Whatever has calcified our public school system, charter schools are changing it. What terrifies a lot of left wingers is the relevant change COULD BE getting rid of unions. To that I say, have some ****ing faith in your importance and do whatever it is that the charters are doing to make it work.

Charters in NYC can also be very different from charters in most cities because it is actually viable for even the poorest NYC kids to commute to charter schools due to availability of cheap and relatively effective public transport system.

That difference alone allows NYC to bypass/ameliorate a whole lot of the practical obstacles of charter (bussing, racial/socio-economic segregation by zip codes)

Charter schools aren't taking over public schools in mass. Middle class and upper class schools are doing fine and there's no big movement to replace them. Teacher unions do fine there.

1a) I'm pretty sure all charter critics agree that you're always going to find some examples of charters which outperform public schools in different metrics or standards
1b) So long as charters effectively have students self-selecting for them, you're never quite getting an apples-to-apples comparison.

2) CREDO's studies are fine. It's tedious getting into methodological debates. But it's worth pointing out CREDO is part of the Hoover Institution, which is a right-wing think tank that gets its money from the predictable sources. You can Google to your hearts content the debate about CREDO, their agenda, whatever. It's only somewhat relevant here; I take it on its face their studies pass peer-review muster and you could replicate the results. But "oh this glossy thing lays out the right-wingers case in simple terms, huh" impression it left you is a feature, not a bug.

Related, then: the twin school studies are created with this in mind. CREDO uses them consistently over constant objections from other educators. That's their prerogative. But remember that the same factors which are motivating parents of black and Latino students to place their kids in charters are motivating white parents too. So the average TPS white student at a twin public school to a charter is presumably the white students whose parents didn't survey the options and therefore we might predict straightaway they would preform worse than a TPS white student in a hypothetical world with no charters where everyone is in a public school.

They know this going in; whether you think twin school studies have value in spite of or because of that is your decision, I suppose. Just note that the whole premise of these studies have (predictably) a bunch of (admittedly left wing) critics since CREDO is, at its heart, a right-wing think tank out to make a case and influence public opinion and not necessarily disinterested academics just trying to falsify something.

3) Note one unsurprising facet of the debate is how charter apologists always exclude some charters from their analysis ("not talking about vouchers," you say; grizy tries the same gambit where he says charters are awesome if you ignore all the fraudy scam ones).

Bigger picture, worth repeating: Charters were popularized by right wingers, unequivocally, as an assault on public institutions and organized labor, to take public dollars and direct them to private companies, and to give racially anxious and religious fundamentalist types a 'choice' in the face of schools which were secularizing and forced to integrate.

The defenders will always be able to produce glossy publications out of their think tanks that show successes if you ignore the failures, only count some of the charters, discount the fundamental differences in the comparison, and ignore any other social costs.

If you find them convincing, good on you. I cannot both due to time but also, surely, the true empirical facts of the world convince you that for instance the charter movement hasn't had success in urban NYC districts on some parts of the racial minority community in NYC. The ideological case is always, necessarily, going to be larger than that.

If studies like this have you running to embrace the DeVos fevered dreams of America, then I would ask the question differently; should we renounce charters? You've seemingly already answered the question. I would ask it differently: if the left doesn't hold the line on this, in what ways do our principles have meaning? This is a huge project for the right. It's like right up there with rolling back progressive taxation and gutting the welfare state. It ticks all of the boxes for them: integration of public institutions is a social choice left to parents; organized labor are pariahs on the public; schools are commodities, open to market competition, and parents should start a cutthroat competition for slots in the good ones so they don't get left behind in the ****ty fraud charter ones or the public schools with all the lazy parents' kids, ESL students, bereft of public dollars diverted to charters.

If you join with them, what's left to fight over, really?

Put differently yet still: oh, DVault, silly ideologue, would reject these only out of principle? Yes, my dude. Only out of principle.

Eyebrow-raising to wave off the results of the study as "some examples" when they clearly describe a systemic phenomenon. 1b is fair enough, but the study measures academic growth rather than raw performance, which is probably the best that can be done to account for the non-apples-to-apples nature of the student populations.

I don't see the charter idea as inherently right wing. They are public schools. In NY, where they have apparently had success for minorities, they are exclusively not-for-profit. Teachers for some charter networks have already organized and a Democratic governing body can ensure that it is easy and secure for teachers to organize. This is not what Ted Cruz or Betsy DeVos envisions.

DVaut suggests that I am cherry picking when I say "not talking about vouchers," but it's the other way around. Vouchers are not inherently part of charter schools; for example they're not even part of the school system under discussion. It's not cherry picking to exclude the bad things when those things can and have been systematically banned, and the whole question is why draw the line specifically here at charters rather than somewhere else like vouchers or for-profit schools.

OK, so I am too utilitarian to ever take a hard line opposing something that apparently works just on principle. BUT I am now getting the political reality, which is that if grassroots Dems don't draw a line in the sand on charters entirely, then weak Dem politicians with donors and lobbyists will eventually cave to the right wing on all the rest, school vouchers, scam Trump University type middle schools, etc. That is probably right, sadly, and makes charters worth opposing even for those like me only concerned with outcomes.

Charters, like some subset of them, the sort of theoretical conceit of Albert Shanker and technocratic education wonks operating under the presumption of regulation and within the public sphere of influence...sure, you're correct: not necessarily inherently a right-wing idea.

Charters, their common implementation and popularization in America in two thousand and seventeen, are absolutely the province and hobby horse of right-winger and right-wing ideologues and this has become their project, complete with an orbit of lobbyists, think tanks, corporations, scammers, etc. ensuring their vision of the project is pushed to the fore.

It's a little like saying voter IDs are common sense if you just put yourself behind the Veil of Ignorance and ignore their primary proponents, the common implementation used to disenfranchise voters rather than protect election integrity, and the history of burdens to voting, and instead focus on simply how Russia meddled in the 2016 election, there's a lot of cool whizzy new technology in the field of personal identification, and really elections in the US aren't that secure.

Believe me, no snark, I am confident some charters out perform public schools. Full stop. In a world where we only had sincere, well-meaning activists we could have the debate. It's not the real world we live in and it's critical to realize the debate isn't going to be the technocrat wonk's wet dream like "should we invest more in public schools or give regulated teacher-run charters an opportunity to try alternatives with public funding?" Instead, the real world debate that plays out across America is should we divest from our public schools and hand over education to BlockchainSchoolz dot edu, the hot new charter startup promising to innovate the elementary school marketplace of education ideas like replacing teachers with YouTube videos, school work with mining bitcoins, and writing book reports with responding to customer service emails from the school CEO's drop shipping side business.

It's not even necessarily the concern that Democratic politicians will, when entertaining some of the good ideas inevitably "cave to the right wing on the rest." It's also that the right-wingery concepts ARE the bulk of ideas in the space. Charters, the innovative reform designed to field test alternatives to public schooling is like a few academic papers a decade and surely some solid few number of implementations across the country and literally everything else IS just a right-wing scam or inherently is meant to divest from public, integrated institutions by design. To be clearer, there's like maybe some number of failing schools who benefit from the righteous ideas charters might offer and prove worthwhile and literally everything else is either right-wing grift or right-wingers trying to get their tax dollars back to pay for either religious or segregated/private education they really want. Almost by necessity you're going to be caving to the right-wing on the rest because the right-wing is almost all there is in the game.

Solid points.

My girlfriend wrote her masters thesis on transportation and school choice. Unfortunately I didn’t ask her what here thesis was until 1.5 years into our relationship. So I have nothing to add except that I also have sex with an educator.

The Hot for Teacher thread is in OOT.

The bulk of the evidence, contrary to what some in this thread seems to believe, is charter schools help disadvantaged students more than they help students that were already doing well. This is after controlling for self-selection bias by comparing winners and losers of charter school lotteries. The effects on well to do students (and even overall) are more controversial when we're talking about nationwide data although many districts show much stronger effects even on well-off students.

For what it's worth, this is consistent with my observations in New York City that disadvantaged students who get into charter/magnet schools see a path to success that they simply don't see while being stuck in schools that just lack a critical mass of parents to serve as role models.

PS: It's true CREDO studies could use a control for self-selection bias. The stats I've seen however suggest the self-selection bias is almost entirely captured by socio-economic factors. The results in NYC can't be explained by self-selection alone.

PS2: My wife is a teacher in NYC DoE system and member of UFT.