The federal Charter Schools Program: A short, opinionated history, part III
This essay is part of the The Moonshot for Kids project, a joint initiative of the Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress.
This essay is part of the The Moonshot for Kids project, a joint initiative of the Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress.
Headlines about colossal mismanagement issues in Ohio charters—the biggest being the ECOT meltdown—dominate the school choice narrative in the Buckeye State. These stories raise the question: Why are Ohio charters so bad? This query and the dominant narrative that flows from it have long provided cover for charter opponents, even as some of the negative coverage is well-deserved. But it’s the wrong question—and it distracts us from a bigger, far more compelling story.
A number of New York City public schools recently learned that even though close to 100 percent of their students earned passing grades, less than 10 percent were able to pass the standardized state exams. A common explanation is that teachers are lowering expectations and inflating grades, possibly due to the pressure of the city’s bureaucrats’ desire to achieve equitable racial and socioeconomic outcomes. This has some truth, but it actually misunderstands the problem. The students’ inability to demonstrate their learning stems from the most prominent educational theory by which teachers have been trained over the past fifteen years. In essence, the failure of the students is an internal educational problem.
Good teachers are warm and compassionate people, and like parents, they tend to love all their kids equally. Nevertheless, they also have a special tenderness for the students who struggle in their classrooms and feel a particular urgency about meeting their needs. This often means less attention paid to high flyers. Educators tend to believe these children will be fine no matter what. But they’re are their own “high-needs” subgroup because they’re at the greatest risk for extreme boredom.
A willfully one-sided and misguided “study” emerged the other day from something that calls itself the “Network for Public Education” that purports to show that the federal government has wasted a lot of money trying to expand and improve America’s public charter schools. This outfit, which appears to get support from the teacher unions and their fellow travelers, cites several states that, in the authors’ view, have mishandled the money and bungled the program.
For better or for worse, hard-left politics continue to cast an outsized shadow over the education sector. Nowhere is this more prevalent than within the echo chamber of ed school thinking, where the tweed-jacketed have their feet firmly planted in midair with regard to the nation’s most pressing education challenges. This goes doubly so for low-income schools, where the academy’s hubris makes for swell sounding monographs, but often has little grounding in the difficult work required to raise student performance.
I met with an architect a few days ago to discuss the needs of GEO Prep Academy’s new building in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His original plan included classroom space big enough for each one of our 650 students. I told him to cut that number in half. He looked puzzled, so I explained that, for our high school to succeed, we really have to have the right attitude from day one.
By Brandon L. Wright
The Education Gadfly
New report on the emergence of non-district authorizers
Since the inception of Ohio’s charter school program in 1998, gallons of ink have been spilled documenting the missteps of a few charter operators.
Ohio House Education Committee chair voices support for charters
OhDELA testing new approach to online learning
Online charter schools have been front-page material in every major Ohio newspaper for the past two years.
A good news online charter school story
Ohio charter school success story
Did you know that there’s a great new resource to help you keep up with charter school news in the Buckeye State and across the country? It’s called Ohio Charter News Weekly and you can have it delivered to your email Inbox every Friday.
Over the past two years, Fordham has been an outspoken critic of some of the efforts to modify Ohio’s graduation requirements. It’s not that we think the current graduation requirements are perfect. Heck, we’ve even offered a variety of ideas to modify the current framework.
Big changes are coming for Ohio’s dropout prevention and recovery charter schools
Since 2012, Tennessee has taken a unique approach to intervening in struggling schools. With the goal of turning around the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools in the state (known as priority schools), officials introduced two separate models: the Achievement School District (ASD) and Innovation Zones (iZones).
Legislative update: SB 216 and HB 87
New Ohio online school legislation
Comparing Ohio K–12 education to other states helps us gauge the pace of progress, provides ideas on improvement, and gets us out of our local “bubble.” In a recent post, my colleague Chad Aldis examined Ohio and Florida’s NAEP results, finding the Buckeye State wanting in terms of gains over
NOTE: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute occasionally publishes guest commentaries on its blogs. The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect those of Fordham.
NOTE: In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, Fordham Ohio staffers will be blogging about teachers, principals, and guidance counselors who made a positive difference in their schooling and in their lives. This is the fourth and final post, which does double duty of celebrating National Charter Schools Week as well.
For charter school supporters, it can be frustrating. There’s always something new in the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) saga.