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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > October > 24
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Editorial: “Who’s better?’ is not the debate kids need
The debate about charter schools really has to move beyond the argument that asks, “Which is better — charter or traditional schools?”
Some recent research on charters, while raising interesting questions, remains too focused on pitting schools against each other.
When you put it in perspective, this is really an odd way to view the issue. Despite the grandiose ambitions of a few early supporters of the idea, charter schools are no threat to supplant traditional public schools. About 3 percent of American K-12 students attend the free, publicly funded, but privately run, schools.
It makes more sense to think of charters not as a competitor seeking to challenge the established public school system’s franchise, but rather as a complement to that system. Ideally, the new options offered by charter schools should be truly unique and experimental. In the best cases, that’s what charter schools do now.
On the local level, you see this approach at the Dayton Early College Academy — challenging students early with college-level work — and the ISUS Trade and Tech Prep High School — taking dropouts and teaching them job skills along the way to getting their academic careers back on track.
Nationally, new models like the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) — offering extended school days and school years and cultural reinforcements encouraging academic success — are perhaps showing the way to improve the life chances of poor, urban kids who too often haven’t had good schools to attend.
While these are charter school success stories, other ideas have flopped or, just as bad, floundered too long in mediocrity. As a result, charter school test performance has been mixed overall, which has partly fueled the obsession with comparing them to traditional schools as if this were a competition.
Two big studies this summer from the same university had differing takes on charter performance. While one set of Stanford researchers found charters lagging behind traditional schools in a survey of test data in 15 states and Washington, D.C., another Stanford team found New York City charter school students were gaining more test ground than kids who did not get selected for the schools via a lottery and thus remained in traditional schools.
This fall, Ohio’s Policy Matters think tank took a novel approach that looked at whether charter schools had an advantage by attracting better prepared kids. It found that in Ohio cities, charter school kids scored slightly higher than their traditional school counterparts on a kindergarten readiness assessment.
The study concluded charters are a bad policy choice since they have higher performing kids, on average, but were coming in with similar, or even sometimes lower, test scores than comparable traditional schools.
That kind of argument misses the point. The reality is that there are extreme differences in the quality of charter schools. Absolutely Ohio and other states should be more aggressive about closing down perpetually low-scoring charters. But without the charter school movement, education reform would be a big step behind where it is today.
The successes and exciting ideas that have emerged from charter schools are crucial to wider future reforms.
Dayton, which was the state’s first big charter school hot bed, is certainly better for having lived through what was, at times, a tumultuous evolution of the city’s education offerings. Dayton kids have better options today — both from outside and from within the district — than they did a decade ago. Charters were an important catalyst for positive change here, even though Dayton’s charter school test scores, on average, have not blown away those of traditional schools.
The focus should be on nurturing charter school successes, incubating other promising new school reform models and pruning those charters that have failed. To focus on an artificial horse race between charters and traditional schools is giving into distraction at a time when school reform needs to remain focused.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
Scott Elliott: Dayton schools could have been Detroit
The 11 years since the advent of charter schools in Dayton has, at times, felt wrenching.
Schools closed, while others opened. The school district battled a seemingly never-ending financial squeeze. All the while, Dayton students have continued to struggle to pull themselves out of the basement relative to Ohio’s 610 school districts on test scores.
Yet, in other ways, Dayton is a dream example of the positive effects of charter schools. You need only look three hours north to Detroit to see just how wrong things might have gone.
The first charter school opened here in 1998 and, within two years, a flood of students left the district, choosing from an array of new charter schools. The district was hit with a severe financial loss. That’s because, as the kids left, they took a big chunk of the district’s state aid with them.
Dayton responded well to the economic and competitive pressure of charter schools. In 2001, the city elected a reform school board led by Gail Littlejohn, who was motivated to run, in part, by the sense of crisis that was being exacerbated by charters.
The Littlejohn-led board took crucial financial steps and then began trying to mimic what was working for successful charters.
The board started by shutting down a lot of low-enrollment schools. Before charters, board members didn’t have the political courage to close even one school for a decade and a half, despite a precipitous decline in enrollment. In response to charter schools, the board closed more than 15 schools, most of them longtime low-scorers.
But the district also responded by opening new schools and creating new, high-quality options. Among them were an early college high school, a boys-only school, a girls-only school and an academic magnet program. These schools looked a lot like the charter schools.
The end result was the district’s tumbling enrollment stabilized. Its test performance, while still low, improved. Its finances continued to be strapped, but at least the district managed to get out of crisis mode.
Suppose it hadn’t worked out that way. What if good people hadn’t been motivated to run for the school board? What if they didn’t make tough, unpopular choices or weren’t bold enough to experiment with their own charter-like options?
Had it gone the other way, Dayton might be where Detroit is today.
To be fair, at its worst, Dayton schools were never as corrupt nor as suffocatingly bureaucratic as Detroit’s. Even so, the things that Dayton did right, Detroit did wrong. When Dayton was recognizing the need to compete, Detroit was burying its head in the sand, hoping charters would somehow go away. While Dayton was trying out its own academic experiments, Detroit mostly just kept doing what it always did.
In the end, Detroit schools were hammered by enrollment losses, both to charters and simply from families rapidly escaping to the suburbs. The corresponding loss in state aid left them drowning in red ink. Detroit schools are all but bankrupt.
Last year, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm appointed an “emergency financial manager” to take charge of the district and to deal with its staggering $260 million deficit (bigger than the entire annual budget of Dayton schools). Robert Bobb, a veteran public administrator, has earned good reviews for his efforts to root out corruption and make the hard choices the city’s school board never seemed able to confront.
No matter how you look at it, Detroit is a mess. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called the district “New Orleans without Katrina.” Ouch.
Dayton certainly hasn’t done everything right. Most frustratingly, test scores have only nudged up slightly despite the decade of big changes in the city’s education system. But, by comparison, it’s clear Dayton did a lot of things right.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Education, Scott Elliott
