Letters from the US (On Education)

 Desperation Drives Change

Why do we strongly favour of charter schools?  Because they represent the breaking up of government monopolies.  This is positive for two reasons.  Firstly, it represents in part the crumbling of the soft-despotic state, which is the dominant idolatry of our age.  Secondly, the all embracing, all regulating, all providing state represents a stupid overreach which becomes inevitably racked by incompetence and failure. This opens  opportunities for education to make significant progress and increase its positive impact upon the community.

Communism in the Soviet Union failed to deliver on its promises.  It built huge department stores and shops, stocked with nothing or very little.  It suffered crop failure for sixty-five years, which it blamed on inclement weather.  One of the few things which actually increased and grew in the Soviet Union throughout that time was the length of lines of people queuing up to buy food.  In a state education system there will be many achievements, but few of an educational nature.  In the end the system will break down through the necessary incompetence of the government operating in spheres beyond its competence and proper duty.

Charter schools are non-government controlled; they offer better educational results simply because they are free to excel, rather than being bound to comply with nanny-state.  Bad or inadequate charter schools fail and go out of existence, being overtaken by better schools--just like any other service business.  Bad or inadequate government schools usually linger on in the twilight for decades, cocooned and protected by Nanny, whilst educational progress stultifies.. 

A couple of recent articles on charter schools in the US illustrate the hugely positive impact they are having on the education industry in some cities and states.  The first example is New Orleans.


Charter schools have gone ahead in leaps and bounds in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  The government (neither state nor federal) simply could not cope and needed help to re-establish a school system in that devastated city.  Not that the government education system was doing well before Katrina.

Jillian Kay Melchior, writing in National Review Online provides the pre-Katrina educational backstory.

In 2004, around 40 percent of the city’s residents were functionally illiterate. In 2006, about 40 percent of the adult residents of the Lower Ninth Ward had never graduated from high school. Before Katrina, 90 percent of public schools in New Orleans were performing below the state average. A whopping 74 percent of eighth-graders lacked reading proficiency. On the 2004 high-school exit exam, only 4 percent of students exhibited basic proficiency in English and only 6 percent showed basic math capability. The school district, corrupt and dominated by union influence, was heavily indebted and barely staving off bankruptcy. In the three years before the hurricane, the FBI indicted 29 school employees for fraud and corruption.

Change came fast. Katrina hit New Orleans in late August 2005, damaging all but 16 of the public-school buildings and displacing tens of thousands of students. Within two months, the Louisiana legislature had voted to take over New Orleans’s failing school district, establishing the Recovery School District and effectively firing 7,500 teachers and school workers. In place of most of these public schools, charter schools were established.

The article profiles Harold Clay who had been on the verge of joining the long seried ranks of school dropouts in New Orleans.  Fortunately a school teacher took a personal interest in him, and he eventually graduated.  Now he runs a charter schools in the city--Edna Karr High School. 

Edna Karr High School reopened in December 2005, changing as radically as the rest of the city in those days. Before, it had been a blue-ribbon magnet school, with 40 percent of its student body in the “gifted” category. These students performed well above the norm, and every one of them graduated. After Katrina, the school dropped its selective admission standards, allowing children from anywhere in New Orleans to attend.

“I had a job before Katrina,” says longtime principal John Hiser. “Since Katrina, I’ve had a mission.”  Today, most freshmen enter the high school with fifth-grade math and sixth-grade English skills. Ninety-five percent of the students are black, and 87 percent receive free or reduced-fee lunch. “We take these kids in,” Hiser says. “We don’t tell them they’re stupid. We tell them they’ve got potential.”

One of the things which the school faces is the decrepitude of the students, given their background and life experiences.

Educational obstacles are one thing; emotional ones are another. “Life’s vicissitudes don’t take a day off,” Clay says, rattling through the depressing litany of challenges his students face. Some have a father in prison. Others never knew their father, and “I have a group of kids who feel like, ‘How do you want me to believe in a higher power when the physical man hasn’t shown up?’” More than a dozen students have attempted suicide during Clay’s tenure at Karr. Others have post-traumatic stress from Katrina, which intensifies whenever there’s a storm warning. There are kids whose teeth are rotting in their mouths because they’ve never been to the dentist.

The charter model has given Karr’s administrators flexibility to address these issues creatively, establishing what they call a “wrap-around service environment.”   "I think the charter model — and that’s what I’m going to stress — allows you to do this,” Clay says. “You have a lot of charter schools in New Orleans that have [the freedom] to get what they need for the children instead of, ‘Let’s place an order, let’s make this come from a top-down approach.’”

Because administrators have more control over budgeting and spending, they’ve been able to prioritize their particular needs. In addition to providing robust academics, sports, and extracurricular activities, Karr employs three regular counselors, one college counselor, a full-time nurse, and two full-time social workers. The nurse persuades local doctors to visit for in-house checkups; on one occasion, a student had a root canal on a table in an administrator’s office.

The school does all this, with the same funding as all other schools--yet their academic achievements are stellar.

Teachers are required to stay late some days, offering remedial help and tutoring — an uncompensated extra effort that a teachers’ union would probably oppose, although it makes a huge difference to students’ progress. Karr offers ACT preparation and college visits, encouraging students to apply for scholarships and make connections for their future careers. Administrators recruit community groups and businesses to volunteer or donate. The school has invested in infrastructure, giving the students a sense of worth they lacked in their old, broken, dirty learning environment. . . .

Though the charter receives the same $8,500 per student as does any other Louisiana school, Karr has made staggering progress with its students. In the last school year, it was one of three schools in the nation to win the Gaston Caperton Inspiration Award, which honors institutions that help low-income students achieve academic success.

Karr’s teachers manage to cram in four years’ worth of English and math by the time students enter their junior year. In May 2013, all but two students in a senior class of 220 graduated, and 80 percent immediately went to college. That’s in an environment where many students are first-generation high-school graduates, let alone college students.

“It’s rewarding when you have an A and B student and they succeed,” says Cheryl Flotte, president of the parent-teacher association. “[But] when you have a D student who succeeds . . . I think, ‘That’s what we’ve got here. We offer everybody, from the smartest to the ones that are struggling, the opportunity to succeed.’”

This is just one case study.  No doubt not all charter schools are as good.  Some may well be better.  That's life.  But overall the city is experiencing a significant advance in schooling.

Not all New Orleans charters have made such dramatic progress, but there’s been a noticeable uptick in the quality of education since the city embraced school choice. Today, almost 80 percent of public-school students in the city attend charters, and on average they receive 86 more days of math instruction and 58 more days of reading than their public-school counterparts do, according to a new report from the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes. Minority students especially benefit. While New Orleans still has a long way to go, “I think we’re moving in the right direction,” Clay says. “That is, we’re putting out better citizens, in my opinion, because of the charter movement.”

But Big Despot is counter-punching.  It will not relinquish its mythology or power easily.

Though the public-school model failed New Orleans historically, it still has its vocal adherents; school choice is by no means a fait accompli. In August, the U.S. Department of Justice sued to block 34 school districts across the state of Louisiana from giving private-school vouchers to the approximately 400,000 eligible poor children who attend failing schools. Most of these students seeking to escape academic doom are black — but the DOJ is claiming, without irony, that it’s acting in their interest, because when these minority kids leave, it makes the bad schools less diverse.

[Our New Zealand readers will recall that our monopolistic teacher unions asserted, in the debate over charter schools here (a debate largely won, incidentally, by the unions) that charter schools had failed miserably in New Orleans.  No doubt they would think that the Justice Department's concerns represent a devastating critique of charter schools. Their ideology and propaganda hath blinded them.] 

Now, secondly, New York.  In the race for the NY mayoralty, the Democratic candidate wants to shut down the city's charter schools.  The Republican candidate wants to expand them.  The New York Times, a long time Democratic cheerleader, has this to say in an editorial column:

In all the bombast it is worth making two points. First, there’s little question that New York has one of the nation’s most successful charter school systems. A study published earlier this year shows that the typical New York City charter student learned more reading and math in a year than his or her public school peers. The second point is that the next mayor can improve the system, in part by shutting down poorly performing schools, awarding new charters only to groups with proven track records, and smoothing relations between charters and traditional schools by making sure “co-locations” take place only in buildings big enough to house both.

Why are the city's charter schools so successful?  No doubt there is a plethora of reasons.  But the Times points its finger to just one.

The teachers’ union is never going to fall in love with charter schools because a vast majority of them are not unionized, and they have real financial advantages because their work force is younger and more transient and their payrolls, pensions and medical costs are lower. Many charters plow these savings back into education — hiring social workers, lengthening the school day, or staffing classrooms with more than one teacher as a way of helping disadvantaged children.

Charter schools are not union controlled.  They do not have to pay union award wages.  Consequently, they have recruited younger, non-unionised teachers who are prepared to work for less and don't come with all the ancillary costs, such as medical insurance and pension payments--awards which have protected union teachers and have created a barrier to entry to the profession for younger teachers.   (State schools have such a huge cost to pay when they hire, they are prejudiced against younger, less experienced teachers who require more on-the-job training and mentoring.) 

But the enthusiasm, the drive, the ambition,the creativity, and the energy all tend to come from new, non-institutionalised, non- union-protected teachers.  The jejune attitudes of the tenured teachers and their unions and their school administrations would otherwise de-motivate and demoralise these younger teachers who are throwing all their creative energy and enthusiasm into teaching in charter schools. 

Hat Tip: Kiwiblog