Just like the whole issue, this series has been a throbbing ache that makes me feel gloomy about the world at large. But the paper tries to end the series on a high note, on a Look! The school “systems” does work because look! This kid got into—wait for it, wait for it, get your grin prepped—LUSHER! Gasp! Grin! Applaud! Give thanks for the fracturing of K-12 education in Orleans parish! He never would’ve had that chance before the fracturing, right? WTMF?
Carr ends the series with an ambitious teen and mother and their spot of luck in this “systems”—a super-dedicated counselor whose daily focus is students on their way up and out of KIPP Mc 15:
More than six months earlier, Jamal [Encalade], an eighth-grader at KIPP McDonogh 15, had enthusiastically, if a bit nervously, embarked on his high school search. For many families, a great deal is at stake in the process. A yawning gulf seems to separate the top-performing high schools, like Franklin, Lusher and Warren Easton, from the bottom-dwellers, with not much in the middle.
How subtly understated. There’s even a gap in that short list.
Luckily, Jamal had a not-so-secret weapon on his side: [advisor Nicole] Cummins, working full-time for KIPP, helped the eighth-graders through the admissions maze, and continued to support them after they graduated. She kept students abreast of admission deadlines and requirements at high schools and regularly brought them on tours. She even showed up with Nutri-Grain bars for students taking early-morning admissions test to the city’s most competitive high schools.
Cummins has a lovely, working-from-the-heart story but what is more than likely missed here is that this is an individual effort and without her or her energy level or laser focus, the results would be very different.
Plus, it makes KIPP look good to get its kids in good schools. And deflects the public from any real scrutiny—It works, doesn’t it? Then shut up, ‘kay?
But the letter that finally arrived at his home with the Warren Easton return address last spring brought unexpected news.
Rejection.
“Even Warren Easton turned him down?” his mother said. “He’s had good grades since kindergarten, since forever. And he just can’t get into the schools he wants.”
Warren Easton officials said recently that they had no record of a rejection letter in Jamal’s folder, but sent a notice out in January indicating the family’s application was incomplete.
Regardless, the confusion dismayed Jamal.
“At this point,” he said late last spring, “I’m not really excited about high school.”
Think this is rare? Think so if you want. This “confusion” at schools has been common in this series, if not appearing in each and every installment. It is to be expected when each school is its own system, when each admission is a long process of weeding or quality checking or just plain multiple places and steps where it can all fall apart. I know no one wants his or her child’s health or education to rest on a piece of paper, an intern, or a single person’s understanding or misunderstanding.
Both Miller-McCoy and Sci Academy eventually accepted Jamal. But while he liked their ideas and plans, he wasn’t sure either would provide the best fit for him.
Like many schools, they are close-to-brand-new, untested [pardon the pun], unknown. And high school really is too important, especially for Jamal, to gamble. No one should be gambling. Some have no choice.
Cummins, who says she has a good working relationship with Warren Easton, ultimately called the school to inquire about the student’s case. Jamal, she learned, was actually in.
He was so miffed over the confusion, though, that he crossed Warren Easton off his list.
Only Cummins and her relationships with folks at Easton and her perseverance make it [almost] work out. And who can blame Jamal’s reaction? OK, I know someone will but that’s a knee-jerk, thoughtless reaction. High school students, including public school ones, are humans, too, with human emotions, egos, hurts, joys, needs and wants just like a student from Old Metairie who goes to a private school. Jamal is not the only middle schooler, high schooler, even grade schooler experiencing this roller coaster of acceptance v. confusion, misunderstandings and rejection. They are children, children forming self-images, human children with needs, tender places, and talents that can be all-too-easily discouraged or snuffed by some process, events or glitch an adult thinks hardly anything of.
I know many well-meaning, good people who would plotz if such a thing happened to their child but who might read this article, if they bother, and see nothing problematic with Jamal’s struggle. That as-long-as-it’s-not-me shit is pandemic around here. Also, the Bush family people-not-like-me-are-supposed-to-have-a-hard-ass-time belief/conviction/ideology.
Jamal wondered, after the grueling search was over, what would have happened without Cummins.
Yeah, what would’ve happened?
Also understated:
For decades, families have gone to great lengths to get their children into Lusher, even moving to the neighborhood to gain preference at the elementary school. After Katrina, Lusher became a charter and added a high school.
Whole lot glossed over there. “Moving” into Lusher’s neighborhood is not like standing in line for an application, driving to school meetings after work, or taking afternoons off to tour schools. In a city plagued by segregated housing patterns, low wages, and a hard-to-believe-something-so-big-can-grow education gap, only certain people can afford to even consider buying or renting in Lusher’s district. Even though there are always bargains and good-luck-finds, it makes Lusher out of reach for most folks in the city. [The tiers are not in the Parents Guide. Are they gone or tucked inside the black box of charter school/former magnet school admissions?]
Then Jamal reassesses:
“Now there’s this choice of great schools,” he said.
This is contradicted by his experience documented in the article. This is contradicted by the reality of so few schools being accredited by SACS.
“It takes a lot of perseverance, and it can be discouraging at times. But when a last-minute miracle like this happens, it makes it all worth it.”
No, Jamal, it does not. Education should not be left to a “last-minute miracle.” If that is our collective belief, then this is not a democracy and we should send all the working-class and middle-class kids home so the resources can be left to those who are lucky enough to be able to pay, lucky enough to live in x neighborhood, lucky enough to be part of y family that has owned q for t number of years and given f number of thousands to something or someone. That’s also not a meritocracy. If you are born into it, you didn’t earn it. And if you didn’t earn it, how can you say with a straight face that you believe in hard work, perseverance, and intelligence?
I’m making myself sick saying this: public education should not be hard to access. That is why it is PUBLIC. In other places, it’s not perfect but not nearly so hard.
Why do we here so admire the extraordinary, over-the-top efforts of parents to get a decent education for their kids? Why does this irritate so few? Or seemingly so? Does anyone realize, or believe, that education is not a privilege, a game you have to be lucky enough to win? That parents should not have to fight or bargain with any number of devils just for a school? Why is this so radical in LA?
There should be a few competitive, harder-to-get-into schools for the hard-core scholar or artist. But that shouldn’t be the only chance to get out alive.
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“High school search frustrates ambitious student.” Sarah Carr. 11/12/2009. A1, A8. Print. [Web version is only available through paid archives at nola.com.]
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photo courtesy of Collin Allen, used under this Creative Commons license
Again, who is this system, this reform, for if parents with a good set of skills and resources find the process and the system overwhelming, confusing, bewildering, overly demanding? Is it reasonable to expect every family to have a parent who has nothing at all to do but look for and at schools?
[Candis] Netter, a cheerful, practical heart-and-vascular nurse at Touro Hospital, had many things going for her in the school search: Job flexibility, a working car, a supportive husband, a contact or two to offer advice, a strong education background herself, including degrees from the University of New Orleans and LSU. But even with all these advantages, she still felt like crying — or screaming — at moments.
Like the day of Audubon’s lottery.
She had taken the day off to be there — attendance was encouraged, but not required — and grumbled to friends later that afternoon about why she had bothered. She had already missed a day to attend a mandatory information session on the Montessori curriculum.
Netter thought her goal was simple: She wanted her son to attend pre-K at a public school with good academic results, racial diversity, active parents and small classes.
But at times it felt like she was trying to get the 4-year-old into Harvard.*
It might be less complicated to apply to Harvard though the odds of getting in may seem to be the same. [The ultimate problem with this comparison---public K-12 education is not supposed to be like college. College is a different place and not for every comer or aspirant. It's not elitist but fact that only 29% of Americans get a college degree. K-12 education is not supposed to be exclusive or only for a slim percentage of the population. Why do I feel like I'm in the chapter on Reconstruction in Crescent City Schools?]
Netter’s story is not the exception but the rule for parents who are trying to work with the systems left to us, systems we had little say in.
“Every school has different requirements,” she said. “You can use the common application except, of course, for the better schools you can’t.”
Officials unveiled the one-page “common application” two years ago, describing it as a golden ticket that any family — regardless of where they live, how well they read or how much time they can spend on the search — can use to apply to most schools.
But not all schools.
Most of the 16 traditional and charter schools under the Orleans Parish School Board — including all three of Netter’s choices — used their own process last school year.
Which means that the common application is best for getting into a RSD charter or non-charter school. Excuse me?
And Netter is exactly the kind of involved, high-standards-holding parent this system is supposed to increase the odds for.
Even though Cameron is only 4, Netter talks to him and his older brother, Armani, about college every day.
“If they are not going to college, I don’t know where they are going to live,” said Netter. “Because they won’t live here.”
People like Netter are supposed to now have a better chance to get good or even great schools for their children than before The Floods. Supposed to. But we see the same frustrating story as in the second installment, minus special education needs:
January passed. February passed. And Benjamin Franklin Elementary still wasn’t accepting applications. Worse, Netter never received a letter from Audubon after the frustrating lottery.
She called the school. Again and again and again.
At long last, Netter reached someone who said the letter had mistakenly gone to her house — where she could not receive mail — instead of her post-office box. After calling so many times that she felt like a “crazy stalker,” Netter finally learned that Cameron’s odds of making it in to Audubon were so slim she crossed it off her list.
…
Netter focused her energies on Benjamin Franklin, known as Baby Ben, which began accepting applications in March. Cameron would have to take another test. But the school told Netter that her son should do fine. (School officials say they have to test incoming prekindergarteners for general education classes, and actually admit students with the greatest need first if oversubscribed. The school dropped its magnet requirements after the storm, they say.)
But Netter had no idea how high — or low — Cameron would need to score to get in.
It’s a lie, an intentional falsehood/burying of head in sand or ass, to say that these struggles are not typical. This is what parents are expected to do according to Ms. Roemer Shirley, not wait until “the last minute” and put your kid “anywhere” [not her words; my paraphrase]. Is this meant to be a Darwinian school system, or systems, where the families with the most resources [or the fewest obstacles] get the best choices and get to float above the shit with clothespins on their noses?
The other point here: Cameron will do well no matter what:
Once inside, Netter opened her son’s notebook immediately. She checked to make sure he had a green dot for good behavior that day. She noticed a “Dad’s duty day” scheduled at the school for later that month — an effort to get fathers involved at Baby Ben.
As Cameron became immersed in a hand-held computer game, Netter called out to him. “Ooh, Cameron, we have some more homework to do.”
With his mom’s help, Cameron circled the two items starting with the letter ‘G’ he had missed on a worksheet.
Only two months into the school year, and Netter had already joined the parents’ organization and won the group’s first door prize for paying dues early. She eagerly volunteered at the school.
“When he’s older, he’ll remember all we did to get him into a good school,” she said. “And he’ll know it was worth it.”
But what about the others, the not-Camerons who don’t have Netter, a father, a stepbrother, constant reminders of college or, at the very least, a school that isn’t a last resort or end of the line or starved and neglected? Are we not supposed to worry about that? Can “we” write off chunks of the current generation of students? And for whom? [Not what, but whom.]
Like I said to The Girl in the car today, everyone deserves an education and when some do not get it, we all suffer. That boy up the street is not going to say, Oh, Ms. Bitch, you been so concerned and making so much noise about the schools and caring and all that, I ain’t gon’ take your TV or your car, I’ll just go next door.
I do not understand how Leslie Jacobs can run for mayor when she has had a hand, an important background hand, in this fiasco. [More on Ms. Jacobs soon.]
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*I link to the online version but am reading and commenting on the print version, which may have slight present or future variations.
“Complicated admissions process filled with frustration.” Sarah Carr. (New Orleans) Times-Picayune, 11/10/2009. Web.
Schools Chart updated Sept. 2009, Cowen Institute
It’s not a surprise that there are stumbles along the new road of School Choice to our difficult and deceptively “improved” status quo.
While the New Orleans community has successfully created an unprecedented number of school choices, scores of families still struggle to take advantage of them. *
From the beginning, I felt and said the kind of shopping around, school visits and research School Choice here requires is directly in opposition to a large targeted population, its resources and needs. Just because there are computers at the public library doesn’t mean they are instantly and perfectly accessible when this or that particular parent can get there. And should you have to be computer literate to get your child into a decent–not good but decent—school? I still assert that as US citizens in a democracy the answer to that question has to be, cannot be anything but, No.
Yet one of the greatest challenges moving forward will be to ensure that the best schools do not simply go to the families with the connections, knowledge and time to navigate the complicated new landscape; that, in other words, parental wherewithal does not control destiny.
And even this intro article hints that this “new landscape” isn’t really all that new, that those with the most get the most and those with the least end up somewhere that’s more like limbo than school. From what I’ve personally seen anyway.
That paragraph should reappear at every section break and at the head of every article in the series. Because that is the challenge, the dilemma, the moral imperative. To improve a school system means to work on and work to eradicate injustices, biases, inequities, not to reproduce them and then throw up hands and say, We gave you the CHOICE!
“Right now, choice is more like a land run than an open house,” said Aesha Rasheed, director of the New Orleans Parent Organizing Network. “It’s each man for himself, desperately trying to get the best you can get your hands on.”
The best schools fill up quickly. And despite the creation of a streamlined application process, several schools still require different paperwork, accept applications at different times of the day, and make parents jump through different hoops to gain admission.
As a result, parents with flexible daytime schedules, access to the Internet, reliable transportation, and savvy still hold a distinct advantage.
Many educators, including Rasheed, note that creating equitable choice is a work in progress. Although more work remains to be done, the city has come a long way toward the more standard application form and deadline for its public schools. About 4,000 students submitted the “common application” by the deadline last spring, up significantly from the previous year. [emphasis added]
Out of how many students in the systems? Where are my damn interns?
Cowen Institute
And why did the streamlined application come LAST? No one really thought through the process of School Choice. Or just figured it was such a great idea it just had to work.
“We’ve gone so quickly from a system where parents opened their doors and just sent their children to the closest schools to one that requires an active decision by parents,” said Caroline Roemer Shirley, executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools. “People get worked up that it’s not 100 percent working, but please remember that it’s only been four years.”
A radical change was made, things emptied out and renamed overnight without our consent or consultation, but now we, and our children, are told to be patient and wait while it rights itself. I ask why it was so important to throw parents and children, and teachers, into this kind of chaos to enact “change.” It’s a great idea to get parents “more involved with their children’s education” but Ms. Roemer Shirley misses a few things, and oozes, like many who speak in favor of the “reforms” and privatization here, contempt for parents and some lightly sketched idea about how bad 100% of the schools were before and how 100% of parents and people involved at whatever level just didn’t give a damn, those evil, lazy bastards. No one will argue the schools weren’t in serious trouble and were not serving children well, and making things worse in some cases, but the fact that there was poor performance and negligence [don't deceive yourself into thinking the children ruined NOPS] and some crazy shit going on does not prove that parents didn’t care, parents weren’t trying, children were hopeless and needed to be put in new uniforms and desk row formations to get higher test scores [I almost wrote "to learn"---silly me]. I doubt if the heat on LAPCS and others involved in the privatization of the system is over the new status quo not being perfect; the unreasonableness in the 100% is meant to make any and all who ask questions or complain or analyze privatization look like absolutist, extremist fools who just need to sit the hell down. Roemer Shirley, and I do not think she is alone, associates neighborhood schools with a lack of love, concern and intelligence on the part of the parent. Is it okay in the suburbs to bring your children to the neighborhood school? And does she really think that the majority of parents in the previous system just let their kids out like a dog or cat to roam their way to school? There’s a meanness in her brief statements that shows contempt for parents, a contempt I’ve seen ooze out of other supporters of School Choice, often laced with defensiveness. Like this later comment of Roemer Shirley’s:
“We’re requiring more on the part of parents,” said Roemer Shirley of the state charter school association, “but that also means that individual schools and the (districts) need to do a better job informing parents that you can’t just show up on the first day.” [emphasis added]
Such contempt—Can you believe, Charla, that there are These People who think They can just Show Up to a School and put Their Children in it, how APPALling, how GAUCHE. Ms. Roemer Shirley, it’s SCHOOL. A school should be able to educate whoever walks in the door. That’s the point of having a public system, resources shared, pooled, allocated where needed, best practices shared and disseminated, everyone taken care of as best as is possible.
I also say if you are elbow deep in changing education and school systems, should you be so contemptuous of those you serve and whose lives you alter and, in small or not-so-small ways, direct and therefore determine?
The defensiveness is understandable. When you rip my clothes off you will have to tolerate some verbal and physical abuse while you take 3 days to make underwear, much less the rest of what I need. That could make everyone involved touchy. If you take out the floor of the house, you should give the residents something to stand on or a motel room until there’s a walkway at least. And hand out hard hats. And steel-toed boots.
But I digress….
And after all this parents-need-to-make-an-active-choice, the next 3 paragraphs note the heavy door-to-door and in-neighborhood recruiting some schools do to fill their desks. Which is needed. It’s unreasonable to say that only kids with the right kind of parent can go to a decent or good school.
Virtually no one disagrees that parents should work hard on behalf of their children, setting aside substantial time for a school search if necessary. On the plus side, such requirements could very well spur increased parent engagement citywide.
“We want schools to press parents to be more responsible, engaged and involved,” said Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas.
But there’s a fine line in some cases between promoting parent engagement and setting up unnecessary hurdles before a student is admitted. To a school, requiring families to interview before granting admission helps ensure that the parents and students understand expectations. To a parent, it can come off as a screening mechanism, particularly if not fully explained.
Also, some parents have significantly more time and resources to devote to the search than others. For one family dropping off an application during a work day might mean a quick errand in the car. For another family, it could mean a long bus ride, a missed work shift, lost income and late bill payments.
Carr has a light touch here. I’m not sure how an interview can’t be seen as a screening. A one-on-one interview—when you go for a job interview, isn’t it also a screening mechanism? A parent meeting can answer questions about and emphasize important aspects of a program through handouts, lecture, discussion, role-playing, videos, etc. And again, Carr brings in, to her credit, and I look forward to this as I finally get to this series, the reality of the parents we have and the world in which we actually live. You don’t have to be a resident of Iberville to have resource or time issues. We collectively must, not ‘be able to’ but, DO better.
Moreover, every city, including New Orleans, has some parents who are addicted to drugs, mentally or intellectually incapacitated, or who simply don’t care. Should their children — who could reap the greatest benefit from a strong school — be relegated to the weakest schools, victims of their parent’s incompetence?
“If we are about equitable choice, then we don’t want to create a Darwinian system where only the people who can figure out how to get through the maze get into the best schools,” Rasheed said.
Which is the system we had before, where those with the most resources and time got their kids into the betters schools. I’m not seeing a great deal of difference or more-than-superficial change yet. Part of why not is that, as Henry Levin, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education said,
“…(Choice) doesn’t solve the problem of families who are just behind the eight ball.
“You are dealing with people who are worried about putting food on the table and whether they are going to have to move in the middle of the night. … They are not sitting down at the breakfast table every morning and saying, ‘Oh, let me read through the parent handbook and figure out where to send my child to school.’ “
Which brings us back to the sad formula, and not new, that if your parents aren’t up to a particular standard, you are screwed. And that’s antithetical to the idea of public education.
Most people are just worried about their own kid or yet-to-be kid. I know mine will be fine regardless because she has me and Mister. I worry about those kids who do not have. And that shouldn’t be dismissed or seen as irrelevant to the issue of our public schools and kids. It’s not sprinkles; it’s the cake.
And I’m not seeing and haven’t been seeing how this School Choice is changing what happens in classrooms.
“The solution is that every school is a good school,” said Jay Altman, chief executive officer of FirstLine Schools, which runs Arthur Ashe and Green charter schools. “That is the end game to all this.”
And that happens because of parents who can scramble and hustle and cross town 4 times to get their kids in x school? Huh? Am I missing something here? Does he not know that it’s money, resources, teacher training and support and education that makes a good school? NO had choice before—people who could chose to send their kids to anything-but-a-public school, or to a hard-to-get-into handful of public schools, or to move to the north shore–which gave us the schools we now are trying to reform via School Choice. What a finale.
Next: the article from the 9th and a child with possible autism.
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*I link to the online version but am reading and commenting on the print version, which may have slight variations.
“Selecting a school can be a real test for New Orleans parents.” Sarah Carr. (New Orleans) Times-Picayune, 11/8/2009.
pics cropped from “School Chart Update Sept. 24, 2009″ [PDF], Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives
Are there studies that clear the validity checks proposed here and still come to positive conclusions about choice? Yes. The work of Mark Schneider, Paul Teske, and various colleagues is a good example. They have a clear concept of choice and what it should do (that is, they have a theory); they creatively address (if not completely resolve) the challenge of selection bias; their work is published in the top peer-reviewed journals of the discipline; their studies are not consistently affiliated with any advocacy group (the National Science Foundation is a primary funding source for their major studies); and they make their data publicly available for replication. Their findings show a number of positives for choice: increased parental satisfaction, increased parental involvement, and perhaps even some performance gains. Yet they also note that the positive effects are modest, the gains come without the participation of private or religious schools, and stratification and segregation are a consistent concern. 92 Though not without caveats, these findings support carefully crafted option-demand forms of choice. This is about the most positive view of choice likely to emerge from the scholarly record (293).
Even carefully targeted programs run the risk of becoming triage systems, in which those most able to take advantage of the opportunities reap the benefits and those least able to do so are left behind. And even students who do benefit are not getting the same choices as more affluent students (294).
Finally, there is the risk of violating what might be called the Hippocratic oath of education policy. Undoubtedly some public schools are so wretchedly substandard that choice could not make things worse. … Yet programs that promote divisiveness, increase stratification risks, and engender a class of politically protected service providers are not neutral. The record of radical reform in American public education is largely a record of failure for a simple reason: its promises invariably fail to significantly improve on what already exists. 95 (294)
There is no real secret about what makes a school broadly successful in terms of academics, socialization, and satisfaction: adequate resources, good leadership, good teachers, a vision and the autonomy to act on it, committed parents and community support. Choice can never, by itself, supply all these (294).
Achieving these successes does not require a radical reformation of public education. If any choice plan carries the endorsement of the scholarly record it has the following characteristics. First, its objectives are to increase parental satisfaction, broaden educational opportunity, and create denser social networks within (not between) school communities. (Achievement or performance gains are NOT policy objectives.) Second, it seeks to achieve these objectives by offering an expanded set of educational options to a clearly defined and targeted group of disadvantaged students. Third, it does not involve private or religious schools. The policy objectives of such a program stand a reasonable chance of success, and divisive political battles are unlikely because the program can be promoted as progressive experimentation rather than radical reform. A controlled choice or option-demand choice program can achieve these objectives—but the more a program resembles a universal or voucher scheme, the more likely it is to suffer the downsides of choice for insignificant gains (295).
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Smith, Kevin. “Data Don’t Matter? Academic Research and School Choice.” Perspectives on Politics 3:2 (June 2005): 285-299.
photo courtesy of Aaron TD, used under this Creative Commons license
An initial assessment of any study’s potential contribution to policy should begin with three questions: What is being studied? Why is it expected to work? How is program performance assessed (286)?
Why do some expect that providing an exit option will improve education generally? … Does choice somehow affect teaching, learning, or the broader educational environment? … Policy makers need to know how program X and outcome Y are correlated: theory lets us understand correlation as causation. Without theory, it is hard to assess the evidentiary basis for regarding a program as a success or failure. William Howell and Paul Peterson, for example, report finding a positive achievement gain for African Americans—but not Latinos or whites—participating in a privately funded voucher program. 13 This is described as evidence of the positive benefit of vouchers. Yet what, exactly, did the voucher schools—and more specifically the presence of vouchers—do to cause such gains? Why were the gains racially confined? Is this something specific to the voucher approach? We do not know. There is no satisfactory causal explanation for the reported correlation. 14
In addition to the what and why, it is also important to ask how, that is, how is success or failure being assessed? The default dependent variable for many education studies is a test score measure (one review found roughly three-quarters to 377 studies used test scores as their dependent variable). 15 While much is made of achievement scores, they represent only a narrow dimension of education. The same program that increases test scores may also increase dropout rates. 16 Increasing civic engagement among students may also decrease their tolerance for dissenting views. 17 Satisfied parents do not necessarily mean higher-achieving children. 18 Which outcomes are analyzed and how they are measured can themselves determine the results of a policy study. 19. In short, what constitutes “success” or results in a “better” school is very much in the eye of the beholder, and whether a program works or fails depends on what facets of education are considered politically important. Whatever choice does or does not affect, consumers of choice studies are well advised to put dependent variables into context before buying into sweeping policy conclusions (287).
How, then, can consumers trust our [academics’] research? They should form independent judgments of the veracity of our studies by asking this basic question: Were the data treated fairly? 23 Fair means that the researcher makes known his or her preferences and offers demonstrable assurance that he or she has adhered to scholarly conventions designed to minimize the influence of those preferences. Armed with such a reference point, consumers can be reasonably confident that data are driving a study’s policy conclusions rather than vice versa. 24
For choice studies these reference points are not always clear, and consumers may lack an insider’s knowledge of what “good scholarly practice” means. These problems can be reasonably, albeit imperfectly, dealt with by following a series of simple steps:
Note institutional affiliations. … Stanford University’s Hoover Institution has a public education task force that reads like a who’s who of researchers associated with pro-choice and voucher arguments (including Paul Peterson, John Chubb, Terry Moe, Caroline Hoxby, Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Diane Ravitch). Scholars affiliated with the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University (for example, Alex Molnar and Peter Cookson), tend more toward a skeptical view of choice and, especially, privatization and commercialism in education. …
Note funding sources. … For example, the Olin Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the Friedman Foundation support vouchers, and all three have generously supported high-profile academic choice studies. 26 …
Confirm quality. …Peer review by nonpartisan specialists helps ensure the credibility of scholarly work. …
Look for replication. … Indefinite data embargoes should invite outright skepticism. Without the possibility of replication, it is difficult to independently assess the validity of prescriptive claims (287-8).
Choice research is heavily based on variants of regression analysis—the standard statistical tool kit of social science research. Regression has well-known limitations, though (288). 32
Most choice studies are also correlational rather than truly experimental. There are good reasons for this. …randomly assigning students to different schools or choice programs presents formidable legal, ethical, financial, and logistical problems. … Even randomized field trials, however, are several steps from the experimental ideal. 33 For example, by definition those who apply for vouchers—whether they are awarded them or not—are a self-selected rather than randomly chosen group. Of this self-selected group, a significant percentage (up to 50 percent or more) awarded a voucher will not actually use it. Receiving schools may select nonrandomly among those students offered a voucher. Of those who do use their voucher, many will use it temporarily: voucher programs tend to have high turnover among participants (289). 34
John Chubb and Terry Moe issued probably the best known, and certainly the most sweeping, prescription based on a scholarly study of school choice: “We think reformers would do well to entertain the notion that choice is a panacea…Choice is a self-contained reform with its own rationale and justification. It has the capacity all by itself to bring about the kind of transformation that, for years, reformers have been seeking to engineer in myriad other ways.” 35 Their advice to engage in a wholesale, market-based transformation of education is remarkable since it springs from a study that did not examine any sort of choice program. Chubb and Moe inferred the effects of universal choice from a study of public and private school differences. Their prescriptive leap was to assume that universal choice would result in more schools maximizing the benefits they associated with private schools while minimizing the problems they associated with public schools. Perhaps choice will do this, but their actual study contains no direct analysis or empirical evidence of any such impact (289).
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Smith, Kevin. “Data Don’t Matter? Academic Research and School Choice.” Perspectives on Politics 3:2 (June 2005): 285-299.
photo courtesy of Marcin Wichary, used under this Creative Commons license
Greg Richmond, president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, a group that has vetted charter school applications for Louisiana, said fewer than 1 percent of the 4,000 charter schools in the country have some kind of selective testing or auditions and that most of them have an arts focus.
But he thinks it would be unfair to dismiss such schools outright as running counter to the spirit of the charter movement.
“When school districts create an elite high school that kids have to test into, nobody blinks,” he said. “So I am concerned that when school districts do this, it’s accepted, but when charters do it, it’s condemned. That is a double standard.”
The article itself is pretty good by T-P standards (even though it is the usual ridiculously-limited-sources article the T-P does on education, go read the whole thing) but this quote shows the often petulant reaction of charter school advocates when charter schools are criticized or looked at sideways or, sometimes, at all unless that look is already tilted toward fulsome praise and the declaration of a war won. What Mr. Richmond ignores is that when school districts create elite or selective admissions schools, it is a big damn stink, especially in systems with the kinds of nose-burning inequities as the NO system. The system was allowed to go bad then magnet schools were created to, largely, draw and keep white and/or middle-class families in the school system. A noble goal since an abandoned school system becomes no system at all, as we all know far too well. But it also created distortions and added fuel to generations-old community conflicts and did nothing to ease the sting, effects or legacy of racist policies in the city or its schools. (I am a magnet school graduate. And I knew and heard about more than a handful of white kids in my school whose entrance exam scores were 10-15 or even 20 points lower than mine and significantly below the alleged and public cutoff but there they were. How did that happen? I, by the way, scored in the 95th percentile.) This kind of pouty behavior and the hardcore sell of privatization will not make the system work and will only fool a small part of the people for a limited amount of time. The idea of “selling” the “new” schools to the non-public-school-attending public, those with kids in private schools and those with no children at all, is another noble goal but that “selling” should not be mistaken for community involvement or participation. I.e., I’m happy people with no children in the system are interested and getting involved but those voices and desires should not outweigh the wants, concerns and needs of the teachers, parents and children in the non-private schools. A non-parent’s idea of education and privatization can be not only different than reality and pragmatism but dangerously so. I do think you should know something about education before you start sticking your favorite ideologies into it. I don’t tell a mechanic how best to fix my car when all I know is the address of the dealership and how to check the oil and that I believe in better air quality for all people around the world. In what other field do non-experts have the first, middle and final say?
I get the feeling that the big players in what’s happening with the schools are all weighed heavily toward privatization/charterization regardless of effects, benefits, pitfalls, failures. (I have a whole ‘nother post of quotes on this one. If I could just have 2 more days in the week, household help and 3 more hours of sleep every night….) The idea is that the public sector cannot and does not work and only the skill set of private business and MBAs can save ___, in this case public schools. These advocates forget that not everything is a commodity and not everything can be treated as a commodity. People as commodities leads to personal violence, slavery and child abuse, among other things.
Charter schools have a place. They should not, though, be the whole damn place as far as the eye can see.
