I was left back in kindergarten. I can’t imagine what subject I failed. Midway through second grade, I still couldn’t read. Luckily, I was a pretty amiable kid, at least according to my parents, so I had that going for me. Though, for the whole time, I think they were just hoping that I didn’t see the need to rush.
It’s like the old joke about the six-year-old who had never uttered a word. At dinner one night, out of nowhere, the young boy finally blurts out, “Soup’s cold!” His parents, completely taken aback, ask why he’s waited so long to speak. The kid answers simply, “Everything’s been fine ’til now.”
Patience and contentment are admirable qualities for sure—but not if you’re really upset about something and your goal is to foment serious change. I’m guessing that’s what Thomas Paine was thinking in 1776 when he wrote Common Sense, a book that sold 500,000 copies to a population of only 2.5 million (not all of whom could read)—more on a relative basis than any book in American history, not counting the Bible. His little pamphlet professed no patience for the status quo, and its impact was incendiary and immediate. George Washington even credited Common Sense with being one of the major influences in winning support for American independence.
So, what was it about this little book that made it so popular and ultimately so powerful? Of course, Paine could have started out railing against taxes and exploitation and in favor of voting and property rights. But he doesn’t. Instead, he argues from a different vantage point. Not just taking a step back or even the 40,000-foot view, the power of Paine’s pamphlet comes from reexamining first principles as if he were a citizen fresh off the boat from Mars.
He begins (and I may be paraphrasing a bit here):
Where did this King guy come from anyway?
Who picked him? Hundreds of years ago did some ancestor grab power and ordain that all his progeny become kings forevermore? Or maybe back then, the people, by general acclamation or even a vote, chose a king. That’s great, but why are we stuck with a decision made hundreds of years ago by a bunch of dead people? Is that fair? Is that moral? Does it even make sense?
The opening of Common Sense summarizes more eloquently:
“a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom.”
If alive today, Paine would likely have some tough questions for our country’s education establishment. Why are poor and low-income kids systematically sent to the worst schools? If you are poor, black, or Hispanic and entering high school in one of our major cities, why is your chance of graduating college only one in eleven? If most of the good-paying jobs go to college graduates and we care about income inequality or at least equality of opportunity, why aren’t we doing everything we can to fix things?
I’m a capitalist, but over the long term, the system only works if everyone has a fair shot. And a fair shot, most would agree, starts with a good education. Yet, our education system is almost designed to be unequal from the start.
In most cities and towns in this country, schools are a local affair. A student goes to the zoned public school in his or her neighborhood. The school is free and financed through local taxes. As things stand now, wealthier and middle-class parents can effectively choose their children’s school by paying for a private school or by simply moving to a neighborhood with good public schools. Parents with more limited resources don’t have these “choices.”
In New York City and other major cities, elementary school kids in lower-income neighborhoods are assigned to their locally zoned district school with other low-income kids. If that school isn’t good, most families can’t afford to move to a neighborhood with a better school. And even if an individual school were to significantly improve, rents would soon rise in the immediate neighborhood, and poorer families would eventually be forced to move.
One potential fix would be to break the relationship between zip code and the schools children attend. In her 2003 book, The Two-Income Trap, Senator Elizabeth Warren suggests a “well designed voucher program” that “loosens the ironclad relationship between location-location-location and school-school-school.” Giving parents a voucher, funded by the state, that pays for children to attend the public school of their choice, not just the one assigned to them based on their local neighborhood, would “eliminate the need for parents to pay an inflated price for a home just because it happens to lie within the boundaries of a desirable school district.”
Under Senator Warren’s proposal, public schools would compete to attract students based on the quality of the school’s offerings and by “providing the education parents want.” Even parents of modest means would now have school choice. Their children would no longer be automatically trapped in failing and underperforming neighborhood schools.
And, in theory, public school “vouchers” make lots of sense. We should all hope that some version of the senator’s plan gets implemented, especially in our most challenged urban districts. It’s certainly an improvement over the current system where, as the saying goes, zip code effectively determines destiny.
But this is where good theory runs into a rougher reality on the ground. In the real world, almost every parent whose kids were already zoned for a “good” school would object to losing that preference. In fact, New York City actually has a Public School Choice (PSC) program. But for the most part, kids in good district schools aren’t forced to leave, so there aren’t very many spots available in their schools. In 2017, 876 lucky kids were able to switch to a better district school through the program. A public school choice program that gives a choice to 876 kids out of the 1 million in New York City district schools isn’t very effective. You don’t need to pass a math test to figure that out.
So, what else can we do? Well, putting aside the school choice issue for a moment, one thing we should certainly try is to fix underperforming schools. But how should we go about doing that? And even before we set out to “fix” things, maybe we should entertain the possibility that our schools are already doing a pretty good job. Considering the conditions students and parents are facing in our major cities, including poverty, crime, drugs, health, and family issues, maybe our education system is doing the best it can?. Maybe a big part of the answer actually lies in solving some of these other problems first.
The truth is, though, there probably isn’t a “first.” We need to work on each of these challenges—economic, social, and educational—simultaneously. In fact, it’s pretty obvious that they’re all intertwined. Nevertheless, granted all the external challenges, if we wanted to improve the education system right now, what would we do? What should we try?
One obvious answer would be to give schools more resources, more money. Of course, the money would have to be spent intelligently. Unfortunately, the most recent evidence of additional government spending to help improve inner-city schools is pretty discouraging. It’s not clear that the most recent “state-of-the-art” interventions to fix underperforming public schools work at all.
Started toward the end of the George W. Bush administration and significantly expanded under Barack Obama, the School Improvement Grants (SIG) program spent a total of $7 billion in an attempt to improve underperforming schools. These interventions included replacing principals and teachers, instructional reforms, new governance structures, increased learning time, allowing more flexibility, as well as closing or restarting entire schools, among others. In January 2017, the Obama administration released a final report on the SIG program.
In an unusually blunt government version of “we spent a lot of money and didn’t help anyone,” the report stated:
We found no effect of SIG-funded models on student outcomes…. When we examined the impacts of SIG-funded models on math and reading test scores, high school graduation, and college enrollment … for all of these student outcomes, we found no significant impacts within student and school subgroups.
The most recent intervention in New York City to “fix” failing schools has been equally unsuccessful. New York already spends the most of any state on education per pupil while offering the highest teacher pay in the country (fourth-grade reading and math scores rank the state 27th and 36th by results). In November 2014, incoming mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan to spend even more to fix 94 failing schools that had been slated to close under the prior Bloomberg administration (with the students under the Bloomberg plan slated to be enrolled in new or higher-performing schools).
In short, rather than closing the 94 schools, de Blasio’s plan was to keep the schools open, reclassify them as Renewal Schools, and spend more money—an additional $773 million—to try to improve them. Though the standards used to measure improvement were set quite low, the program largely failed.
By saying low standards were set, I mean low. Under the program, for example, a 1 percentage point improvement on state math and reading tests over a two-year period was judged a success. In other words, a school where 7 percent of students were reading at grade level only had to improve to 8 percent—two years later—to meet the standard for improvement. To be clear, a school with 92 percent of its kids failing to read at grade level could still meet improvement standards under the program.
Union leader Ernest Logan of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators asserted, “If I told you that we spent $14,000-plus a kid and you know what you only got is a 1 percent improvement, you’d run me out of the country.” After three years, only 15 percent of Renewal School students passed the state English exam and only 8 percent were able to pass the state test in math. In 2019, Mayor de Blasio, while still leaving most of the schools open, finally ended the Renewal program, stating simply, “I would not do it again that way.” The New York Times observed: “The question of how to fix broken schools is a great unknown in education, particularly in big city school districts.”
When kids are trapped in a school where 80 or 90 percent are failing, why—it might be reasonable to ask—condemn them to even one more year; especially since each year is such a critical year of development that can never be given back and likely never recovered from? Shouldn’t kids and families currently trapped in low-performing schools be given good choices—not theoretically—not someday—but right now?
While every caring and fair-minded person would likely answer a resounding “Yes!” to that last question, there is still a lot of controversy over how to go about providing these “good” choices. One avenue of thought says that we should just keep trying to improve poorly performing district public schools—more money, more resources, more training, etc. Unfortunately, the most recent state-of-the-art interventions in school improvement do not hold out much short-term hope for kids currently trapped in these underperforming schools.
Another avenue would be real public-school choice—Elizabeth Warren–style. No longer would it matter where you live. Students could apply to any school in the state they choose. There would be no preferences based on neighborhood. Ideally, the selections would be made by lottery, giving every student a fair chance to get into a school of their choice.
There are two reasons this option won’t solve our problem any time soon: One we already know. Families currently zoned for a good school would object. Many of these parents are relatively better off and better connected and would make for a powerful opposition force.
Second, there just aren’t enough good schools to go around. While elementary school students currently have some limited chance to switch out of failing zoned schools in New York City, the best district public schools are, for the most part, filled. Good choices are rare. With two-thirds of black, Hispanic, and low-income students failing the state math and English tests last year, even an average school choice isn’t likely a “good” choice.
The bottom line: Most poor and low-income kids are zoned for the worst elementary schools—it’s built into the system. We’re not very good at fixing them, and it’s almost impossible to escape to a good school in another district. Without a good elementary school education, there is almost no chance of getting into a selective middle or high school or of doing well in the middle school or high school you do attend. If you don’t graduate high school or if you graduate without a good education, it is almost impossible to successfully graduate college. Without a college education, it’s difficult to get a good-paying job.
Well, you get the picture. There’s clearly a crisis, but as Thomas Paine would say, “a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong …”
Over the past fifty years, as per-pupil spending in the United States has doubled in real terms, average reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exam haven’t improved at all. So, what should we do? How can we help poor, low-income, and all other kids, for that matter, escape from zoned public schools that aren’t doing the job? What else can we try?
Trying something else was the thinking in 2006, when my business partner, John Petry, and I helped start a new, not-for-profit charter school in New York City. A charter school is merely an independently managed public school, funded by the state and local government. The vast majority are not-for-profit. Tuition is free and admission is determined solely by a lottery open to all. Charters are one way to give another choice to students currently zoned for a failing district school.
In general, the states that maintain the highest standards for deciding who gets to open a charter school and who gets to keep running one achieve the best results. Some charter operators, like Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, KIPP Academy, and Noble Schools, do an excellent job. Others do not. But the decision to attend a charter school is always voluntary. Hopefully, parents enter a charter school lottery when that charter school appears to be a better option for their children.
If the main question confronting our major cities is— How do we create more good schools for poor, low-income, and minority children? then—the real questions for charters should be: What are the best charters doing to achieve their results? Can those schools be replicated and can those methods be shared with other schools, both district and charter?
The premise behind our new charter was simple. If a high-performing school could be opened in a low-income urban neighborhood and then successfully replicated twenty, thirty, or even forty times, it would help show that—with the right supports—poor, low-income, and minority students could achieve at the highest levels. Today, Success Academy Charter Schools manages 45 schools with 18,000 students across New York City.
Fortunately, the schools in the Success Network, run by founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz, are by all external measures performing quite well for students. Most of the schools are located in the poorest areas of New York City, with 87 percent children of color and 75 percent from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. In 2019, over 90 percent of Success students passed the New York state math and English tests, while fewer than 40 percent of similar students in the city’s district schools passed the same tests. These results made Success #1 for student achievement in all of New York, outperforming every wealthy suburban school district in the state.
Success students with disabilities outperformed district school students without disabilities. English Language Learners at Success (formerly known as ESL, or English as a Second Language) outperformed district students whose first language was English on the English exam. Test scores were not affected by race or ethnicity. Black, brown, and white kids performed equally well on both English and math tests, completely eliminating any achievement gap. In short, pretty good results. Someone might even want to figure out what’s in the water over there at Success.
Though “trying something else” doesn’t suggest we should stop trying to fix the system we already have, charters have met with fierce opposition across much of the country. In his campaign for mayor, New York’s Mayor de Blasio told a union audience that Success’s Moskowitz “has to stop being tolerated, enabled, supported.” At another campaign stop, “There’s no way in hell Eva Moskowitz should get free rent, OK?” Within a month of his election, fulfilling a campaign promise to limit the use by charter schools of public-school space, the new mayor cancelled plans for three Success schools to be sited in public-school buildings, revoking the prior Bloomberg administration’s approval for use of the space. Why?
Under the Bloomberg administration, empty public-school space was allocated to charter students under a policy of co-location with other public schools. Co-location of more than one public school in the same building is actually the norm in New York City, with most public schools sharing a building with another public school. Since charter students are public-school students (the schools are free, funded by local government but independently managed by non-profits) and charter school students would otherwise be enrolled in traditional public schools, the thinking was that they were just as entitled to use empty public-school classrooms.
In the 2016–2017 school year, there were still 192 public school buildings in New York City with more than 300 empty classroom seats and 72 buildings with over 500 empty seats. So, why was there no room for three schools from the high-performing Success Charter Network? Diane Ravitch, an NYU professor and fierce critic of charter schools, revealed in an article she authored for the Huffington Post the “objective” criteria de Blasio used in his decision to deny public-school space to the three Success charter schools. Unfortunately for Success, none of those criteria had anything to do with whether the school was good at teaching students.
In the 1970s, my freshman-year economics professor, the great Herb Levine, was a world-renowned expert on the workings of the Soviet economy—though “workings” often wasn’t the right word. My professor memorably explained:
I arrived at the Moscow train station at 8:10 a.m. for the scheduled 8:20 train. But no train arrived at 8:20. Neither was there a train at 8:30 or even 8:40. Finally, I walked over to the station office to find out what was going on. That’s when the proud station manager let me know, “The glorious 8:20 train came through at 8:05 this morning!”
Of course, the main point of his story was clear. This was ridiculous. It makes no sense for the train to be early if it ends up carrying no passengers. The trains were working, but somebody, somewhere had set both the wrong incentives for employees and the wrong standards for measuring success. In the centrally controlled communist system, with no input from customers and no checks from the marketplace, these misguided incentives and standards weren’t being corrected. The train was literally leaving the station with no one on it.
In New York City, and in every other major city in the United States, the centrally controlled education train keeps rolling for adults in the system, but most inner-city kids aren’t on it. It’s almost absurd that school quality—how well the school teaches students—would be completely ignored when determining which public schools (district and charter) should have access to public-school space.
But why is there so much opposition to charter schools, even schools performing well for students? My guess? There are likely a few reasons. First, education money follows the student. That means that if a student gets into a charter school, the government funding for that student goes to the charter school, not to the district school they would have attended. Though charters are also public schools (open to all through lottery rather than by neighborhood), the argument is that charters drain funding from traditional district schools—and most kids attend district schools.
Second, most district school employees in New York are unionized; most charter school principals and teachers are not. Third, in New York City, for example, the mayor has central control over all district public schools (which includes elements of curriculum, work rules, discipline policies, real estate, etc.). He has limited power over independently run public charters. In other words, every new charter student removes money, power, and control from districts, unions, and local government.
Why specifically did de Blasio turn down the three Success schools? According to Ravitch, one of the new criteria for deciding which public schools get to use empty public-school space stated that the mayor “would not open any school with less than 250 students because the school would be too small to meet the needs of the students.” In other words, no public-school space for charter schools with fewer than 250 students.
At a minimum, that certainly sounds objective. Unless, of course, I also told you that there is a New York state law that says that if you open a new charter school that has more than 250 kids in it during its first two years of operation, the school is automatically unionized. That’s right. More than 250 kids in your school during the first two years? The school is automatically unionized. (How this law benefits kids is tough to discern.)
Since two of the Success schools being denied public space were newly chartered schools, they had to stay under the 250-student cap during their first two years or they would be unionized. The third school slated to be closed by de Blasio, Success Academy Harlem Central Middle School, had 194 mostly minority, low-income, and high-achieving Success students. Luckily, the school had just tested second out of over 600 middle schools on the state’s math exam.
From a political standpoint, this high-performing school was probably a poor school to pick on. Making matters worse, the co-located district middle school, P.S. 149, where the Success students were being denied space and where many of the Success students would likely have ended up had their school been closed, had only 5 percent of its students passing the state math test the prior year. With 194 easy-to-point-to kids being harmed, bad press eventually pressured the mayor to back down and he quickly found space for the three Success schools.
But what was the big deal in the first place? Why wouldn’t a charter school want to be “automatically” unionized? Well, consider a few interesting data points:
Success opened its first elementary school in Harlem in 2006 with just two grades, kindergarten and first grade. Opening with just two grades was an effort to stay beneath the 250-student limit during the first two years of operation. The school hired a total of 13 lead and assistant teachers to work at the new school. As you can imagine, it’s not so easy to staff, create a new curriculum, establish a teacher development program, and do all the other things necessary to open a new school.
Unfortunately, after the first year of operation, the school decided it needed to let 4 of the original 13 teachers go because of disappointing performance. (Note: Eva Moskowitz now believes that with current levels of teacher support and training at Success, support that did not exist in 2006, she might have been able to keep 2 or even 3 of those 4.) Admittedly, letting 4 of 13 teachers go after only one year is likely too many and indicates a combination of poor hiring decisions and suboptimal levels of teacher support. On the other hand, the 4 teachers Success asked to leave in their one elementary school with only two grades in 2006 were more teachers than the entire New York City school system let go that same year from a tenured teacher staff of over 55,000 across more than 1,700 schools.
When combined with a 200-page union contract with limiting work and supervision rules and virtually no effective provision to remove teachers who are not educating students at an acceptable level, most charters prefer to have more flexibility when designing their school model. In fact, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) tried to show that its work contract was not an impediment to the effective operation of charter schools by opening its own charter school in 2005.
After several conditional extensions, the UFT school was finally closed by the state a decade later as one of the lowest performing in New York. In 2014, just 1.2 percent of seventh graders passed the state reading test and 2 percent of eighth graders passed the state math test. UFT head Michael Mulgrew blamed the state’s test-score requirements and stated, “… a student or a school is more than a test score, and SUNY’s [the State University of New York’s] narrow focus on state tests has meant that overall our elementary and middle-school results have not matched SUNY’s benchmarks.”
At the UFT school’s inception in 2005, Randi Weingarten, Mulgrew’s predecessor as UFT chief, said, “Our schools will show real, quantifiable student achievement—and with those results, finally dispel the misguided and simplistic notion that the union contract is an impediment to success.”
Of course, it shouldn’t really matter whether a school is unionized or not. It makes more sense to support great public schools of any kind, district or charter, unionized or non-unionized. After all, there’s a desperate need for more high-performing schools in every major city, particularly for low-income and minority children. Yet, charter schools, particularly high-performing charter schools, have met opposition across much of the country.
Massachusetts, for instance, has seventy-eight of the best- performing charter schools in the United States. According to Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker: “Our charter schools are the envy of the nation, delivering amazing results for over 40,000 kids here in the Commonwealth, almost all of whom come from disadvantaged communities and underperforming school districts.” In fact, he continued, “most of the highest performing schools in the Commonwealth are charter schools.” Over 30,000 kids remain on waiting lists still hoping to get into a Massachusetts charter school.
Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) stated that “Boston’s charter schools are arguably the strongest in the country,” with one year of learning in a charter school equivalent to two or more years of learning in a district school (the Stanford study adjusted to make sure it was comparing students of comparable backgrounds). Researchers from MIT compared students who had won the lottery to enter a charter school with students who had lost the lottery. Their conclusion? Charter schools in Massachusetts cause large differences in student achievement. The Quarterly Journal of Economics estimated that four years of charter high school enrollment in Massachusetts were enough to completely close the black-white achievement gap in both reading and math.
So, why in 2016 did Massachusetts vote overwhelmingly to ban the further growth of charter schools? Charter opponents in Massachusetts (backed by, of all people, Senator Elizabeth Warren and an anti-charter lobby largely financed by the state and national teachers’ unions) argued that charters drain local school districts of hundreds of millions in funding each year. How? Simply because school funding in Massachusetts follows the student. If a student enrolls in a charter school, the charter school gets the state funding for that student. The local district school, which no longer teaches the student, does not.
In other words, the argument is that less money for district public schools is bad, period. And that’s a fascinating argument. If you believe it, it effectively precludes the state from trying any educational alternative other than the district public schools. It doesn’t matter if the district schools are doing a good job or not. It doesn’t matter if charters are doing a good job or not. If the district schools teach fewer students, it doesn’t matter. According to this argument, money can’t leave the district system ever, even if all the students leave.
I’m in favor of democracy, and Massachusetts voters should get whatever they want, especially when it comes to their kids. On the other hand, charter schools open almost exclusively in “disadvantaged communities and underperforming school districts.” The only way a charter school gets students in the first place is when parents are unhappy with their local school choice. In effect, parents vote with their feet when they choose a charter school. If there isn’t demand, charter schools don’t get any students.
Yet, wealthy and middle-class suburban neighborhoods in Massachusetts voted overwhelmingly against charters. But for the most part, charters don’t open in suburban neighborhoods with good schools. So, effectively, wealthy and middle-class Massachusetts residents who had the resources to move where they were happy with their district schools voted that parents trapped in disadvantaged communities with underperforming schools shouldn’t have the chance to find a better school for their children.
But here was the real tragedy of the vote to ban further growth of Massachusetts charters. When a district school loses a student to a charter school, under state law the district school still receives 100 percent of the funding for the student in the first year after he or she leaves. That’s right—the district school is paid in full for the student who is no longer there. But that’s not all. After that first year, for each of the next five years, the district school continues to receive 25 percent of the per-pupil state funds for the long-departed student. In addition, the district schools are reimbursed for facilities costs and receive additional local funding.
In other words, funding per pupil goes up for district students. In the five years after 2011, the Boston Public School budget for district schools increased 23.4 percent while district school enrollment decreased.
Hopefully, you get the picture. Growth in charter schools doesn’t hurt district school funding at all. In fact, during those same five years, district school math and English scores improved significantly both in Boston and the next ten Massachusetts districts with the highest concentration of charter schools.
So, once again, where’s the harm in allowing poor and low-income kids to have the choice to attend a better school—a charter school where they have the chance to learn, according to the Massachusetts secretary of education, “at twice the rate of their district-school peers.” If the Massachusetts process to compensate district schools for the loss of students to another educational choice outside the district school system doesn’t pass muster (and the arguments and multimillion-dollar campaigns against charters don’t change regardless of how much extra support district schools receive), then it’s hard to imagine any compensation scheme in any state that would be judged acceptable.
But the arguments against high-performing charters don’t stop there: Top charters do well on tests because they’re just test prep factories. Charters steal the district schools’ best kids and most involved parents. Charters conspire to throw out the worst students. And on and on.
Some of the claims are demonstrably false, while others are easy to make adjustments for. Though top-performing charters do attract many of the most informed and involved parents, that advantage can’t explain the incredible achievements of low-income and minority students at the most successful charters.
In 2016, 150 new students entered Success Academy after attending third grade at another New York school the prior year. In New York, state testing begins in the third grade. After less than one year at Success, these new students went from 39 percent passing the state math exam at their old school (below the city average) to 92 percent. In English, scores jumped over 40 percent to 85 percent passing, more than double the city rate. Clearly, the great results couldn’t be due to Success getting better students or more engaged parents. These were the same students and the same parents. The only difference? These lucky students literally won the lottery and had the opportunity to attend an excellent charter school.
Getting better kids or parents wouldn’t explain how Success students with disabilities outperform district students without disabilities; or how English Language Learners (ELL) at Success outperform non-ELL students in district schools in English; how poor, low-income, and homeless children outperform children in the wealthiest suburban school districts; or how students accepted by lottery outperform students who have “tested in” to Gifted and Talented schools.
Throwing out the worst students? Most charters have significantly lower attrition rates than similar district schools. Test prep factory? How about just prep. Many charter students spend 30 percent more time in school than their district counterparts, with only a small percentage of that time on test prep. Besides, if a student can’t read or do simple math, it’s hard to imagine how rich the rest of the school experience can be.
And what about the argument that charters harm district schools? Some studies support the opposite conclusion. How? Apparently, competing for students can actually have positive effects on district schools.
A study of New York City schools performed by Temple University showed that, similar to the effects in Massachusetts, “students in district schools do better when charters open nearby: students in these schools earn higher scores on reading and math tests and are less likely to repeat a grade. The closer the schools the larger the effect.” The study also found that the more charters there are in a neighborhood, the better the district schools in that neighborhood do on state tests. It concluded that charter school entry produces no significant demographic changes in district schools, including no changes for district schools in the percentage of underrepresented minority groups, special education students, or students that require individualized education programs.
But wait a second. What about fairness? How is it fair to struggling district schools if charter schools attract many of the most informed and involved parents? Let’s think this through.
Taking a look at Gifted and Talented schools—are those fair? These are schools that literally test for the highest-performing and most talented students and then, by design, remove them from regular district schools. Maybe we shouldn’t allow them to exist?
Or what about good district schools? Are those fair? These are schools that attract wealthy and middle-class parents who can afford to choose neighborhoods with the best schools. Should they be able to move their children from neighborhoods with worse schools? Or maybe they should be able to move, but be forced to leave their children in their old school from the original neighborhood?
How about the best schools in low-income neighborhoods? School performance data for most schools is published online. Should savvier parents with limited means have an advantage just because they can figure out which are the best schools in their price range? Solving this real estate riddle and then actually moving a family on a limited budget takes talent and initiative. How is this fair to the children of less savvy parents if the move is away from a neighborhood with lower-performing schools and less engaged parents? Should this even be allowed?
How is any of this different than allowing parents in low-income neighborhoods a choice to enter a lottery for a high-performing charter school? What if we renamed charter schools “choice schools for low-income parents”? Who would be against that? Or maybe, everyone should have a chance to send their kids to a higher-performing school except low-income parents? If we think that’s fair, that’s actually great—because that’s exactly the way our current system works.
Finally, if you are generically against all charter schools—whether they work well or not—by definition, you are also against trying anything else outside the current system. But what if we renamed charters “trying-something-else schools”? Who would suggest never “trying something else,” especially when the current system is failing almost all of those who need it the most?
Of course, it would be nice if successful charter schools were studied, supported, and expanded—not banned, sued, and attacked. Success has been sued eighteen times over the past seven years, almost exclusively by parties with an affiliation to the teachers’ union. It maintains a full-time legal staff of eleven and, in addition, has required the pro bono services of at least six outside law firms to help defend itself. Though far from perfect, Success has a record of fifteen wins and one loss. Two suits are still pending, and until Success becomes less of a “threat” (ironically, by its students performing less impressively), there will likely be many more to follow.
Many top charters make their curriculum and teaching methods available online. Success runs an Education Institute to share its methods, and like many other successful charters, each year the charter network conducts hundreds of school tours for educators from around the world. Yet, in twelve years of operation, only a small handful of New York City district school teachers have come to tour a Success school.
In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, James Stewart in his famous speech on the Senate floor contends that lost causes are the only causes worth fighting for. Particularly at my age, I’m not sure that makes much sense. But charters aren’t a lost cause. Further growth is severely threatened, though—particularly in states like New York, California, and Massachusetts where charter students are achieving at the highest levels.
Yet charters, at only 7 percent of all public schools, aren’t the major issue. Given their small overall footprint, the continuing political opposition to even the best charters and the natural aversion to changing the status quo, more charter schools won’t solve the inequalities in our public-school system any time soon.
So, for most poor and minority children currently stuck in a system that is set up to fail almost all of them, what hope does that leave?
At the height of his career, I posed this question to my class of MBA students: What strategy would you use to beat Tiger Woods?
At the time, the challenge seemed insurmountable. Woods had won fourteen major championships. Even other professionals had a tough time trying to beat him. How could an average hacker ever hope to win?
The proposed solution for beating Tiger was simple: Don’t play him in golf!
When it comes to finding a solution for the vast majority of poor and minority children with almost no chance of making it to college graduation under our current system, the challenge appears daunting. Given the more than $1 trillion spent each year on prekindergarten through university education in this country, making major improvements to the system is, at best, an epic long-term challenge. Expecting major improvements over the short term seems unreasonable.
So, if you are one of the ten out of eleven poor or minority students entering a major city high school this year with little likelihood of graduating college, what hope does that leave?
Maybe more than you think.
I was sitting at a board meeting for the Success Charter Network and up on the screen came a chart listing the top 25 elementary schools in New York based on the previous year’s fourth-grade state test scores. With over 2,400 elementary schools in the state, making this list indicated that your school had performed among the top 1 percent. The education leaders at Success were justifiably proud that 18 of the top 25 schools were part of the Success Academy network.
The leaders also mentioned that 6 of the remaining 7 were Gifted and Talented schools. Their point was that Gifted and Talented schools are selective; students must pass a test to attend them. This gave these schools an edge over public charter schools, like Success, that accept all of their students through an open lottery. Interesting, to me at least, was that this still left one ordinary district school on the top 25 list. Who were those guys?
As it turned out, “those guys” weren’t located in a wealthy suburban school district like Scarsdale or Great Neck. P.S. 172 was a New York City district school in a lower-income neighborhood in Brooklyn with 87 percent of its students qualifying for free or reduced lunch. Jack (Giacomo) Spatola had been the school’s principal for the past thirty-four years. I visited P.S. 172 on several occasions and was hoping that Jack would just let me in on the secret. His school’s results weren’t merely good—they were spectacular.
In 2017, 99 percent of the school’s students with disabilities passed the state math test and 94 percent passed the state English exam. Across the city, students without disabilities performed less than half as well. More important, that meant that almost every child with disabilities throughout the entire school was able to read and do math at grade level. For English Language Learners at P.S. 172, over 90 percent passed the state English exam, compared to 9 percent of ELL students across the city. Jack’s ELL kids were passing the English exam at a rate 10 times better than similar kids at other schools. What was going on?
It was easy for me to understand some of the systematic advantages top charter school networks have that help them achieve such good results: advantages like 30 percent more time in school than in district schools; the flexibility to create, adapt, and improve curriculum and training methods quickly; the right to choose and keep only the teachers they want; and an ability to create data systems and instructional designs that help identify and share best practices across schools with no bureaucratic impediments. Jack’s school didn’t have any of these advantages.
Yet, Jack’s students were achieving comparable and, in some cases, even better results. After decades of leading one of the top schools in the state, no doubt plenty of smart and involved parents figured out how to move into Jack’s neighborhood. But practically every single child in his school—with disabilities or without, English Language Learners or not—was achieving at high levels. His school was receiving even less funding than the average city public school. What was Jack doing?
Then again, with over 2,400 elementary schools in the state, only one can have the “best” principal. Given his extensive experience and clear talents as an educator, maybe that was Jack. Most likely, the average school will have only an average principal. So, in the greater scheme of things, how much can the accomplishments of one great school or one great principal mean for a state that has to teach well over two million children each year or a country that must educate tens of millions?
Sure, Jack shared many great principles, but most seemed like common sense:
Every decision must be focused on children.
Every child has the right to a quality education.
Like the Romans, look at what works and try to improve on it.
Lead by example and create opportunities for students and teachers to achieve their goal.
No matter how tough the challenge, don’t let educators forget the underlying nobility of their mission.
Jack was clearly an inspirational leader; most of his teaching staff had been with him for fifteen years or more. But he also had plenty of criticism for the current system, much of which we’ve heard before:
The system is set up for adults—that’s the biggest obstacle to all children receiving a quality education.
The system doesn’t move in inches, it moves in millimeters.
Each new school chancellor gets rid of whatever the predecessor did—whether some of it was working or not—they stay blind to successes.
Orders come down from the top to “go fishing” over there for some educational goal without any clear connection to the real purpose of fishing—which is to bring back fish!
When Mayor de Blasio’s new administration came into office, 2½ hours of weekly instructional time was cut from the classroom in favor of more time for teacher development and parent involvement. My teachers and I thought that was a terrible idea and refused to take away any significant instructional time from the kids. The Department of Education and the Central UFT [teachers’ union] would not accept our plan. We resisted, implemented our plan and threatened to go to the press and picket in front of the school. I even told them “What are you going to do, arrest me?” They eventually approved our plan with one slight modification—5 fewer minutes a week of professional development time for our paraprofessionals. So, we agreed. Part of my job is to protect the kids within this building from the politics and other forces coming from outside.
Given his incredible successes with special education kids and ELLs, Jack’s thoughts on how we should handle things in this area also had to be valuable:
We base our system on pulling kids out of the classroom to receive special education or English language help. That’s crazy. They miss valuable time in the classroom where they fall behind on what is being taught, their lessons become disjointed, and they also miss the chance to master learning in a classroom setting. At our school, we “push in” our extra help to the classroom, we don’t pull kids out of class. I got turned in to the Department of Education for violating the rules and not providing mandated services, but we didn’t want to pull kids out for 7 of the 25 classroom periods. Given our success, I threatened to go to the media and they backed down. Now, they don’t require “push in” services but at least they “allow” them.
And finally, though Jack obviously has strong opinions in many areas, he shared his one fundamental principle for creating a successful school and perhaps the key to his students’ achievements:
High expectations for every child.
Unfortunately, that’s not how the system is set up. The system thinks in terms of gifted programs, not high expectations for everyone. If one plan doesn’t work for a child, we have to be ready with the next and the next and the next. We keep trying until we find a solution that is right for that child. Every school is diverse—each has a diversity of learners. The bottom line is that all the stakeholders must believe that every child, regardless of background, “can.”
Think about that. If Jack is right that every child “can,” that’s incredibly powerful. It’s certainly true that almost every child who has the opportunity to attend Jack’s school “can,” with disabilities or without. It’s also true that students who attend other top district and charter schools “can” as well. It’s probably not a coincidence that most successful schools share Jack’s “high expectations” mantra.
Sadly, most urban schoolchildren in this country don’t have the opportunity to attend a great school. Given the overall scale and difficulty of the teaching challenge, a centrally controlled Soviet-style school system that imposes limited consequences for poor performance and few incentives for good performance, and a political reality that makes it almost impossible to close failing schools, this situation is unlikely to change soon. And whether you agree with me about the causes or prognosis, it is inarguable that our current urban education system is unfairly biased against poor and minority children and failing almost all of them.
But luckily, that’s not my point.
My point is that if it’s really true that almost every child “can,” we have a lot to work with! If it’s really true that, given the right support, almost all kids are smart enough and capable enough to achieve at high levels, maybe we can take advantage of that fact. Maybe we can design an alternative, a way to work around the current system.
Mark Spitznagel in his The Dao of Capital describes how conifers (cone-bearing trees) have learned to survive in the evolutionary battle with seed-bearing angiosperms (stay with me, it gets better …). In general, angiosperms grow faster and reproduce more efficiently than conifers. As a result, they end up winning the battle for sunlight and the best soil. Although angiosperms are able to crowd out conifers for the prime real estate, over time, conifers developed the ability to grow and survive in rocky, exposed areas with inferior soil. At least in this tougher environment, conifers are able to grow without competition for sunlight. Though conifers prefer and grow better in rich soil, overall their best chance for survival is to learn how to grow and thrive in a less hospitable environment. Spitznagel names the conifers’ strategy the roundabout.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a roundabout strategy for education? Sure, almost every child would be better off if they had an opportunity to attend a great school starting at an early age. There’s no argument about that. But that’s not in the cards any time soon. And as things currently stand, the unfairness only gets worse and the opportunities more lopsided as kids move through the system.
A bad elementary school education usually sets students up for a poor middle and high school education. Poorly educated elementary students don’t have an opportunity to attend selective middle and high schools. Teachers in less-selective middle and high schools are left with the almost impossible job of trying to teach students who are often grades behind in reading and math skills. The problem compounds through high school as unqualified students receive “social promotion” to the next grade based on age rather than academic performance.
Arne Duncan, Obama’s secretary of education and former head of the Chicago Public Schools, opens his education memoir this way:
Education runs on lies. That’s probably not what you’d expect from a former secretary of education, but it’s the truth.
Duncan recounts his experience tutoring Calvin Williams, a rising high school senior and major college basketball prodigy. He was supposed to prepare Calvin for the ACT college entrance exam, and though Calvin was a B honor roll student from a supportive family, Calvin wasn’t going to be playing basketball in college. Calvin had been lied to; he was entering his senior year of high school reading and writing at a second- or third-grade level.
Calvin’s story isn’t unique. In New York City, an above- average urban district, roughly 80 percent of high school graduates entering City University of New York community colleges can’t pass the college readiness exam. These kids must take remedial classes before they are able to enroll in courses for college credit. With hurdles like that, no wonder so few ultimately make it through college. And those are the statistics for high school graduates. Over 30 percent of poor and minority students have already dropped out of high school before qualifying to take that college readiness exam. Without even a high school diploma (regardless of its dubious validity), their prospects in the job market are even worse.
Maybe we need some other options. Ready for the roundabout?