Sending Kids to Charter Schools Outside of their District is Not the Answer To Fixing Our Educational System

July 24, 2012 | Jamila Akil |

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has jumped on the charter school bandwagon. At the Universal Bluford Charter School in Philadelphia, Romney provided a few details about his education policies, which included the creation of a voucher-like system to provide federal funding so that low-income and disabled students can attend charter schools, private institutions and public schools outside of their district.

On it’s face, Romney’s idea sounds good: Take the kids out of the bad schools, and send them to the good schools. But this solution is too simplistic and doesn’t deal with the underlying problems that create and sustain bad schools.

How are students in under-performing schools going to get to the excellent school across town? A student who has to spend one hour traveling to school and another hour getting home has less time for homework and outside activities than a child who attends a neighborhood school.

What sort of neighborhood wide disintegration is likely to ensue as a result of the closure of most, or all local schools? Many people consider a good school to be requirement in order for a community to be considered a nice place to live. With all of the schools closed, or closing, you can expect property values in the neighborhood to decrease–which may further mire the people who live in that community in poverty, due to lack of ability to grow wealth by investing in their homes.

In nice communities people expect to get what they pay for, and one of the amenities they pay for is small-class sizes at the elementary and high-school. Once the limit on class size is reached, no more room is left for additional students to attend from outside of the district; thus, just because a kid a poor community has a voucher that says he can attend another school doesn’t mean that another school will have room to take him.

And here is the issue that the politicians love to skirt: some schools are bad because they are full of kids who have emotional or physical problems. Fixing the problems with the school may necessitate doing something to fix the lives of the kids who attend that school. Rather than investing in sending children to another school district, the answer to solving the educational crisis may lie in investing money and other resources into the children, their parents and the communities in which these people live.

Fixing under-performing schools will require innovative solutions, an investment in people and the places they live. But at the moment it seems more politically expedient to hand out vouchers.

steveLS
Charter schools are not the answer. Despite their ability to pick and choose their student population,, which one would think should give them quite the advantage over public schools which must accept all students in the district, they do not outperform public schools. ( http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/06/13/understanding-charter-schools.html) Furthermore, they do not accommodate, as Ms. Akil referenced, those children with emotional or physical problems. Despite the many problems, public schools are still the best option. Vouchers are a sign of political weakness.
steveLS
Charter schools are not the answer. They do not outperform public schools: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/06/13/understanding-charter-schools.html. While charter schools are required to admit students on a “first-come, first-served” basis, there is an inherent bias in the selection. Despite it being called a lottery, typically only involved parents will use the vouchers to move their students to a “better” school. These students have a leg up on the others with the most critical factor in determining academic success: not teachers, not new computers, not “innovative classrooms”, but involved parents. They often receive the newest facilities, newest equipment, and benefit from the selection bias I noted. Despite this they still do not outperform. Perhaps experimenting on children with the newest fad doesn’t work. Even though there are many problems, public schools are still the best option. We must work to *FIX* the problems not run away from them.
- Brenda55
  @steveLS I agree with you. Charter Schools in Philadelphia have been a mixed bag with far too many under preforming and all manner of corruption being part of the mix.
- Tammy_Ghalden
  @steveLS Many charter schools also reject or kick out students in need of special education.
Browncow
I agree that charter schools and vouchers aren’t the answer across the board. The schools need to be improved in the neighborhoods in which these families live. Busing them off to charter schools and schools in “high rent” districts aren’t going to improve the students’ performance. It isn’t a magic wand. What happens when a family sends their child to a charter/private/other well performing school and finds out that their child is years behind in reading, science, and math? Low performing schools have low performing students so changing the location for the most part won’t have that much of an impact. I can see if there are involved parents who want to make sure that their children do well so they use that voucher to send them to a private or charter school to escape the “anti-education” elements of their neighborhood. The problem is (and this is my opinion) there aren’t enough involved parents.
- The Working Home Keeper
  @Browncow “The problem is (and this is my opinion) there aren’t enough involved parents.”
  
  I absolutely agree!
The Working Home Keeper
“And here is the issue that the politicians love to skirt: some schools are bad because they are full of kids who have emotional or physical problems. Fixing the problems with the school may necessitate doing something to fix the lives of the kids who attend that school. Rather than investing in sending children to another school district, the answer to solving the educational crisis may life in investing money and other resources into the children, their parents and the communities in which these people live.”

In our area when the school board moved away from a diversity based assignment plan in favor of a neighborhood based assignment plan, the loudest critics were the local NAACP. They claimed a plan based on neighborhood assignment would lead to re-segregation. But even from the local NAACP, there was no talk of improving the neighborhood schools in the low income areas. No talk of getting more resources or attracting better teachers, just send the kids away to other schools for the sake of diversity. Now that there’s a Democratic majority in our school board, they are taking steps to move back to the old diversity assignment plan. It didn’t work before, so I’m not sure what is going to be different this time!

But I agree with your statement. More effort needs to be placed in improving the schools and the community. When you take a student out of those areas and bus them way across the county (which was happening in some instances), it makes it harder for the parents to be involved. If transportation is already an issue for a family, getting to teacher conferences is harder or near impossible. Those parents are also going to be less likely to be involved in the PTA and other school functions. Plus, I do wonder about the behavioral issues that may arise when your place a child that doesn’t have much (in terms of financial resources, parental involvement, home life stability) in an environment where everyone seems to have so much more.
Toni_M
“And here is the issue that the politicians love to skirt: some schools are bad because they are full of kids who have emotional or physical problems. Fixing the problems with the school may necessitate doing something to fix the lives of the kids who attend that school. ”

Bingo. A lot of problems cannot be solved by simply moving these kids around. It may create new problems instead.

I think this system would only work for certain children, most likely those already excelling who could use the opportunities better schools with better credentials for upward mobility provide.

But students doing poorly for reasons having nothing to do with their location will not benefit.
Brice Cameron
Improving schools might be difficult, but at least the government has some measure of control over them. I don’t think improving parents is something the government can accomplish.
- dani-BBW
  @Brice Cameron
  I agree with this. Even in the wealthiest school with the best teachers and plethora of opportunities for the future, if the parents are uninvolved and do not assist with homework, pay attention to teacher feedback, etc, then the child will be more likely to fail. Many schools are trying to help out with the home environment as much as possible – making teachers available to answer homework questions in the evening, sending a BackSnack of food home over the weekend, providing breakfast, but there’s only so much the school can do to overcome an undesirable home environment.
  - The Working Home Keeper
    @dani-BBW @Brice Cameron “but there’s only so much the school can do to overcome an undesirable home environment.”
    
    That’s so true! One of my coworkers is a former a teacher in our local school system. He said one school year, a mother came to him and told him not to assign her son homework because he would not be doing it and she was not going to make him. How is a teacher suppose to handle a parent like that?
    
    This past school year, our daughter was in the 3rd grade. To our surprise when we attended the initial parent meeting with the teacher, we found out homework would not count towards the students final grade. They would be assigned homework, but essentially it wouldn’t matter if they did it or not. My husband and I were shocked. We didn’t inform our daughter of this because regardless, we would have her do the homework anyway. And she’s a very good student. But, we also wondered if this was a strategy by the school to handle students that don’t have parents willing or available to help with homework and assignments at home.
    - Jamila
      “He said one school year, a mother came to him and told him not to assign her son homework because he would not be doing it and she was not going to make him. ”
      
      People like that mother need to take their kids home and ‘unschool’ them, which is a valid way of teaching children and from what I hear actually works out well. But right now this woman is using the public schools as a daycare center and that is not fair to the teacher or the rest of the administration (or the entire public school system).
dani-BBW
I took a brief sabbatical from Corporate America a few years ago and became intimately involved with a new charter school in my city. There are some great things about charters – the freedom from bureaucracy which allows innovation for learning; however that freedom is a double-edged sword. It takes WAY more than hope and a dream to educate children properly, in a safe environment that complies with applicable state laws. We have about 15 urban charters in my city, and I’d guess that less than 5 are very strong schools. However, that is very dependent upon leadership and Board accountability, which can change at any moment as people leave to take other positions, move out of state, etc.

The schools that I’ve seen work are the ones established by wealthy families or foundations, where there are already strong internal processes for quality and accountability, as there is the risk of brand/reputation damage if the school fails. The ones that do not are those established by community figures who have a following but little understanding of finances, education law, or proper governance. The school I was involved with was a national chain so there were solid academics but the administration, discipline and structure was an absolute zoo. After that experience, I would be very, very, very leery of sending my child to a brand new charter school.
QadirMohamed
This article is so steeped in the ‘entitlement’ matrix it’s unbelievable.
You need school choice to boost robust school to school competition.
If i know i’ll get funding for my school,full salary/pension and can’t be fired however bad i suck,then i have no incentive to improve. You can’t possibly say you love poor kids and then turn around and deny them the choice wealthier kids take for granted.
- Jamila
  Thanks for providing us with the standard talking points that are drummed up in support of ‘school choice’ and vouchers. You make no sense though.
  
  You speak of ‘denying choice to kids,’ but who exactly do you think is going to be funding that choice if the parents can’t? That’s right: the government.
  
  Where are you going to get teachers from to start all of these new schools, where is the money coming from to fund the building of these new schools?
  
  I’ll let you think about all of this for a moment.
  - QadirMohamed
    We disagree. lol. Thanks.
  - dani-BBW
    @Jamila Many charters convert other buildings for educational use or use abandoned schools. For example, there’s a KIPP school somewhere that teaches out of a YMCA. The thought is that money isn’t needed for fancy buildings so much as for academic instruction, kids are adaptable to learning anywhere so long as the environment is safe and clean.
    They either attract teachers from foundering systems where they were fed up with bureaucracy stifling their innovation, or they look for people with core competencies desirable in teaching but who may have other back grounds (i.e. take an engineer and have them teach science, or someone from politics who can teach civics/social studies). They find a lot of people who work with kids in a mentoring capacity in a particular area they enjoy and work with them into becoming teachers. Pros and cons to this of course.
MixedUpInVegas
What do you do about parents who can’t, or won’t, actively encourage their children to achieve in school? Sending these kids to other schools is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. If they can’t make them go to school, study and do homework, what is society supposed to do about it?
- amiar10
  @MixedUpInVegas Agreed. Moving these kids to a better environment won’t make a lick of difference if their home lives and mindset are in the trenches. If anything, there’s a propensity for these kids taking their bad attitudes, bad hometraining, and lack of appreciation for anything academic to the new school with them and start rubbing off on other students. I’ve seen it happen in the public school district I went to as a child, from kindergarten to 12th grade, and it went from a pretty upscale school district to downright ghetto.
  
  Transplanting a brat or hoodrat won’t change them. Changing their mindsets and hammering the importance of an education into them– instilling values into them– will. I know it’s the parents’ job, but when they won’t step up, educators have to get as close as they can to picking up the slack. Extremely comprehensive social programs are the best way to fill in the gap. Especially ones that let these kids know they’re worth something, they are loved, and they’re better than that. Programs that give them a hunger and a passion for something, and let them know the world will chew them up and spit them out if they don’t have a plan for the future. A complete overhaul is needed, and not necessarily with new technological gadgets and corporate sponsorship. Opening up a dialogue, lowering teacher to student ratios, kicking out the lazy good-for-nothings collecting tenure and replacing them with fresh faces who CARE and are well educated in their fields and can connect/deal with the age group they are in charge of, replacing bare-bones standardized testing with actual LESSONS. It’s expensive, but in the long run, it’s more than worth it.