| The Harvard Salient | November 4, 1996 |
| Point - Counterpoint | |
|---|---|
A man stood up in the back of Longfellow Hall and asked, "But doesn't your little scheme depend on having dedicated teachers?"
"Why, yes," the panelist answered, "I think our students deserve dedicated teachers."
"Even at lower wages?"
"We pay competetive wages at our school"
"Even by the hour?"
"Professionals, as I recall, don't get paid by the hour."
This "scheme," as one of Harvard's best and brightest Education School students termed it, is known as charter schools, and far from being some sort of bureaucratic conspiracy which would be impossible to implement, it may actually have a significant role in saving public education. The panelist responsible for silencing this narrow-minded graduate student was Sarah Kass, principal and co-founder of the City on a Hill Charter School in Boston. Ms. Kass was one of seven experts who participated on a panel on October 23 entitled "Charter Schools: Raiders or Reformers." The panel was, unusually enough for a Harvard-sponsored event, unbalanced in favor of charter schools as a method of education reform, by a margin of five to two. Shockingly enough, the two dissenting panelists were an academic, Professor Bruce Fuller from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Boston public school teacher.
While the message of the panel was met with some cynicism especially from an audience mostly comprised of Education School students, the event was well-attended by many people outside of the Harvard community whose interest in the education that charter schools are giving its students was much more than academic. They were parents who were about to flee Boston and head for the suburbs. They were teachers looking to escape the overwhelming bureaucracy of the public school system and actually get a chance to decide what goes on in their own classrooms.
The panel presented a very sound case for charter schools, made even stronger by the fact that one of the two charter school principals on the panel was a public school teacher and one was a parent. The best panelists, though, were the ones who had the least in the way of academic qualifications - two students at the City on a Hill Charter School. As one of them said, "If we aren't evidence for the success of charter schools, we don't know what is." Her statement may have been all the more significant because her fellow student panelist was black; his very appearance dispelled one of the greatest myths surrounding charter schools: that they are a public school alternative for intelligent, wealthy, white students. Both of the schools discussed at the panel were inner-city schools designed to serve all members of the community. Admissions are determined purely by lottery, and charter schools are required to abide by the same anti-discrimination policies as the public schools. In fact, charter schools seem to be having more success than the public schools as far as diversity is concerned, because they provide parents who can afford to move out of the city with an educational incentive to stay.
It has been suggested that charter schools are needed even more in the inner cities than elsewhere. One phrase that many of the panelists used in their responses was "individual accountability." It is especially important in inner-city schools for parents and students to feel as though they have some control over the educational opportunities offered by their schools. Parents who previously didn't concern themselves with their children's education have been found to take a great interest in it once their children escape from the often intellectually vacuous and physically dangerous public schools. In small classes, once delinquent students cannot fall through the cracks. The hostile graduate students in the audience may want to take another look at charter schools, which may make it possible for the future of education to be determined by the parents, the teachers, and the students instead of by the failed theories of distant academics.
-Naomi Schaefer
It would be impossible to deny that Massachusetts's charter school initiative has produced some impressive results in individual charter schools. But advocates for charter schools are wrong to overstate the case for charter schools. It is not sufficient to show that charter schools are performing at a high level; rather it must be shown that, given a level playing field between public and charter schools, charter schools would outperform public schools.
For example, charter schools are not subject to the same tenure rules that prevent public schools from efficiently managing their human resources and firing low-performing teachers. Furthermore, since most charter schools have waiting lists, they are able to manage enrollment to a degree impossible for public schools. Public schools must educate all students interested in attending, even if doing so leads to over- or under-enrollment in certain grades or academic areas.
Nor can the question of charter school performance be divorced from an ill-conceived funding mechanism. A charter school's gain is a public school's loss. When a student transfers from a public school to a charter school, the charter school receives state aid equivalent to the public school system's per-pupil spending. "Below foundation" school districts (i.e. those spending less per student than Massachusetts believes is necessary) are currently reimbursed by the state for the lost aid. "Above foundation" districts receive no reimbursement from the state and lose the entire per-pupil cost.
What does the one-for-one transfer of funds from public to charter schools do to public education? When a student transfers from a public school to a charter school, the typical public school system will lose $5000. How will the system make up for the loss of $5000 per student? If only fifty or so students (spread through twelve grades) leave the public school system, it will be impossible to fire a teacher or close a school. In fact, about the only savings possible are likely to come from a reduced book budget - in other words, the school system will lose $5000 per student and save about $100 per student. Students remaining in the public school system will suffer from larger classes and lower maintenance spending.
Charter schools may well be a useful educational experiment, but they can only educate a small fraction of the state's students. The effort being put into charter schools might well be better spent on reforming education for all students.
-Douglas Gordon