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Saturday, November 12, 2005
The charter debate
In the comments under my post about the Dayton school board race, there’s a little debate going on about charter schools and whether they are a good thing or a bad thing for Dayton.
I think the jury is still out on that one.
Dayton is a very interesting place to consider the question of charter schools because we have so many of them (33) and such a high percentage of the city’s school-age kids (22 percent) attending charters. And in fact, the movement here has had both wild successes and spectacular failures.
In fact, given what I know about charter schools, I think I could argue convincingly both for and against them based on Dayton’s experience. So I think I’ll do just that and let those who wish kick these opposing views around take their shots.
Later today, I’ll try to channel charter school supporters and post my best argument for why charter schools are good for Dayton. Then tomorrow, I’ll do the same thing for the opposition side.
So check back a little later today and then tomorrow and see which argument you find more convincing.
Update: Here’s part one, The case in favor of charter schools in Dayton. And here’s part two, The case against charter schools in Dayton.
Permalink | | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, My Favorite Posts
The case for charter schools in Dayton
This is the first half of my debate with myself over charter schools in Dayton. Here I argue in favor of charters.
Let’s start with exhibit A: Dayton’s ISUS Trade and Tech Prep High School.
Six years ago when Ann Higdon launched ISUS, there was almost no public discussion going on about Dayton’s dropout problem, even though the school district at that time had a graduation rate of about 50 percent. One out of every two Dayton high school kids was getting lost along the way!
Higdon, at that time, had started the Builder’s Academy in partnership with Dayton Public Schools. She was bringing together skilled tradesmen and at-risk youth from an alternative high school, teaching the kids construction skills as a supplement to their regular classwork.
But Higdon had bigger ideas. She wanted to partner with Sinclair Community College, so the kids could leave high school with actual construction certificates along with their diplomas. Administrators said it couldn’t be done. There was too big a funding wall between the district and Sinclair to overcome.
Higdon also wanted to pay kids who came to school prepared everyday, to simulate more realistically the way the workplace would work. This horrified school officials. Pay kids for coming to school? What a dangerous precedent. No way, she was told.
When the charter school law came along in 1997, Higdon saw her chance to be free of district bureaucracy and really try her ideas.
At ISUS, they aggressively recruit dropouts, through juvenile court, word-of-mouth or other referrals. These are kids nobody seemed to care about six years ago. The kids get intensive instruction to try to raise their test scores to the point where they can pass a state exam and graduate.
Those that stick with the program can get assigned to job experience. The school has carpentry, electrical, drywall and plumbing crews. Higdon persuaded the Dayton Rotary Club and individual donors to fund a purchase of 60 dilapidated homes along Wolf Creek. One-by-one, the kids are rehabbing the houses, learning from their tradesman crew chiefs and rebuilding a whole neighborhood in the process. And some even get a small stipend if they show up on time and prepared.
The whole story of ISUS was made possible by the freedom of charter schools. Once the bonds of bureaucracy were broken, Higdon was able to put her innovations into motion and create a remarkable opportunity for kids who were mostly overlooked and ignored in the past.
Innovation is a prime byproduct of the entrepreneurial spirit that independent school operators — their livelihoods depend on the success of their schools — bring to the table. Before competition, the school district had no incentive to pursue Higdon’s innovative ideas. Today, more educators in Dayton are thinking outside the box than ever.
Take the Richard Allen chain of charter schools. They’ve raised initially poor test scores to rank among the best performing elementary schools in the city — with two schools outdoing all of the school district’s elementary schools on state tests.
Families flocked to these new options. Poor families, who were tired of choosing among schools that scored low and at times even treated them rudely, were swept up in the warm feelings of new schools who actively marketed to them and who had great incentives to try to meet their needs.
Even the school district eventually got into the act. The charter-like Dayton Early College Academy is a partnership of the district and the University of Dayton, experimenting with a new school design that lets high school kids move quickly to college coursework.
And that is not the only change forced on the previously politically immobile school district. Consider this — from 1981 to 1999, Dayton school enrollment dropped by more than 27 percent and yet the board was unable to find the political will to close even one school!
From 1999 to 2005, under relentless financial pressure from enrollment losses to charter schools, the board closed 14 schools.
And the pressure brought other political changes. The old conventional wisdom in the business community said that the city’s political scene was such that the dysfunctional school board could not be radically changed. There were too many entrenched political interest groups to defeat.
But in the wake of charters, four professional women running as a team were able to raise $200,000, mostly from CEOs and large companies, and capture a majority of four school board seats by outspending their five opponents by a 20-1 margin combined! They took control, set about professionalizing the top administration, replaced half the district’s principals and began instituting a systemic curriculum and instruction reform.
Interestingly, charter schools even forced private schools to get their acts together. Take Catholic schools. Like the district, Catholic schools often lacked the will to make tough choices or respond to the needs of the families they serve.
Now finding themselves in a competitive environment, Catholic schools are working together more closely than ever, sharing resources, retooling their programs and refining their message. Even some on the inside believe the end result will be leaner, but also better, Catholic schools.
To sum up, charter schools:
—Created a sense of urgency about education and spotlighted important problems, like dropouts
—Spurred innovation
—Forced reform on the public school district
—Gave parents choices
—Spurred even private schools to raise their game
When in the last century has there been this much action on the education front in Dayton?
Update: The Richard Allen schools no longer use the Marva Collins curriculum. I’ve updated this post to reflect that.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, My Favorite Posts
The case against charter schools in Dayton
This is part two of my debate with myself over charter schools in Dayton. This is my argument against charters.
If charter schools are about free enterprise, markets and bringing business sense to the world of education, then I’ve got three words that the proponents should consider: return on investment.
Last year, Ohio spent $424 million on about 250 charter schools statewide. In Dayton alone, the cost was about $45 million on 33 charter schools. So what did we get for our money?
Statewide, 71 percent of charter schools were rated in “academic emergency,” the lowest rating category.
In Dayton, no charter schools were rated excellent or effective — the top two rating categories. Many Dayton charters, about 39 percent, got no rating for a variety of reasons, while another 40 percent were rated in academic emergency.
And this is part of a continuing pattern.
An annual analysis by the Dayton Daily News beginning in 1999 showed charters, collectively, have never outperformed the city’s public school system. And underperforming Dayton Public Schools is a challenge. During this time, the city school district fell to worst rated in the state — last out of 611 school districts!
Let’s look more closely at Dayton’s charter schools. There are 33 charter schools here. The district actually has fewer schools now — just 28. How do Dayton’s charters look? Well, there are a handful of very good ones. A few are very low performing. And most of them are in the middle with generally low end test performance compared the average Ohio school.
Funny, you know what that sounds like? It sounds a lot like the school district. The district also has a few very good schools, a few way down at the bottom and most in the middle, but comparatively low achieving.
So for $41 million what have we done in Dayton but simply spend a lot of money to replicate what we already had, with slightly worse test performance?
Part of the problem is that the education marketplace in Dayton, one of the few if not the only place in the country with enough competition to unleash true market forces, has not worked in the pure way proponents expected.
You see, schools are not mutual funds. If you pick a mutual fund, all you care about is performance. If it starts to lose money, you dump it. Schools are much more complicated. Once you pick one for your child, it’s awfully hard to switch. You arrange your life around the school’s schedule, your child makes friends. It’s more than a business relationship. It’s an emotional investment. And those ties are awfully tough to sever, even if the school’s performance is disappointing.
That’s why the market had not truly weeded out the poor performers. Only the catastrophic failures, like the Dayton Urban Academy which closed a couple years ago after a string of financial and management miscues, have been shuttered.
In the meantime, charters have had a negative effect on the school district. Every year since the advent of charter schools, the district has underestimated their cost, which leads has often led to a financial scramble at year’s end.
The uncertainty has created budgeting havoc and simply forced the diversion of much of the attention of district leaders away from the classroom as a matter of financial survival. Every year, there were schools to close and costs to cut. Three years after the first charter school opened, Dayton had slipped to last in the state’s rating system — worse even than Cleveland, the traditional testing doormat in Ohio. Three years later, Dayton still is at the bottom.
And unexpectedly, charters have also devastated private schools. The trend line is stark. Private schools were having a strong decade in the 1990s. Many hit 10-year enrollment peaks in 1999, just as charter were getting off the ground.
Five years later, private school enrollment was collapsing — better than three-quarters hit 10-year enrollment lows. I just pulled updated private school enrollment data last week — since 2003, 18 of 20 Dayton private schools saw enrollment drops. This is no coincidence.
Catholic schools are discussing widespread consolidations and closings. And last year, Dayton Christian Schools — one of the nation’s largest and most successful networks of private Christian schools — closed its two Dayton campuses and fled to the suburbs after more than 25 years here, mostly motivated by enrollment declines.
The city school district’s share of school age children in Dayton has dropped some, from just over 60 percent to 57 percent, in six years. But the private schools have taken an even bigger hit — down from 24 percent to 19 percent. Charter schools are now the second choice for Dayton families after the school district.
With the trends showing no sign of relenting — charter growth in combination with private school decline, I am forced to wonder if in the end the city will largely replace its private school options with charter options instead.
Doesn’t that seem like a bad idea? Catholic schools have been producing well-trained students in Dayton for 100 years. Dayton Christian also established a solid reputation over more than 25 years. Are we trading in that known quantity for the unknown? Charters have much shorter and much less distinguished track records.
To sum up the opposition position, charters:
—Are expensive
—Score poorly overall
—Are not weeding out bad schools as expected
—Negatively affect school district test performance
—Harm private schools
The bottom line is after millions of dollars spent, there is little evidence the charter experience has in any way raised the quality of education in this city overall.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, My Favorite Posts
