Will the charter school movement live up to its promise?

Walter Russell Mead writes today about charter schools and teacher unions:

Pushback against the spread of charter schools is one of the Left’s most important goals. This is not really about education; it is about power and, particularly, the power of the blue model state to fight the future. And it is part of an increasingly sophisticated fight by teacher unions to preserve their power.

...As it stands, in many school districts good teachers stick with teacher unions because, given the irrational and rigid policies of bureaucracies and the atmosphere of cronyism and even criminality in city governments, individuals need to band together for protection. Teachers embrace teacher unions because the alternative is to be an unorganized individual at the mercy of an uncaring political machine and incompetent administration. The achievements that teacher unions are proudest of, like tenure and seniority, have, as we know, large social costs, but they make sense in a situation in which teachers must organize to protect themselves from meddling politicians and a predatory bureaucracy.

There was a time when teacher unions were on the cutting edge of reform, and it would be a mistake now not to recognize those accomplishments, and not to understand the good reasons many people still have to support them. But the future of our schools isn’t more of the same: more big box, one-size-fits-all cookie cutter educational institutions in which everybody moves at the same pace through the machine. As the American economy changes, our schools must change too. Big box schools prepare people for big box jobs: in government bureaucracies, in bureaucratic stable corporations, on jobs for life assembly lines.

...we don’t want the next generation to spend most of its formative years under the guidance of people who have been socialized into the jobs for life in behemoth institutions.

Smaller, teacher-led and teacher-managed autonomous schools offer students and parents more choices (of curriculum, of educational philosophy, of discipline, of learning style) than the big box systems can. They also produce smarter teachers: people who know what it is like to build an enterprise and keep it going. Those are exactly the skills the next generation of students need; we need an educational system that produces teachers who can teach toward the future rather than the past.

If the charter school movement is to live up to its promise, it has to do more than privatize the existing school system. Franchised chains of for-profit charter schools may make sense as an element of competition that forces public schools and others to up their game to attract students, but we need more. We need teacher-managed schools that are rooted in the local community and that good teachers recognize as an opportunity, both for them and for the students in their care.

Read more here.

An education revolution

Gloria Romero writes in the Orange County Register,

President Obama travels to New Orleans this week to commemorate Katrina’s 10th anniversary and the city’s rebuilding.

I wonder if Obama will notice what has happened to the New Orleans education system. Romero reports,

Following Katrina, the Legislature acted boldly, enacting a transformative measure to expeditiously transfer more than 100 chronically failing New Orleans schools to the RSD. State leaders, confronted by unprecedented natural disaster, chose to not only rebuild, but to boldly reimagine, New Orleans’ schools and acted with urgency.

City schools were closed, and all teachers removed from their posts. Rather than reopening the same failed schools, a comprehensive network of charter schools was authorized and opened. New teachers were hired.

This action led to the innovative “portfolio” system of schools found today in New Orleans, with 92 percent of students attending independent, charter schools.

RSD is Recovery School District.

Romero continues,

Undoubtedly, the RSD response to Katrina has become one of the most important education reformations in America. Academic outcomes for public school students in New Orleans have improved significantly in the 10 years since Katrina.

New Orleans in 2005 was the second-lowest-ranked district in one of the lowest-ranked U.S. states. Today, New Orleans students are closing the achievement gap with their peers, graduation rates have dramatically increased accompanied by major boosts in achievement tests, and students are going on to college. Whereas just slightly more than 30 percent of RSD schools were above failing status in 2008, more than 80 percent were in 2014 – a significant turnaround.

Read more here.

Politicians beholden to teachers unions oppose charter schools where minority students are achieving excellence

Have you been reading about the charter schools in New York and Los Angeles that serve mostly minority students, achieve higher scores on tests, and politicians subservient to teachers unions want to close? The Superintendent in Los Angeles points out that

"the trajectory of achievement in [the elementary] school is unquestionable and unassailable."

Allysia Finley writes,

Yet their performance was never under dispute. Instead, some board members quibbled that Aspire was contracting out state-mandated special education services. The board members wanted Aspire to subscribe to the district's more expensive special-education plan in order to procure more state funds for the district and its unionized workforce.

The same thing is happening in New York, where Mayor de Blasio is making a fool of himself opposing charter schools where black students are achieving.
Read more about Los Angeles here.

Are Republicans willing to learn?

On March 25 Thomas Sowell addressed the issue of how Republicans can reach out to black voters.

Too many Republicans seem to think that the way to “reach out” is to offer blacks and other minorities what the Democrats are offering them. Some have even suggested that the channels to use are organizations like the NAACP and black “leaders” like Jesse Jackson — that is, people tied irrevocably to the Democrats.

The issue on which Democrats are most vulnerable, and have the least room to maneuver, is school choice. Democrats are heavily in hock to the teachers’ unions, who see public schools as places to guarantee jobs for teachers, regardless of what that means for the education of students.

There are some charter schools and private schools that have low-income minority youngsters equaling or exceeding national norms, despite the many ghetto public schools where most students are nowhere close to meeting those norms. Because teachers’ unions oppose charter schools, most Democrats oppose them, including black Democrats up to and including President Barack Obama.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s recent cutback on funding for charter schools, and creating other obstacles for them, showed a calloused disregard for black youngsters, for whom a decent education is their one shot at a better life.

But did you hear any Republican say anything about it?

Many people today would be surprised to learn that there were once years when the unemployment rate for black 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds was under 10 percent. But their unemployment rates have not been under 20 percent in more than half a century. In some years, their unemployment rate has been over 40 percent.

Why such great differences between earlier and later times? In the late 1940s, inflation had rendered meaningless the minimum wage set in 1938. Without that encumbrance, black teenagers found it a lot easier to get jobs than after the series of minimum wage escalations that began in the 1950s.

Young people need job experience, at least as much as they need a paycheck. And no neighborhood needs hordes of idle young men hanging around, getting into mischief, if not into crime.

Republicans have failed to explain why the minimum wage laws that Democrats support are counterproductive for blacks. Worse yet, during the 2012 election campaign Mitt Romney advocated indexing the minimum wage for inflation, which would not only guarantee its bad effects, but would put an end to discussing those bad effects.

Bad choices and good choices

Liberals love to give women the choice of aborting their babies. Liberals are less fond of giving black families the choice to send their children to charter schools in their neighborhoods, where the old theory that blacks must sit next to white children in order to get a good education is being disproved.

Read more here.

A fighter for children

There is a battle going on in New York. It's between newly elected progressive Mayor deBlasio and Eve Moscowitz. Eva who, you ask? She is the CEO of New York's charter school system, which serves 6,700 students who are predominantly from poor and minority families. Recent test scores showed her students performing in the top 1% in math and top 7% in English.

Matthew Kaminski writes,

Charters hire teachers who don't have to join and pay union dues, and who work outside the traditional system.

The schools are also mushrooming nationwide. Nearly half the public schools in Washington, D.C., and virtually all in New Orleans are charters. One reason the friction in New York is especially bad comes from the city's practice during the Bloomberg years of having charters share space with regular schools. The charters then often proceeded, embarrassingly, to outperform the other schools.

Already deBlasio has cut all funding for charter-school construction after 2015. He announced a "moratorium" on putting new charters inside existing schools. He is considering ways to roll back 25 co-locations already approved for the next school year, including 10 Success Academies.

While Mayor de Blasio can't stop the creation of charters, he controls access to the most treasured asset in New York City, real estate.

Ms. Moskowitz won't concede that charters must pay rent one way or another. Her schools, run by an independent nonprofit, don't charge tuition to students, who are enrolled through a lottery. The state gives charter operators $13,527 per student, less than what it costs to educate a regular public school student.

She says the charters take underutilized space in a school system with 200,000 empty seats.