In his December 13th editorial ("Sources of charter-school mediocrity"), Checker Finn laid out ten factors that contributed to charter-school mediocrity. He didn't say anything about what part the curriculum plays.
In Arizona, where I now live, charters are able to develop their own curricula and do not have to align them with the Arizona Academic Content Standards. Three Arizona high schools were recently included in a list of the top 100 high schools in the U.S. Two of those top 100 high schools were Arizona charter high schools.
In Ohio, the charter schools were asked to show how their curricula were aligned to the Ohio Academic Content Standards. The state provided forms to show how individual items in each school's curriculum were aligned to specific grade-level indicators. This effectively locked charters into the Ohio state-sponsored curriculum.
When I recently saw many sixth-graders still counting on their fingers to compute simple addition problems like 8 + 5, I wondered where they learned that. Sure enough, on page 57 of the Ohio Academic Content Standards, under the 16th grade-level indicator for grade-one mathematics, were eight "strategies" for computing simple one-digit addition problems. They covered various ways to solve simple addition problems, such as combinations of counting on your fingers along with memorizing "doubles" (7 + 7 = 14).
Learning to count on your fingers, instead of memorizing, might work in the first grade, but it is a prescription for down-the-road failure. I can't imagine an engineer or scientist counting on their fingers. I can't imagine solving a simple problem in algebra, one involving factoring, by counting on your fingers. It's hard for me to imagine going past the second grade in mathematics counting on your fingers to solve simple addition problems.
The Ohio Academic Content Standards are filled with many such wonderful ideas that were part of what has been derisively called "Fuzzy Math." The Ohio State Academic Standards for the other subject-areas are filled with bad ideas, too. It's a wonder charter schools do as well as they do.
In a recent forum sponsored by the Manhattan Institute that was attended by such luminaries as Diane Ravitch, two school systems in Virginia were compared (Richmond and Fairfax County). Richmond's black students outperformed Fairfax County's black students even though the demographics said that it should be the other way around. A big part of the reason was said to be that Richmond had changed its curriculum and Fairfax County had not.
Focusing on what I call the externals and imagining that you can produce significant improvement in charter school performance won't work. You have to focus on changing the curriculum and all the years of bad ideas that charters are forced to accept and teach.
Robert A. Douglas
Richard Allen Schools
Dayton, Ohio