| Despite Push, Success at Charter Schools Is Mixed |
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By Trip Gabriel, The New York Times
Executives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, McKinsey consultants and scholars from Stanford and Harvard mingled at an invitation-only meeting of the New Schools Venture Fund at a luxury hotel in Pasadena, Calif. Founded by investors who helped start Google and Amazon, this philanthropy seeks to raise the academic achievement of poor black and Hispanic students, largely through charter schools.
By
Trip Gabriel, The New York Times
In the world of education, it was the equivalent of the cool kids’ table
in the cafeteria.
But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000
or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many
cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on
standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last
year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford
University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools
nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools,
almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37
percent, were “significantly worse.”
Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education
reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education
Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the
aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in
traditional schools.
Researchers for this study and others pointed to a successful minority
of charter schools — numbering perhaps in the hundreds — and these are
the ones around which celebrities and philanthropists rally, energized
by their narrowing of the achievement gap between poor minority students
and white students.
But with the Obama administration offering the most favorable climate
yet for charter schools, the challenge of reproducing high-flying
schools is giving even some advocates pause. Academically ambitious
leaders of the school choice movement have come to a hard recognition:
raising student achievement for poor urban children — what the most
fervent call a new civil rights campaign — is enormously difficult and
often expensive.
“I think many people settle and tend to let themselves off the hook,”
said Perry White, a former social worker who founded the Citizens’
Academy charter school in Cleveland in 1999 — naïvely, he now recognizes
— and has overseen its climb from an F on its state report card in 2003
to an A last year. “It took us a while to understand we needed a
no-excuses culture,” he said, one of “really sweating the small stuff.”
Visits to half a dozen charter schools in Cleveland and New York State
show that high- and low-performing schools often seem to take pages from
the same playbook. They require student uniforms, a longer day and
academic year, frequent testing to measure learning, and tutoring for
students who fall behind. They imitate one another in superficial ways,
too, like hanging inspirational banners: “This Is Where We’re Headed. To
College!” say posters in the hall of the Williamsburg Collegiate
Charter School in Brooklyn, with campus scenes of a chemistry lab and
big-time college sports.
But the differences in how schools are run, the way classes are taught
and how school culture is nourished are striking. It is like watching
two couples dance a tango, one with poise and precision, the other
stumbling to execute the intricate footwork.
A High-Flying School
At Williamsburg Collegiate, whose middle school students annually
outscore the district and city averages on state tests, Jason Skeeter
stood before his math students the other day as tightly coiled as a
drill sergeant. He issued instructions in a loud, slightly fearsome
voice, without an extra word or gesture. “Five minutes on the clock,” he
told the 26 fifth graders, as they began a “Do Now” review sheet on
least common denominators.
On the whiteboard, an agenda told students precisely what to expect for
the 60-minute period. Mr. Skeeter placed his digital Teach Timer on an
overhead projector so the countdown was visible to all. When the buzzer
sounded, he announced, “Hold ’em up,” and students raised their pencils.
“Clap if you’re with me,” he said, clapping twice to snap students to
attention. The class responded with a ritual double-stomp of the feet
and a hand clap.
Mr. Skeeter, 30, a stocky man in a dark blue shirt and tie, moved
swiftly to a second timed exercise, the “Mad Minute,” 60 multiplication
problems in 60 seconds.
“Pencils down,” he ordered after the minute was up. “Switch papers with
your partner.”
The teacher read aloud the 60 answers. “Hands on your head when you’re
done counting” correct answers, he told students. He started the timer
again as he called students’ names — DeAndre, Alejandro, Nakeri, Lyric —
typing their scores into a laptop. He announced the class average:
37.86.
“Brian Leventer,” he said, making what the school calls a cold call to
one student rather than looking for a raised hand, “what does it round
to?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“Thirty-eight is correct,” Mr. Skeeter said. The class had fallen two
points shy of fifth graders in a rival class. “Close, close, close,” the
teacher said.
At Williamsburg Collegiate, everything is measured, everything is
compared, graphed and displayed publicly. Besides academics, students
compete for merit points for good behavior and receive demerits for
absent homework or disrespect. The school drills students on posture and
clear speaking, known as SLANT, shorthand for “Sit up straight. Listen.
Ask and answer questions. Nod for understanding. Track the speaker,”
meaning follow with your eyes.
“I will give merits to the first group to stop what they’re doing and
track me,” Mr. Skeeter said at one point.
A rigidly structured environment is part of the formula the school
believes produces success. Another is “the use of data to inform
everything we do,” said Brett Peiser, the superintendent. If tests
reveal that 70 percent of students do not know how to add fractions with
like denominators, teachers reteach it. The curriculum is constantly
adjusted.
Although half of Mr. Skeeter’s fifth graders began the year, their first
at the school, below grade level, his goal is for all to pass the state
exam. It is a goal that eludes most schools statewide with populations
like Williamsburg Collegiate’s, which is 99 percent African-American and
Hispanic, with 83 percent eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.
Yet last year all 78 of the school’s fifth graders who took the math
exam passed. “If our goal is to close the achievement gap and prepare
students for college, obviously we’re trending in the right direction,”
Mr. Peiser said. A More Typical Case In Ohio, the Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy is not the kind of charter school that celebrities visit. It is, however, close to the norm for urban Ohio, where 60 percent of charter school students in the eight largest districts attend a school that earned a D or F on its last state report card, according to an analysis by Catalyst Ohio, an independent publication supporting school improvement.
Alison Ellis, who is 27 and in her second year of full-time teaching,
had the advantage of a small class of 14 the other day to teach
sixth-grade math, in preparation for the state tests on which the
all-important school report cards are based.
“Yesterday we looked at the extended-responses part of your test,” Ms.
Ellis said, referring to practice exercises the students had done. “We
had a rough day.”
She passed out a work sheet reviewing similar material, starting with a
word problem calling for basic arithmetic. “Jackie ate lunch at the
Double D Diner,” she read. “Her check is shown below.”
The students bent to their work sheets, six girls and eight boys, the
boys ranging in size from a student with a faint mustache and an
untucked extra-large polo shirt to another seemingly half his size.
The Arts and Social Sciences Academy, which Ohio says is in a state of
“academic emergency,” might not strike a casual observer as a school
that is failing its students, who are similar demographically to
Williamsburg Collegiate’s — 98 percent African-American, 91 percent
economically disadvantaged.
But the contrast with the Brooklyn school was apparent in many subtle
ways. In Ms. Ellis’s classroom, the whiteboard was empty except for the
date — no agenda to focus students. Although Ms. Ellis timed students on
solving problems similar to those they would expect on the state test,
she was imprecise about when time was up.
The pace was unhurried; there was little sense of the urgency to impart
and absorb knowledge that lends an electricity to classrooms at
Williamsburg Collegiate. At one point, a boy put his head on a desk and
had to be wakened. As fifth graders one year ago, only 20 percent of the school’s students passed the state math exam, results that contributed to the school’s overall grade of F. The principal, Debroah A. Mays, was disappointed by the results. She introduced a yearlong improvement plan that included Saturday tutoring and teacher training. “We are determined to become a school of excellence,” Mrs. Mays said.
Even though the school did worse on the Ohio math and English exams than
the average Cleveland public school, families did not flee Arts and
Social Sciences Academy. On the contrary, enrollment has doubled in each
of the past two years. It is a phenomenon often seen in academically
failing charter schools when parents perceive them as having better
discipline than district schools.
“Families love the feeling of community; they walk in and say they feel
safe,” Mrs. Mays said. “They don’t worry about bullying. My kids are
just a bunch of marshmallows.”
The Ideology
Since the first one opened in Minnesota in 1992, charter schools have
captivated school reformers, originally on the political right but
increasingly from the center-left. Largely an urban phenomenon, charter
schools in some 72 cities now enroll 10 percent or more of public school
students, up from 45 cities three years ago, according to the National
Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Fifty-five percent of enrolled students nationwide are black or
Hispanic, the alliance says, and more than a third qualify for free or
reduced-price lunches, a common measure of poverty.
The movement sometimes makes for strange bedfellows. “When I first got
into this, I thought everyone interested in educating poor black kids
would be a good lefty,” said Lyman Millard, director of development at
Citizens’ Academy in Cleveland and a Democrat. “We went to a state
charter convention where they were debating which of two bumper stickers
to have printed: ‘Go With Bush’ or ‘God Wants Bush.’ I thought, what
did we get ourselves into?”
In 2007, President George W. Bush visited a Harlem charter, but
President Obama has done him one better, pledging to use the Harlem
Children’s Zone, a network of charter schools and social services, as a
model for high-poverty urban areas. The administration’s Race to the Top
competition, which waves the carrot of $4.3 billion in education aid to
states that comply with administration goals, has prompted three so far
— Illinois, Louisiana and Tennessee — to lift limits on the number of
charter schools. Advocates say there has never been more political
momentum from Washington in favor of charter schools.
The club of millionaires and billionaires who support them includes Mr.
Gates; Mr. Broad, whose fortune is from home building and financial
services; Michael Dell of Dell Computer; Doris Fisher, who, with her
late husband, Donald, founded the Gap; and the Walton family.
Rather than starting their own schools, these philanthropists largely
went looking for successful charters and provided money for expansion.
Thus they can boast of mainly backing academic winners.
Celebrities who support charters have also picked carefully. In Los
Angeles, a former writer for “L. A. Law,” Roger Lowenstein, founded the
Los Angeles Leadership Academy, which ranks in the top 10 percent of
schools statewide with similar disadvantaged populations. He has
cultivated as donors the screenwriter James L. Brooks and the television
agent Rick Rosen, who represents Conan O’Brien.
In New York, Mr. Legend, the Grammy-winning soul singer, has used his
visibility to debate political opponents of charter schools in the news
media. “What these people are proving who are running excellent schools
is that poor black and brown kids can be successful,” he said in an
interview. “Until recently a lot of Americans didn’t even believe that
was true, because they saw such persistent gaps in the education
outcomes.”
Mr. Legend is on an advisory board of Harlem Village Academies, three
small schools that held a glittery fund-raiser at Lincoln Center last
week. Katie Couric told the crowd that she was a mentor to students on
Saturday mornings. Hugh Jackman, the host, announced a $500,000 gift
from Rupert Murdoch.
Last year, 93 percent of eighth graders at the flagship Harlem Village
Academy passed the state math, English, science and social studies
exams, compared with 41 percent in its West Harlem school district,
records show.
Some Have Doubts
Critics of charter schools, often teachers’ unions and their political
allies, say the schools rely on a corps of young teachers who are
willing to work 60-hour weeks, but who burn out quickly. In addition, as
the United Federation of Teachers reported in January, charters in New
York City enroll a smaller share of special education students and those
still learning English.
An independent study recently backed the claims to high achievement made
by New York City charters, which have benefited from the strong support
of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the schools chancellor, Joel I.
Klein. Devised to address criticism that charters skim off the most
motivated students, the study compared the state test scores of students
in charter schools with those who had wanted to enroll but were not
picked in lotteries that charters hold when they have too many
applicants.
The study concluded that charter students made better progress in math
and English than their counterparts who ended up in traditional schools.
In math, students in charters from kindergarten through eighth grade
came close to equaling the achievements of suburban students, nearly
closing what the study’s lead author, Caroline M. Hoxby, a Stanford
economist, called the “Scarsdale-Harlem” gap.
Ms. Hoxby’s study, released in September, followed by three months the
much broader investigation by a Stanford colleague, at the Center for
Research on Education Outcomes, which showed discouraging results for
charters nationally. Drawing on data from the District of Columbia and
15 states (but not New York), that study’s finding that 83 percent of
charter schools are doing no better than local public schools shocked
many advocates, all the more so because its author, Margaret E. Raymond,
is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a bastion of libertarianism.
Ms. Hoxby, also a fellow at the Hoover Institution, where she is a
member of a pro-charter task force, and Ms. Raymond engaged in a sharp
online exchange over research methodologies — an echo of years of
arguments over charter school data. (Ms. Raymond’s study did show that
learning improved the longer students were in charters.)
What most experts can agree on is that charter school quality varies
widely, and that it is often associated with the rigor of authorities
that grant charters. New York, where oversight is strong, is known for
higher performing schools. Ohio, Arizona and Texas, where accountability
is minimal, showed up in Ms. Raymond’s study with many poorly
performing schools.
Perhaps the sharpest knock on charters — one that even some proponents
acknowledge — is that mediocrity is widely tolerated. Authorities are
reluctant to close poor schools. Some advocates concede that the
intellectual premise behind school choice — that in a free market for
education, parents will remove students from bad schools in favor of
good ones — has not proved true.
“If you look at the hopes and dreams from 1992, it didn’t pan out that
quality would rise because of marketplace accountability,” said James
Merriman, chief executive of the New York City Charter School Center.
“It turns out you need government accreditation to drive quality, and
the human capital to make schools go. The hard lesson is, it is so
dependent on human capital.”
Can They Be Replicated?
Mr. Skeeter of Williamsburg Collegiate is what advocates mean when they
talk of human capital. A former public school teacher in the Bronx,
where he lives, he works from 7 a.m. to 5:30, nearly three hours longer
than his public school day. The charter school says it pays teachers
about 15 percent above union scale, though there is no tenure. “I have
more say in what I teach and how I teach, which is important to me,” Mr.
Skeeter said, adding that in a traditional public school he felt
“handcuffed” to the assigned curriculum.
As his students lined up after lunch outside his classroom, he popped
questions before they could enter. “Kayson, what is two-fifths as a
percent?” he asked. The boy hesitated before correctly answering 40.
“Next time,” Mr. Skeeter said, “quicker.”
Mr. Peiser, who oversees Williamsburg Collegiate and nine other charter
schools in Brooklyn for Uncommon Schools, a nonprofit management
organization, frequently says “there’s not one big thing” that his
schools do differently that explains their success. “There are 100
1-percent solutions,” he said.
Ninety-eight percent of some 1,000 students in grades three through
eight in Uncommon Schools, almost all poor minority children, passed
their New York State math exam last year, and 89 percent passed the
English exam. “Higher in both cases than the white average,” Mr. Peiser
pointed out.
Such stellar results have attracted philanthropists, including those
from the New Schools Venture Fund, which seeks to replicate top charter
schools. Whether that is possible at a scale that could move the needle
in American education may be the greatest challenge of all for the
charter movement.
Nonprofit networks of charter operators with top-flight schools —
outfits like Uncommon, KIPP and Aspire Public Schools — have created
only about 350 in the past decade, and required $500 million in
philanthropic support, according to Thomas Toch, author of a study last
year on many of the groups underwritten by the New Schools Venture Fund.
He questioned whether successful charters could be “scaled up” without
sacrificing quality and without heavy subsidies from private donors.
“It’s easy to open schools, but it’s very hard to open and sustain and
to grow networks of very good schools,” said Mr. Toch, a founder of
Education Sector, a research group.
The education historian Diane Ravitch offers a parallel critique.
“Charters enroll 3 percent of the kids,” she said. “The system that
educates 97 percent, no one’s paying any attention to.”
In a new book, Ms. Ravitch describes her about-face from supporter of
the school-choice movement as a member of the first Bush administration
to a critic. In an interview, she pointed to the Obama administration’s
oft-stated goal of turning around 5,000 public schools — the bottom 5
percent — which it is leveraging through $4 billion in School
Improvement Grants to states that adopt one of four strategies,
including giving failing schools to charter operators. “What we’re
likely to get are lots of mediocre and very bad charters,” Ms. Ravitch
said.
Mr. Duncan, the education secretary, replied through a spokeswoman: “We
do not favor one kind of school over another. We favor educational
quality and accountability for all schools.”
The teachers and principal at the Arts and Social Sciences Academy,
which has 230 students in temporary buildings, do not want to remain in
the category of failing charter. They hope to expunge the F on their
school’s report card with this year’s state exams. “Soaring to Success!”
a banner in the hallway read the other day, exhorting one and all.
“There are 13 school days to the Ohio Achievement Assessment!!”
In Ms. Ellis’s math class, she patiently demonstrated how to answer the
word problem of Jackie and her lunch at the Double D Diner. As she
reread the problem, one boy interrupted: “I thought it was a he,” he
said, meaning “Jackie.”
“One thing I’ve noticed we get stuck on is names,” Ms. Ellis said,
gently correcting that Jackie is a she. “They have the wackiest names,”
she told students named Devonere, Aja, Danisha and Caz’mier, who might
be unfamiliar with some of the references of standardized tests.
She assigned a more challenging problem, and as she went from desk to
desk offering advice, students worked without the familiar distractions
of a more crowded classroom — hands raised for a bathroom pass, students
wandering over to backpacks. Disengagement here was expressed
passively: after most of the time allotted to complete the problem had
passed, one boy had drawn only a line dividing the work space in half.
At a bank of computers in the back, where other students were working,
one had his head on the keyboard.
The computers ran a learning program, A-Plus, with problems geared to a
student’s abilities. A boy was working his way through simple math. “A
glass of lemonade costs 25 cents,” the computer screen told this sixth
grader. “A hot dog costs 5 cents. How much will it cost to buy both?”
When he tapped the correct answer, the screen flashed, “Way to Go.” Clearly, this school still has work to do. |
In the world of education, it was the equivalent of the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria.
