The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

  Almost every KIPP school is a charter school, and most are middle schools (grades five through eight). In contrast to regular public schools, KIPP schools have longer days (nine and a half hours), some Saturday classes, and three weeks of summer school; typically, a KIPP school provides 60 percent more time in school than a regular public school. Students, parents, and teachers sign a contract agreeing to fulfill specific responsibilities. The central organization does not define KIPP’s pedagogy and curriculum; it leaves these decisions to individual school leaders.

  In the demands they make on students, teachers, and parents, the KIPP schools are reminiscent of the American public schools of the 1940s, or even the 1920s, before the onset of class-action lawsuits and union contracts. In those days, it was not unusual to encounter schools with strict disciplinary codes and long working hours (though not nine-and-a-half-hour days).

  Despite its successes, KIPP has its detractors. Critics question the applicability of the KIPP model to public education in general. One persistent question is whether KIPP enrolls all kinds of students, as regular public schools must. Like other successful charter schools, KIPP admits students by lottery; by definition, only the most motivated families apply for a slot. Charters with lotteries tend to attract the best students in poor neighborhoods, leaving the public schools in the same neighborhood worse off because they have lost some of their top-performing students. They also tend to enroll fewer of the students with high needs—English-language learners and those needing special education.35

  The students who remain in KIPP schools for four or more years tend to achieve large test score gains. Most KIPP schools consistently outperform traditional public schools in the same neighborhood. But KIPP schools often have a high attrition rate. Apparently many students and their parents are unable or unwilling to comply with KIPP’s stringent demands. A 2008 study of KIPP schools in San Francisco’s Bay Area found that 60 percent of the students who started in fifth grade were gone by the end of eighth grade. The students who quit tended to be lower-performing students. The exit of such a large proportion of low-performing students—for whatever reasons—makes it difficult to analyze the performance of KIPP students in higher grades. In addition, teacher turnover is high at KIPP schools, as well as other charter schools, no doubt because of the unusually long hours. Thus, while the KIPP schools obtain impressive results for the students who remain enrolled for four years, the high levels of student attrition and teacher turnover raise questions about the applicability of the KIPP model to the regular public schools.36

  KIPP has demonstrated that youngsters from some of the toughest neighborhoods in the nation can succeed in a safe and structured environment, if they have supportive parents and are willing to work hard, spend long days in school, and comply with the school’s expectations. Thus far, public schools have not copied their methods. Regular public schools must accept everyone who applies, including the students who leave KIPP schools. They can’t throw out the kids who do not work hard or the kids who have many absences or the kids who are disrespectful or the kids whose parents are absent or inattentive. They have to find ways to educate even those students who don’t want to be there. That’s the dilemma of public education.

  The theory of the charter movement is that competition with the regular public schools will lead to improvements in both sectors, and that choice is a rising tide that lifts all boats. But in reality, the regular public schools are at a huge disadvantage in competition with charter schools. It is not only because charter schools may attract the most motivated students, may discharge laggards, and may enforce a tough disciplinary code, but also because the charters often get additional financial resources from their corporate sponsors, enabling them to offer smaller classes, after-school and enrichment activities, and laptop computers for every student. Many charter schools enforce discipline codes that would likely be challenged in court if they were adopted in regular public schools; and because charter schools are schools of choice, they find it easier to avoid, eliminate, or counsel out low-performing and disruptive students.

  Yet, even with their advantages, charter schools—like all new schools—face daunting challenges. Reformers declare their intention to open new schools as though this would solve the problems of low-performing schools. But new schools cannot be mass-produced or turned out with a cookie-cutter design. Opening a new school is difficult. It involves starting with or recruiting a strong leader and a capable faculty, obtaining facilities, developing a program, assembling a student body, creating an effective administrative structure, and building a culture. Getting a new school up and running may take as many as five years. Some will succeed, some will be no different from the schools they replaced, and others will fail.

  Reformers imagine that it is easy to create a successful school, but it is not. They imagine that the lessons of a successful school are obvious and can be easily transferred to other schools, just as one might take an industrial process or a new piece of machinery and install it in a new plant without error. But a school is successful for many reasons, including the personalities of its leader and teachers; the social interactions among them; the culture of the school; the students and their families; the way the school implements policies and programs dictated by the district, the state, and the federal government; the quality of the school’s curriculum and instruction; the resources of the school and the community; and many other factors. When a school is successful, it is hard to know which factor was most important or if it was a combination of factors. Even the principal and teachers may not know for sure. A reporter from the local newspaper will arrive and decide that it must be the principal or a particular program, but the reporter will very likely be wrong. Success, whether defined as high test scores or graduation rates or student satisfaction, cannot be bottled and dispensed at will. This may explain why there are so few examples of low-performing schools that have been “turned around” into high-performing schools. And it may explain why schools are not very good at replicating the success of model schools, whether the models are charters or regular public schools. Certainly schools can improve and learn from one another, but school improvements—if they are real—occur incrementally, as a result of sustained effort over years.

  HAVE CHARTER SCHOOLS LIVED up to the promises of their promoters? Given the wide diversity of charter schools, it’s hard to reach a singular judgment about them. In terms of quality, charter schools run the gamut. Some are excellent, some are dreadful, and most are somewhere in between. It is in the nature of markets that some succeed, some are middling, and others fail.

  In 2004, a furious controversy erupted between advocates and opponents of charter schools when it turned out that the federal government had tested a national sample of charter schools in 2003 but had not released its findings. The federal government did not release the data on charter school performance when it announced the results for states and the nation in November 2003. The charter scores went unnoticed until the results were discovered on the federal testing agency’s Web site by staff members of the American Federation of Teachers. They learned that NAEP showed no measurable differences on tests of reading and mathematics between fourth-grade students from similar racial/ethnic backgrounds in charter schools and in regular public schools. Among poor students, fourth graders in regular public schools outperformed those in charter schools in both subjects. Overall, charter and public students performed similarly in reading, but public school students performed better in mathematics. The AFT published its own analysis in August 2004, which raised the question of why the testing data about charters had not been released in a timely manner. The effectiveness of charter schools was especially important, the AFT team argued, because the No Child Left Behind legislation proposed to improve low-performing public schools by turning them into charter schools. If charter schools were no more successful than regular public schools, then the “remedy” made no sense. The AFT leaked its discovery to Diana Jean Schemo, an educati
on reporter at the New York Times, whose front-page story stated that “the findings, buried in mountains of data the Education Department released without public announcement, dealt a blow to supporters of the charter school movement, including the Bush administration.”37

  The data wars were on! Charter school supporters were outraged and took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to complain about the unfairness of judging charter schools that were serving far more disadvantaged students than their peers in regular public schools and to stress that the federal data said nothing about whether charter students were making gains. In December 2004, Harvard University economist Caroline M. Hoxby published a comprehensive study comparing charter schools and their nearby public schools. Hoxby analyzed the performance of virtually every charter elementary school student in the nation and found that they were more likely to be proficient in both reading and math than public school students, and that the charter school advantage increased with the age of the charter schools; students in charter schools that had been operating for more than nine years showed the largest gains.38

  But that was not the end of the data wars. Critics of charter schools associated with the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute (EPI) published The Charter School Dust-Up, reviewing the evidence as well as the controversy over the NAEP charter report, and concluded that charter schools were a risky venture in education. The critics quoted one of the leading charter boosters, Chester E. Finn Jr., who wrote:Some of the best schools I’ve ever been in are charter schools, some of which are blowing the lid off test scores in such vexed communities as Boston, New York, and Chicago. And some of the worst—and flakiest—schools I’ve ever been in are charter schools. Yet people are choosing them.39

  The EPI authors said that the question to be answered was not whether charter schools, on average, outperform regular public schools, “but rather whether the underperformance of some charter schools is a price worth paying for the overperformance of others.” They were particularly concerned that the response of charter supporters to the flap over the NAEP scores “reflects an unfortunate shift of some charter school advocacy from a pragmatic quest to identify school improvement strategies to an ideological prejudice against regular public schools.” They recalled that one of the original goals of the charter movement was to engage in experimentation to see what works best, but the repeated claim that charter schools were superior to regular schools suggests that “experimentation is not necessary because charter school operators already know what works.”40

  In the years that followed, study after study compared educational performance in private schools and public schools, or charter schools and regular public schools. The only surprise was how small and usually insignificant were the gains recorded by any sector.

  On a Friday in July 2006, the U.S. Department of Education quietly released a study comparing students in public and private schools. The timing suggested that the department did not want to call attention to the study, which found that public school students performed as well as or better than comparable children in private schools. Private school students scored higher on average, but their advantage disappeared when they were compared to public school students with similar characteristics. In mathematics, fourth-grade students in public schools were nearly half a year ahead of their peers in private schools. Only in eighth-grade reading did private school students surpass their public school counterparts.41

  In the same year, another study appeared comparing the performance of students in public schools, private schools, and charter schools on the 2003 NAEP mathematics assessment. The authors, Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski, maintained that mathematics scores offered a clearer indication of the school’s effectiveness than reading scores, because mathematics is influenced less by the child’s home experiences than reading. After controlling for demographic and other variables, the study found that the advantages of private schools and charter schools disappeared and, in some instances, demonstrated the superiority of regular public schools. The researchers concluded that the regular public schools performed “relatively well when compared to demographically similar private and charter schools, without the remedy of major, private-style structural reforms in their governance and management.”42

  When the 2007 NAEP test results were released, they showed that students in charter schools had lower scores than students in public schools in fourth-grade reading, fourth-grade mathematics, and eighth-grade mathematics. Only in eighth-grade reading did charter school students score the same as public school students. When students were compared by race and ethnicity, there was little difference in the test scores of students in charter schools and regular public schools (except that eighth-grade Hispanic students in charter schools did better in math). As Education Week reported, “The picture that emerges from the growing data set appears mixed for charter schools. While many analysts urge caution in using NAEP to judge the 4,300-school charter sector, the latest data do not bolster the early hopes of charter advocates that the sector as a whole would significantly outperform regular public schools.”43

  Meanwhile, studies of charter schools compared to regular public schools continued to appear, and they reached dissimilar conclusions.

  A 2009 study by Thomas Kane and colleagues compared Boston’s charter schools, pilot schools (which have a high degree of autonomy in budget, staffing, and curriculum but are still part of the district), and traditional public schools and reached a verdict favorable to charters. Charters in Massachusetts have an impressive record of success; in 2008, four of the top ten public schools on the state’s test of eighth-grade mathematics were charter schools, as were three of the top ten on the state’s test of tenth-grade mathematics. The study concluded that charters “appear to have a consistently positive impact on student achievement” in both middle schools and high schools. The gains were especially large in middle school mathematics, where students moved from the 50th to the 69th percentile in performance in one year—about half the size of the black-white achievement gap. Part of the study compared students who won the lottery to those who applied but did not win the lottery. Sociologist Jennifer Jennings admired the study but pointed out that the lottery portion of the study included only the most successful of the city’s charter schools—zero of five charter elementary schools, four of thirteen charter middle schools, and three of eleven charter high schools. The remainder were “not oversubscribed enough to require a lottery.” The Kane report acknowledged that “substantial” gains were found in “high-demand Charter Schools with complete records” and warned that “these results should not be interpreted as showing that Boston Charters always produce test score gains.”44 It showed that successful charter schools are very successful; it did not show that all charters are successful.

  Given their outstanding results, charters in Boston enjoy a good reputation. Some are exemplary schools. But an analysis by the Boston Globe in 2009 determined that compared to regular public schools, Boston’s charter schools enrolled a smaller percentage of students who were in special education or who were English-language learners. English-language learners were nearly one-fifth of the public school enrollment, yet the city’s charters (with only one exception) contained fewer than 4 percent of such students. Six of Boston’s sixteen charters had not a single English-language learner. The Globe wondered whether charters achieved “dazzling” test scores “because of innovative teaching or because they enroll fewer disadvantaged students.”45 This analysis by no means diminishes the accomplishments of Boston’s top charter schools—such as Academy of the Pacific Rim, Boston Collegiate, Boston Prep, and Roxbury Prep—but it leaves open the question of how to educate the neediest students and which schools will do so.

  A national study in 2009 concluded that students in most charter schools performed no better than those in traditional public schools. Researchers at Stanford University, led by economist Margaret E. Raymond, analyzed data from 2,403 charter schools in fi
fteen states and the District of Columbia (about half of all charters and 70 percent of all charter students in the nation at the time) and found that 37 percent had learning gains that were significantly below those of local public schools; 46 percent had gains that were no different; and only 17 percent showed growth that was significantly better. More than 80 percent of the charter schools in the study performed either the same as or worse than the local public schools. Raymond concluded, “This study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well as their TPS [traditional public school] counterparts. Further, tremendous variation in academic quality among charters is the norm, not the exception. The problem of quality is the most pressing issue that charter schools and their supporters face.” She commented to Education Week, “If this study shows anything, it shows that we’ve got a two-to-one margin of bad charters to good charters.” The Stanford study created demographic matches between students in charter schools and local public schools. The results were sobering, especially since the study was funded by such pro-charter groups as the Walton Family Foundation and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.46

  In the same year, however, Caroline Hoxby and her colleagues at Stanford reached a starkly different conclusion. In a study of New York City charter schools, Hoxby determined that disadvantaged students who attended charter schools for nine consecutive years, from kindergarten to eighth grade, closed most of the “Scarsdale-Harlem” achievement gap. She compared students who won the lottery with students who entered but did not win, matching equally motivated students, to demonstrate that the charters did not attain great results by “creaming” the best students. This finding suggested to editorialists at the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and other national media that charter schools were the silver bullet that could finally solve the most deep-seated problems of urban education.47