Districts that lose students to charter schools can and ultimately will adjust their behavior. And indeed, recent research implies that, while charters marginally reduce districts’ total revenues per pupil, they also make them more efficient. The challenge for policymakers is managing whatever transition costs may be associated with moving to a more choice-based system in a way that is fair to students and taxpayers.
Last month, Fordham kicked off our new Think Again series with my colleague Adam Tyner’s appropriately skeptical take on the claim that standardized tests such as the SAT prevent minority students from accessing higher education.
This month, I offer my own contribution: a similarly skeptical analysis of the claim that public charter schools “drain” resources from traditional school districts.
Contrary to that widespread assumption, the implication of many local, state, and federal policies is that districts’ total revenues per pupil increase when students leave for charter schools. For example, in thirty-seven of the forty-six states where charters exist, they are partially or entirely excluded from local funding sources such as bond levies. Similarly, many states have adopted “hold harmless” policies that temporarily shield school districts from the revenue declines that would otherwise be associated with declining enrollments. (Federal Title I programs include similar previsions.) Consequently, districts’ total revenues per pupil should increase insofar as students exit the system but the associated tax dollars stay put.
Importantly, some research suggests that the presence of charters has reduced residential property values and, by extension, local revenues per pupil in Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Yet other studies paint a more positive picture. For example, a recent Fordham study that focused on “independent” charters—that is, those not authorized by the “host” school district—found null or positive effects on districts’ total revenues per pupil in most states. In other words, at least on average, charters may have little effect on districts’ total revenues per pupil in either direction.
Meanwhile, research on charters’ effect on districts’ instructional spending per pupil is mixed. For example, studies of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and California all found declines in districts’ instructional spending when charters expanded, both in absolute terms and as a share of total spending. Yet in Massachusetts and New York City, instructional spending seems to have increased. This matters, given charter opponents’ claims that their expansion forces districts to accept larger class sizes or lower teacher salaries.
Finally, research on charters schools’ academic impacts on district schools has become increasingly positive in recent years. For example, at least a dozen studies have found positive effects on district students’ achievement, while just three have found negative effects.
Ironically, the logical implication of these findings is that, insofar as charters are marginally reducing districts’ total revenues, they are also making them more efficient. And conversely, increases in district students’ achievement aren’t necessarily evidence of greater efficiency insofar as districts reap a fiscal windfall.
Either way, districts that lose students to charter schools can and ultimately will adjust their behavior, much as they do in response to the inevitable changes in local demographics. In other words, the challenge for policymakers is managing whatever transition costs may be associated with moving to a more choice-based system in a way that is fair to students and taxpayers.
In general, insulating districts from the fiscal pressures associated with enrollment declines is the wrong way to approach that challenge. But when and where districts are granted some sort of grace period—that is, when policymakers allow their revenues per pupil to increase temporarily—the associated costs should be borne by the general public, not the marginalized children whose parents or guardians have chosen to send them to a public charter school.
Here is a list of ideals and values commonly held within a particular group of people in American life. Name the group of people who prize the following things: a belief in personal responsibility and individual merit; a respect for order, rules, and self-discipline; and a personal commitment to vibrant institutions that are critical to civil society.
It’s a fair bet that the reflexive answer of many readers would be “conservatives.” Perhaps parents or the clergy. Maybe athletes and coaches. But there’s another group that probably doesn’t come reflexively to mind: public school teachers.
Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan famously quipped that “Latinos are Republican, they just don’t know it yet,” a remark that looks more prescient with each election cycle. A similar case can be made about teachers, only in this case it runs in the opposite direction: Teachers are congenitally conservative. It’s Republicans who just don’t know it yet.
Conservatives commonly complain that public education has been captured by progressive ideology. That’s because education is inherently progressive. When it functions properly, education is an engine of social advancement, fairness, and upward mobility—all goals broadly aligned with the outlook of multi-racial, working-class progressivism. At the same time, a school is an inherently conservative institution. We build and maintain schools to expose children to our nation’s history and culture, to bond them to their community and country, and to prepare them for a responsible adult life of informed, engaged citizenship.
While teachers might not think of themselves as conservative, they preside over institutions that have proved remarkably resistant to change. Public schools endure in their basic form and function not because we lack alternatives to placing two dozen children in a classroom led by an adult every weekday, but because sending children to a place called “school” is an enduring and valued practice in nearly every American community.
It’s unsurprising that conservatives would see school choice as the best defense against a public school establishment that seems hostile to their values. Breaking the monopoly of public education—this is very nearly conservative dogma nowadays—forces schools to compete for students and funding, spurring innovation and excellence in turn. Yet what many conservatives seem not to understand is that embracing school choice as the exclusive, even primary, lever of reform while disengaging from efforts to improve public education is a mistake.
For starters, asking America’s parents to abandon their support for local public schools in favor of entirely new educational paradigms is a heavy lift. Changing schools or homeschooling can be profoundly disruptive to family life and routines, as well as children’s social lives. Transportation challenges are often insurmountable. Nor is school choice the reliable bulwark against progressive indoctrination that proponents paint it as. At elite private schools serving families with the most resources and the greatest number of schooling options available to them, the cutthroat competition for seats, combined with social pressure to be “anti-racist,” has made those schools more inclined to adopt progressive policies and curricula. Few private-school parents have shown a willingness to buck their schools’ strident progressive orthodoxies and leave.
Moreover, public school teachers are less hostile to conservative views than is commonly assumed. An Education Week survey showed that only 5 percent of teachers described themselves as “very liberal,” while another 24 percent described themselves as “liberal.” A plurality (43 percent) described themselves as “moderate.” The remaining 27 percent identified either as “conservative” or “very conservative.” This would make the teacher workforce only slightly less conservative, and somewhat more moderate than Americans at large. Debates over education, however, tend to be driven by union leaders, political advocates, faculty at colleges of education, and philanthropic funders, all of whom are a deeper shade of blue than the teachers they represent or seek to influence.
One fruitful source of common ground between conservatives and public school teachers may be student behavior, which has emerged as one of the most significant factors driving teachers from the profession. Conservatives, already skeptical of trends like restorative justice and impatient with lax student discipline, are likely to find supporters among a critical mass of teachers who want safe and orderly classrooms. There is even potential for consensus among conservatives and teachers on increasing pay.
The inescapable truth about education in America is that there is no foreseeable scenario under which traditional public schools will not educate the majority of the nation’s future entrepreneurs, engineers, doctors, soldiers, and citizens for generations to come. Conservatives are not wrong to take exception when activists seek to impose a progressive agenda on what is at heart a bedrock government service, but to respond by promoting school choice as a conflict-avoidance strategy functionally cedes public education—and the vast majority of America’s schoolchildren—to the left. If conservatives earnestly believe that public education is a hotbed of progressive indoctrination on social and political issues, it would be an act of self-immolation to surrender future generations to its influence.
None of this is to suggest that conservatives should abandon the push for school choice. The clearest triumph of the education-reform era has been the creation of new education institutions, particularly public charter schools, which are largely free from unionization and bureaucratic meddling. New networks of high-performing urban charter schools in particular have provided critical relief to communities beset by generations of public school failure. School choice is a positive force for education pluralism and system-wide improvements, and conservatives should continue encouraging and supporting choice-oriented reforms.
At the same time, they should think long and hard before retreating from engagement with traditional public education. The problems with American public schools are legion, but a simple fact dwarfs all others: They are where the children are.
Editor’s note: This is adapted from “Teachers and the Right” in the Spring 2023 issue of National Affairs.
Within a few years of their 2010 rollout, the Common Core State Standards for math and English became a popular scapegoat for a host of perceived ills in K–12 education. (And yet, despite all the vitriol, the Common Core lives on in most states, even if it goes by different names.) Just earlier this month, in a New York Times op-ed, Pamela Paul took a new line of attack, charging the Common Core with draining the joy from high school English by focusing on skills and cutting traditional reading assignments. The decline in English majors, Paul concluded, must be partly attributable to the Common Core.
As a millennial who attended high school in the early aughts and taught high school English during the Common Core’s early years, I found that some of Paul’s points resonated with my experiences:
But these and others of Paul’s concerns aren’t the fault of the Common Core.
First, she blames the Common Core for kids’ lack of interest in actually reading the texts assigned for English class. As a colleague of mine pointed out, the invention of Cliffs Notes in 1958 would indicate that this is no new phenomenon. A retired teacher with whom I spoke described scenes from fifty years ago that were identical to those in my own high school, decades and states away: kids huddled together before class, the ones who had done the reading whispering summaries of the previous night’s chapters to the kids who hadn’t. I can’t imagine that these were the only two schools where this happened prior to 2010.
Paul also denounces the Common Core’s emphasis on skills. Of course, there are teachers who can make literary analysis dry. (By the way, didn’t kids have to diagram sentences back in the day? Was that what made literature “soar” for them?) But by putting “literary devices” in scare quotes, Paul seems to imply that English class shouldn’t be teaching such essential concepts at all. The Common Core standards don’t mandate mindless annotation with colored pencils, as in her caricature; they state that students should “demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in word meanings.” Doesn’t that seem like exactly what English is for—and has been for generations? And teaching key skills using great books (notice how the two are complementary!) makes English seem more relevant to many students.
Another concern cited is the Common Core’s supposed de-emphasis on literature. There’s Paul’s misleading line: “By high school, 70 percent of assigned texts are meant to be nonfiction.” That guidance is specifically for twelfth grade, and more to the point, that 70 percent is across all subjects. In other words, the intent of the standards’ creators is to build students’ literacy in history, science, and other fields—not to strip English class of literature.
Paul also implies that the Common Core encouraged the “dumbing down” of content. But it’s hard to fault those standards for whatever dumbing down is occurring when they call for grade-level texts and explicitly include Shakespeare. A decade ago, in fact, Common Core opponents argued that its reading expectations were too challenging. The push for “just-right” or “leveled” books, on the other hand, has been around since at least 1946.
Perhaps most offensive—and least related to the Common Core—is her insinuation that the authors capable of “open[ing] mind[s] and test[ing] abilities of comprehension and interpretation” are, by necessity, almost exclusively white men. This ought to go without saying, but since it apparently doesn’t: Women and people of color have written plenty of challenging and important books. If James Joyce can teach American high schoolers about Irish culture and modernism, as Paul recalls fondly from her own experience, then Chinua Achebe can teach them about Nigerian history and anticolonialism. If students can learn from William Faulkner’s themes of fate and adversity—another of Paul’s suggestions—then they can learn from Zora Neale Hurston’s novels, also set in the American South and with similar themes no less universal.
Diversifying English curricula does not require tossing aside every classic by a white male author. Rather, it means adding more pages to students’ reading loads (a point, again, on which Paul and I agree) and exposing them to a greater variety of authors. Doing so will engage more students and broaden their intellectual horizons—goals toward which Paul and I would both love to see progress.
To go after the Common Core is to misdiagnose what’s at issue in English classrooms. To ensure that students read challenging books and develop as readers and writers, however, is to ensure they will be informed, critical thinkers prepared for college, career, and citizenship—regardless of what major they choose.
One way education systems have tried to raise the performance of Black and Brown children is by matching students with teachers of the same race and ethnicity. The conventional wisdom is that such practices are strongly supported by research, but a recent study published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly offers a contrarian view.
Two Penn State researchers used data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten (ECLS-K) to look at the national cohort of students who entered kindergarten during the 2010–11 school year, and to follow them through fifth grade. They included details from three tests of academic achievement, five teacher ratings of classroom behavior, and two independently assessed executive functioning tasks. The sample of 18,170 children is large and racially, ethnically, and economically diverse. The outcomes of interest were reading, science, and mathematics achievement; problem behaviors; self-control; interpersonal skills; approaches to learning; cognitive flexibility; and working memory. They also examined whether students were placed in gifted or special education classes.
Approximately 63 percent of students had a teacher of the same race or ethnicity during any elementary grade. Among White students, it was 92 percent, versus 45 percent for their Black and Hispanic peers. White students were especially likely to experience matching throughout most or all of elementary school—55 percent of them for five or six grades—due to the prevalence of White teachers leading elementary classrooms. The contrasting figure for Black students was only 3 percent, and 10 percent for Hispanic students.
For select groups, there were some positive impacts. For Black students, matching resulted in significantly fewer internalizing problem behaviors, such as anxiety, loneliness, and low self-esteem. And for Black girls, it also led to fewer externalizing problem behaviors, such as arguing and fighting with others, acting impulsively, and expressing anger. For students of any race or ethnicity who had previously displayed low levels of academic, behavioral, or executive functioning, racial and ethnic matching resulted in fewer externalizing and internalizing problem behaviors but, unfortunately, lower academic achievement. There was also a small but statistically significant negative effect on science achievement.
When looking at the entire sample, however, the impacts disappear: Student-teacher racial or ethnic matching was not associated with significant effects in reading or mathematics achievement, externalizing or internalizing problem behaviors, self-control, interpersonal skills, approaches to learning, cognitive flexibility, working memory, or gifted education service receipt. Students were less likely to receive special education services when they were taught by a teacher of the same race or ethnicity, but the level of significance is difficult to determine due to the small sample size of recipients.
The researchers properly note that their study focused only on elementary grades and might miss benefits of matching that emerge in middle and high school (or perhaps later in life), and they suggest further analysis along these lines.
SOURCE: Paul L. Morgan and Eric Hengyu Hu, “Fixed effect estimates of student-teacher racial or ethnic matching in U.S. elementary schools,” Early Childhood Research Quarterly (December 2022).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Natalie Neris and Hal Woods of Kids First Chicago join Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss what Chicago’s mayoral run-off election between Brandon Johnson and Paul Vallas means for the city’s schools. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber looks at the effects of mindfulness-based programs on student mental health and resilience.
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