Thursday, April 3, 2008
Charter Schools and Private Schools
Take a look at these interesting links on education policy that came up in the comments on an earlier post. One is on charter schools and the other is on privately run schools in Philly; both compare the performance of each to traditional public schools. Not surprisingly (to us), both cast serious doubt on the free-market education agenda. Thanks to Casey for the Bland Corp. study.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Thank you Ryan, Casey, and Chris for the useful links and information.
ReplyDeleteI guess it it isn't too difficult to make a convincing case against for-profit schools and most voucher systems. I was moderately surprised to find that companies like Edison offer neither higher student performance nor lower overall costs (although most of these studies are pretty poor with standardized test scores as the only performance metric).
The case of Edison is very instructive as entrepreneur Chris Whittle founded the company and brought it public. Shares of the company boomed to $36 which put a valuation of several billion dollars on the for-profit education company. As the company failed to deliver profit or great revenue growth, investors bailed, the stock was delisted by the Nasdaq and traded for pennies over the counter. Whittle and underwriter Bear Stearns cut a buyout deal with the Florida State Pension Fund for $1.75 a share. That fund's involvement is another interesting story, but Whittle walked away with 28 million for a company that sank billions into school start-up costs, never turned a profit, and ultimately decided it was time to basically throw in the towel. The case of Edison foreshadows some of the dangers of a totally decentralized school system that is not accountable to the public, but rather to shareholders.
It is not a huge stretch to argue that No Child Left Behind was a direct attack on urban education with the goal of crushing inner-city schools and their well entrenched Democratic teacher unions. Secondarily, the exposure of "failing" schools would serve as a catalyst for privatization efforts as has been the case in Cleveland.
I find the charter school experiment to be a little more difficult. I have witnessed many examples of high performing public charter schools in districts where the alternative public schools are struggling greatly. Still, it was my impression that these schools did skim students with the most committed parents, and in some cases the highest performing and most affluent students. These schools typically hire creative and enthusiastic young teachers who are not necessarily concerned with the protections and benefits of collective bargaining or a long-term pay scale.
It follows that aggregating all of that talent under one roof with a clear overarching vision would produce positive results. Unfortunately, it also follows that the relationship is close to zero-sum with neighborhood public schools that lose many of their most involved parents, most creative teachers, and best students. One could argue that treating teachers like professionals would increase this pool of effective young teachers, but the short-term effects are detrimental to traditional public schools.
I have a three-pronged Vorman response:
ReplyDelete1. Check this out re: "treating teachers like professionals."
2. I read that there is some reasonable speculation that the Florida pension fund rescue of Edison was a Box Brothers political bailout. I don't know if there's anything to this, nor do I know how much control over the fund Jeb actually has/had. Perhaps you (Vorman) know more about it.
Also, Channel 1 was the freakin' best. It had the best Skittles commercials ever.
3. Please forgive my ignorance, I actually know very little about No Child Left Behind. Generally, how does it work and how is it a war on urban schools? In the meantime, I will see what Wikipedia has to say about this.