How much more evidence do we need before we conclude that charter schools aren't the panacea for America's public education woes that so many believe them to be? If you missed the story last week, a charter school created and administered by Stanford University's renowned Department of Education had its charter revoked by the local school board. Why? The same old drumbeat of low test scores and a designation as one of the poorest performing schools in California by our state's Department of Education.
You would, of course, expect nothing but the best of everything from Stanford University in its creation of a charter school: the highest-quality curriculum based on the latest educational research, the best-trained teachers, and outstanding resources. It was all there. And, in spending $3,000 more per student than the average public school, money wasn't an issue either. Yet the charter school failed. My gosh, if some of the finest minds in education in America can't figure out a way to educate disadvantaged children, what are the chances that anyone else can?
Stanford has plenty of perfectly reasonable explanations for their failure. The charter school is located in East Palo Alto, a city with large minority and immigrant populations and a long history of poverty and crime. Many parents are uneducated and speak little English. Kids in East Palo Alto have a perfect storm of obstacles preventing them from achieving even minimal academic success. But that's the point. The Stanford charter school was designed to overcome these barriers and it couldn't.
Perhaps the Stanford charter school didn't fail. Reports indicated that its curriculum included traditional academic components, but also social and emotional education. So maybe the criterion that was used to evaluate performance, namely, testing, was too narrow to fairly assess the range of knowledge that the students were gaining from their education.
It is also not completely unreasonable to suggest that knowledge proficiency for many poor students might be less important than important life skills such as social and emotional competence, hard work, time management, and persistence, particularly since most of these students will likely join the work force rather than pursue higher education. Perhaps giving them some basic life skills, hope for the future, and keeping them out of trouble is the most that can be expected under these circumstances. But lowering the bar for these kids goes against everything that Stanford represents. It also conflicts with the very foundation of the American Dream. And it is an insult and disservice to those disadvantaged children who, against incredibly long odds, are able to surmount the obstacles with which they are confronted and break out of the vicious cycle of poverty in which they are mired.
In a way, as badly as I feel for the failure of the Stanford charter school, I hope that Stanford just didn't find that magic recipe that will allow schools to provide poor children with a quality education. Then, the Stanford charter school would be the problem. But what if the current education reform system is the problem, as I have advocated in recent posts. That is even worse because it's easier to fix or fold a few schools than repair or scrap the entire public education reform effort.
What does this sad chapter in the ongoing saga of public education reform tell us? At best, it means that the challenges we face in improving America's public education system are daunting even for the best and the brightest at Stanford University. At worst, it means that the current road of reform that we are on just isn't going to take us to the promised land.
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My favorite anecdote of failure about this school was seeing many of our students in the middle of the day (about 11am) hanging out at the local Starbucks. See, our staff had decided to go for a coffee break. Boy were we surprised to see our students there. They told us they had a minimum day (that let's out at 11am, no less). When we called the school, they had NO idea their students were missing. The school had less than 100 students I'd say.
Additionally these students never showed any increase in learning or a desire to want to learn. The biggest question wandering around the office always was "what the HELL do they do with those students all day?"
So I was incredibly happy to see the charter for that school FINALLY pulled. It was LONG overdue!
Then the excuse of the PARENTS. Sure, the impoverished or language limited (or otherwise challenged) do the worst. But Reality Check Middle Class parents: you tsk tsk about the failing state of education in America and smugly fault the OTHERS. But the truth is your little Sally Sue and Jimmy (posing prettily for their H.S. graduation pics) are only marginally better educated than the middle-schoolers of yesteryear. And mom and dad are patting themselves on the back for a job well done. (They're your kids you might want to notice their educational and intellectual shortcomings.)
America is very into the SHALLOW. Well, SHALLOW will pay us all back sooner or later (with a Global Community that is 'chomping at the bit' to show us how education is REALLY done). Time to re-group America, and look at what we've created. Time to re-create education (and not by pretending it's achieved by merely redecorating with a Charter School). Why recreate SHALLOW?
http://www.perdaily.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=1&tag=Charter%20schools&limit=20
Outstanding and honest thinking about charter schools and the problems that the disadvantaged (read mostly minorities) face. Is there a large-scale solution? Anything less than major social and economic change will probably not work.
The good news is that making this a prior is far less expensive than where entities like LAUSD presently spent (waste) their inflated budgets driven by politically connect vendors and an administration at all levels from district to the state that are concerned more with their careers and benefits- think Superintendent getting $150,000 a year from Scholastics while getting $250,000 plus perks for dismantling what remains of LAUSD.
"Major social and economic change" are the effects of a successful approach to public education, the causes that we must address are really rather straight forward if one deals in reality with measured consequences for public education bureaucracies that are presently "too big to fail."
Indeed! Thank you for this piece. The people I know in public education are concerned about the growth of charter schools. They divert resources, create inequalities, and _evidence_ shows that they've been an unsuccessful experiment. Arne Duncan needs to be responsive to that evidence.
Bill Perkins in Harlem feels strongly enough that he's taking the unpopular stance of opposing them
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/nyregion/07perkins.html
...Here is a recent article I came across; I'm sure it's one of many.
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=924038
I overhead a fellow (very frustrated) veteran educator say just the other day: "You don't need to be able to read to steal a car or break a window, and the money from theft spends no matter what the words on it say."
I love my job because of my kids. I hope I never find myself to be that frustrated and burned out. It broke my heart.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-jim-taylor/failing-students-not-fail_b_534797.html
Yes, this schools graduating class has a 100% collage acceptance.
It's a red herring to argue about whether the school failed or succeeded due to its being a charter school. We all know the value of charter schools is that we are more easily able to innovate and experiment, not that charters are inherently better.
Maybe the "experts" who set up the curriculum don't know as much as they think they do. Maybe it's more about the charisma and talent of the teachers and administration ("well-trained" is, we know from the research, not enough).
Maybe a muddy set of objectives produced a muddy set of results. Maybe in an attempt to satisfy many constituencies and their different agendas, the school ensured that no objectives were met.
Maybe we're wasting our time with schools altogether, because our culture no longer values education, and we should be putting our money toward changing values (if we as a society agree that's important), or spending it on mass transit or something we can agree on.
I don't know what the answer is, but I know we need less BS, less jargon, more straight talk, and less defensiveness if we're going to make progress.
Thanks for reading and commenting on my post.
Their interest is in starting a new investment bubble and to do so they need to pry people off the old idea of public community schools. Then they will close public schools down, saying they aren't proven, , pass a mandate that every parent must obtain a private school education for their children ( of course the poor will be somewhat subsidized by taxpayers). Bingo! corporate schooling will commence . Of course unions will not be allowed, community input will be prohibited and public oversight will be limited because of trade secret laws.
And guess who will be on the ground floor? Arne Duncan and Tim Geithner.
This charter school was doomed to failure ... you cannot turn a student into a scholar when the desire, atmosphere at school, home ~ community, and personal abilities are lacking ~ it is a bridge too far. It takes a unity between family, student and facility to advance ~ the will to learn must be paramont... when as the article points out the family is missing, the student is running less than half even the best teacher, and money plus will not get them there.