Editor's note: This post is the first entry of a multi-part series of interviews featuring Fordham's own Andy Smarick and Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at Holy Cross. It originally appeared in a slightly different form at Education Week's K-12 Schools: Beyond the Rhetoric blog.
Schneider: I see a place for some charters in the K–12 system, created under particular conditions, and governed by a specific process.
Some, however, claim that we'd be better off with a system entirely composed of charters.
You're a charter booster. Where do you land on this question?
Smarick: In short, I envision a future where all or nearly all of a city's public schools are charter schools. (Note that I'm only discussing city school systems here.)
Though I'm generally disinclined to fundamentally alter longstanding institutions, urban districts have, for fifty years, proven themselves wholly incapable of producing the results our kids deserve. And we're talking about tens of millions of low-income kids who have been assigned to schools in these persistently failing institutions. While I admire the people who have tried their best to improve urban districts, the results fall miles short of what's needed. So we need a dramatic break from how things have been done.
Now, I remain open to the idea of the government running a few urban schools, for example a selective-admissions high school or some other specialty program. But, in general, the government should prepare to get out of the business of operating urban public schools and hand that responsibility off to civil society.
Schneider: You're right that we see persistent problems in urban districts—lower achievement scores, lower graduation rates, lower rates of college matriculation. But the question is: How much of that is a function of school quality? Because the fact is that urban schools tend to work with a very different population of students than their suburban counterparts do.
Urban schools serve roughly twice as many students of color as their non-urban counterparts. And research tells us that, nationally, white children grow up in households with far more income and wealth, far less intergenerational poverty, and far greater access to healthy environments and social capital.
Additionally, urban schools have far more concentrated poverty to deal with. Thirty-eight percent of city schools are high-poverty schools—where between 75% and 100% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. And in large cities—places like New York, Los Angles, and Chicago—nearly half of young people attend schools with high concentrations of poverty. The suburbs, by contrast, simply don't have this problem.
These are the root problems affecting urban school quality, and charters simply aren't going to address them.
In my mind, the only school-based solution for these issues is desegregation—creating truly diverse schools where no student feels abandoned by society and where no school is overwhelmed by challenges.
Smarick: I still get frustrated by the suggestion that we can only expect so much from poor kids until we fix poverty and residential segregation.
First, we have 40 years of "effective schools" research showing that there are and have been countless high-performing, high-poverty schools. We probably have more of them today than ever, thanks to great charter management organizations. So it can be done.
Second, I'm worried that the "poverty and residential segregation" refrain ultimately serves to insulate current arrangements from tough criticism, and it reduces our aspirations and urgency. When we fail to provide city students with great schools, we can always refer back to that refrain and say, "Well, we tried our best, but until we solve these other problems, there's nothing we can do." But no child ever learned more because a grown-up said, "Poverty is too overwhelming for us to succeed." Lots and lots of kids learn more when grown-ups say, "Poverty is a tragedy, but our schools can still make a huge difference in kids' lives."
Lastly, there are thousands of economically and racially diverse schools with gigantic achievement gaps. This is precisely why NCLB required disaggregated school-level data. We should absolutely aspire to end concentrated poverty, but accomplishing that goal is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for providing low-income kids the schools they deserve.
Schneider: I actually agree with you that student poverty can be an excuse for poor performance. But while I appreciate the sentiment that kids of color and low-income kids deserve everything that their whiter and more privileged peers get in school, I think it's naïve to believe that a new governance structure—in this case, charters—will change that.
Sure, there is research indicating that schools can make a huge difference in kids' lives. And there are absolutely effective schools that have done remarkable things. Deb Meier's work at Central Park East always stands out to me as a particularly great (and a particularly well-documented) example. But the problem is that much of what makes such schools special is difficult to replicate, particularly at scale. So much of what goes into successful schools is about relationships, individuals, and the right context.
And that seems to play out in charters. Some of them are great. Some are abysmal. Simply being a charter, though, doesn't appear to be much more than an opportunity to do things differently—better in some cases, worse in others. And insofar as that's the case, I'm just not sure they're particularly relevant in a conversation about improving the lives of low-income and minority students.
Smarick: I subscribe to the "three-sector," "sector-agnostic," or "high-quality seats" approach. In short, I don't care who runs schools, so long as they work for our disadvantaged kids. Incidentally, that's why I'm so strongly supportive of voucher and tax-credit programs for private schools, as long as those programs hold participating private schools accountable for results. If the private schools sector has schools that can well serve low-income kids, let's make those schools accessible.
Given that, after half a century of work, we still have no high-performing urban districts, I fully expect urban districts to continue to be unable to operate high-performing schools. So while it's conceivable that an urban district could maintain some number of schools in a system in which the principles of portfolio management are rigorously applied, I find it extraordinarily unlikely any urban district would end up running more than a few open-admission schools. There's simply too much evidence over too many decades for me to suspend disbelief and say that an urban district will remain as a significant schools operator in this kind of environment.
Schneider: District governance doesn't have a perfect track record by any means. But I'm not sure that's the case for an all-charter system. Particularly when there is no compelling evidence that the charter model—I'm not talking about particular charter schools—will be much better. Maybe we can pick that thread up in our next post.
