I'm going to take a risk here and wade into the raging debate about charter schools. What started as a creative way to circumvent excessive educational regulation in the name of creativity and innovation has now turned into a full-out movement to privatize public education under the PR banner of the charter movement. Some charter schools work quite well, while others do not. And I'm not going to argue that charter schools on a limited basis are a bad thing. But new data compiled by the New York Post suggests that the movement to gut our public schools and switch to an all-charter system may be terribly misguided.
Traditional public schools bested the city's charter schools on annual report-card grades -- scoring 10 points higher on average on a 100-point scale, new data shows.
The city's more than 1,000 public elementary and middle schools averaged a B on their so-called "progress reports," which assign letter grades to schools based largely on how much students improve on state math and reading tests in a given year.
By comparison, the city's 60 charter schools that received letter grades this year averaged a C+.
The most compelling arguments of charter school advocates is performance. They can't win over the entire population with the argument that teachers are overpaid and overly protected in their jobs; any of us with a teacher in the family know how important and difficult their jobs can be on a day-to-day basis. But if charter school's are simply outperforming publics, then maybe it makes sense to switch to the different model. The inverse of that, however, is that the failure of charter school's to perform takes a real bite out of the Bloomberg-Klein-Arne Duncan model of educational reform.
Charter-school supporters said those adjustments -- along with changes in the way school grades were calculated -- might explain the lackluster ratings of charters.
"Obviously, with the inconsistency and shift in how the grades are actually arrived at, it's hard to know what to make of these grades," said James Merriman, CEO of the New York City Charter Schools Center. "Nonetheless, it is one data point that I certainly would expect charter leaders -- particularly those in schools that did not get good grades -- to look at and figure out why that is."
I'm not going to pretend to be an education expert and diagnose the reason why charters underperformed public schools based on this data. It's hard to say. And I also won't argue against the notion that some charter school vastly outperform public schools. But it's time that we rethink the concept that a 100% charter school system is the way to revive our educational system.
Instead, we should use charter schools on a limited basis in places with consistent and unchanging educational failures and use what we learn from the charter schools to improve public schools all around. The whole point of the system was that charter school could use innovative methods and then public schools could adapt them on a wider range. The creators of this system never (explicitly) thought we'd get rid of public schools completely. And the data now suggests we shouldn't.
One final point; this data shows that the unionized public schools are, on average, doing better than the charter schools. So let's stop the consistent bashing of teachers and the UFT. Yes, some of the policies in the contract can be frustrating. But on the other hand the UFT responsibly dealt with the rubber room situation earlier this year. Teachers work tough jobs and deserve both decent wages and some sense of job security. There's always room to improve a union contract, especially in the public sector. But it's time to stop treating teachers like the problem and start working with teachers to find solutions. |
