Charter School Competition

Of course not; if there was, it probably failed quite quickly.

“Albany’s charter schools are currently reimbursed about $12,000 per student by the Albany school district. A defeat of the budget would have no effect on the charter schools, which received $30 million in Albany taxpayer money this school year.”

The school district’s education budget does not include its payments to charter schools? Does that make sense to anybody?

EVERY Republican privatization scheme is all about funneling tax dollars to Republican campaign donors and cronies. Of course, it doesn’t hurt when you can screw unionized public employees at the same time; who doesn’t love a two-for-one deal?

According to the blog linked below (html seems to be hiccuping), the state teachers union and local school boards lobbied the NY legislature last year for a significant cut to charter schools (which did not pass). No word on how much those school boards diverted scarce resources from other goals into that lobbying effort. Maybe the charters see this current effort as payback time.

http://www.nyfera.org/?p=2982

@7: Interesting, except that your first three categories are non-disjoint (in fact, I think they’re even positively correlated), so you need a set of rules to assign kids that are in more than one of those categories.

Not necessarily. Run the lotteries sequentially; if you’re a special-needs, free-lunch, ESL student, you have three chances to be selected. You might object to giving those kids (or the kids in two categories) extra chances, but evidently they have the most disadvantages, so why not?

At their best charter schools can serve the function of being public schools that parents want to send their kids to. I do believe strongly that they shouldn’t be able to refuse kids. But a lot of the political things that we see in posts like this miss the personal.

There is no way – none – that my son would have graduated from the traditional public schools in my city. Zero chance. He had tremendous difficulties with the system and needed a lot of individual attention. He recovered (from basically failing middle school) and is in college. I’d feel differently if the public school system wasn’t so relentlessly inflexible, so harsh (zero tolerance) in it’s discipline, and so focused on busywork and teaching to standardized tests. It’s important to leave some space in the system for kids who don’t fit in – without forcing them into private schools. (I have serious objections to the idea of private schools, for what it’s worth.) Rather than forcing kids into the urban public schools, which I think is the intent of the suggestions here, you’d just see a repeat of what happened with busing: people opting out of the urban, or public, schools and defunding them.

On the other hand, I don’t see why the charters can’t actually be within the public school system and think that for-profit charters should be outright banned.

I thought the second sentence here sounded odd:

“Albany’s charter schools are currently reimbursed about $12,000 per student by the Albany school district. A defeat of the budget would have no effect on the charter schools, which received $30 million in Albany taxpayer money this school year.”

Why are charter schools paid out of public money but free from any accountability tied to the budgeting process? Then I realized why it sounded familiar – from an article about similar budget issues in Philadelphia:

“The Philadelphia school district may have to cut 3,800 positions in order to close a $600 million deficit. Another proposal to make up for the loss of almost $300 million in state funds this year includes eliminating free transportation to and from school.

That means no busing or free SEPTA transpasses for any students except those in special education students and those attending charter schools.”

Second article is here:
http://www.newsworks.org/index.php?option=com_flexicontent&view=items&id=18361:28spbudget

“the emphasis on accountability for the past eight years has encouraged schools to pay less attention to important subjects and inflate their test scores by hook or by crook.”

Gee, who’da thunk it?

Its like what I say of those who finally faced reality after the Iraq invasion – it’s really nice they’ve changed their mind, but I’d far rather they thought about it before the fact.

“and the public schools system has increased its marketing budget in response – needless to say, diverting scarce resources from other goals.”

This seems to suggest that marketing is non-value added, or at least less important than other potential uses of available resources. I’m not so sure. The marketing of the charter schools is successful precisely because it is helping members of the public to acquire new visions of what education can be (whether or not the charter schools are actually delivering on those visions). Public schools who are confronted by raised expectations among their customers will feel pressure to improve. That’s good for the students.

I remember when I was about 15 or 16 that the school started publishing a glossy brochure of itself. I still can’t accept public education spending money on advertising.

@15: That would be fine too; in fact arguably preferable to charters. Parents want choices in their public education, especially at the middle to high school level, and they can have good reasons for this. That’s the major reason why charters are popular. You don’t need charters to do this, but in practice that has been the main vehicle for doing so.

Marc, come back when there’s any evidence at all that the charter school sector provides a superior education. Since it currently demonstrably does no such thing, it is a misappropriation of the public’s money for a combination if ideological and corrupt purposes, end of story.

The best charter schools—the top 10%—demonstrably achieve superior educational results with inner-city kids.

BFD. A whole industry cherry-picks students and STILL only 10% of it manages to outperform the existing schools? Then there’s the considerable percentage that are worse than the existing schools, or turn out to be just plain rackets. If that’s the best you can do, just don’t bother- you’ll be laughed at by anybody who doesn’t have an ideological or financial stake.

I’m in a city with troubled public schools and the usual mix of failed and successful charters, and my kids (3) have gone to absolutely excellent public schools (2, and there are several others I’m aware of). I don’t see that these excellent public schools mean that public schools are better than charters any more than, for example, KIPP’s success means charters are better than publics. So the 10% figure is pretty unimpressive to me.

It’s a big deal for me, because my kid thrived in one such school, and he would have failed out at a regular high school (and he did basically fail the public middle school.) His particular charter school has an excellent record of getting graduates who were struggling to both finish and go to college (one of the best charter school track records in the state, actually.) Many other charters do much worse, of course.

You’re arguing at the plane of high and lofty ideals, and most parents are working much closer to the level that I’m describing. That’s the issue. I don’t like for-profits at all, and would prefer a model with school choices inside the public school system directly. But if you want to understand why charters are popular, and the role that they fill, just pretending that schools such as the one I know don’t exist won’t help your cause.

In other words, you have no answer. Got it.

So if we compare all charter schools to all public schools, it turns out that the charter schools are insufficiently successful to justify syphoning money from the public schools. But, now it turns out that the justification is to be found in the top 10% of charter schools, that do manage to be successful. Now, can we compare these to the top 10% of urban public schools? And if it turns out that the top 10% are quite successful, then can we abandon charter schools?

In other words, you have no answer. Got it.

I can only repeat that one anecdote means precisely nothing. If you don’t recognize that as an answer and furthermore one to which a cogent response is required from YOU, you’re frankly not intellectually equipped to be involved in the discussion.

By the way, I find little to disagree with in Martin Bento’s comment at 33.

How many “fraudulent fly-by-night charters” are there?

There have been several failed charter schools just here in Cleveland and additional financial scandals with schools that are still operating (for now). In Ohio as a whole, charter schools have lagged far behind traditional public schools in state proficiency test scores . Apparently you’re the one who doesn’t do his homework, or takes the three wise monkeys approach to the subject.

“Finally, it’s not true, as Martin suggests, that if 10% of charter schools underperform and 10% are extraordinarily successful, that’s a wash, because the gains that are reaped by kids in the successful charter schools (which, looking at that PPI study, actually account for 17%, not 10%, of all charters) are immense, while the charters that underperform do so by only a little.”

It is certainly true, as Martin suggests, that if 10% outperform and 10% underperform (I didn’t say “extraordinarily successful”) that’s a wash, providing that success and failure are by equal margins, which I didn’t explicitly say, but I thought would be an implicit default. What you are arguing is that this is not, in fact, the case, which is legitimate but not a refutation. If I say, if A, then B, and you say Not A, therefore not (necessarily) B, that doesn’t make if A, then B an invalid statement.

“It’s the proponents, who keep pushing them anyway, who are ideologically driven (when not financially driven.) As we’re seeing in this thread.”

How are we seeing this in this thread? There are a significant number of charter schools that have demonstrated that they can dramatically improve educational performance. IN their absence, the kids who would otherwise go to those schools would receive meaningfully worse educations and end up with meaningfully worse prospects in life. How is it ideological to say that keeping those schools operating and finding ways to expand their models to the rest of the system makes sense?

There are a significant number of charter schools that have demonstrated that they can dramatically improve educational performance.

NO, that is CLAIMED to be the case. It has yet to be demonstrated that the schools are doing anything unusual as opposed to dealing with preselected kids (whether by them or via self-selection). Furthermore the argument for more charter schools is predicated on the claim that these successes are replicable on a larger scale, which for a variety of reasons does not appear to be the case. The reality is that here in Ohio at least, charter schools as a group have drastically UNDERperformed traditional public schools.

As an Albany NY resident and taxpayer, let me try to explain the situation to the best of my knowledge.

The school budgets are presented to the voters for approval every spring. As noted above, if defeated, the District can try again or accept a ‘contingency budget’ that restricts certain expenses — like equipment repair and some supplies — and prohibits the use of school property by other parties — that is, no Boy Scouts, no community meetings, etc.

By state law, the “home” school district is required to pay $x per student to the charter schools. If the district fails to pay, the state will withhold state aid and pay the charter directly. This is where the statement that defeating the budget “would have no impact on the charters” comes from — they’ll get their money, even if the budget is defeated (presumably harming the public school system in the process).

Important note: somewhere around 25-30% of Albany kids are in charter schools. All 11 or so charter schools are run by the same organization. The organization running the charters isn’t a single organization: there are several that share board members and mailing addresses (some outside of Albany).

The local paper FOILed the post office to obtain records related to three postcard mailing and a telephone poll that were in play in the weeks before this year’s budget vote (which were anonymous). Suffice it to say that the postcards and polls were “leading” and, for that matter, misleading.

It turns out that the mailers were paid for not by one of the charter schools directly, but by an organization used by the charters to “centralize” certain administrative functions (like test scoring). Again, there appear to be shared Board members between the schools and this organization.

For more background, in the past year . . .

The charters sought favorable bonding and city financial backing through an economic development committee of the city. When the proposal was defeated, signs went up on a couple of charter school buildings calling out the city Treasurer by name.

The Board of Education President was inundated with several hundred text messages to his private phone, through all hours of the night, when he proposed withholding a portion of the charter school payments (as there was considerable debate about the rate at the state level).

From #14 above, THE question of the day, couldn’t have said it better: “Why are charter schools paid out of public money but free from any accountability tied to the budgeting process?”

Thanks Harold- that’s very informative and, though I think the data in Ohio haven’t been analyzed quite so thoroughly, the overall conclusion seems to be similar.

Once again- like that physicist- I find the idea of charter schools as laboratories for improving educational techniques, which improvements can then be more widely propagated, to be intuitively appealing. And like Ravitch I once cautiously supported the charter school idea on that basis. But the actual performance, unlike the attractive theory, has been little short of disastrous, and that clearly calls for a moratorium rather than for expansion.

What alternative are we talking about here?

Oh, so now it depends on what the definition of “is” is? That’s your fallback position?
You know perfectly well what a charter school is. It’s a school that is publicly funded yet independent of the existing public school system. (So no, we are not talking about magnets here.) And it’s an idea that, on balance, has clearly made education worse for poor and minority students. You’ve been shown the data on which that conclusion is based. Are you going to respond to that or are you just going to keep BSing?

And they’d be better as far as I’m concerned if they were recast more strongly within the public school system.

In which case they would no longer be charter schools, and also would no longer appeal to most of the “reformers” because they couldn’t be used as a club with which to attack the public schools and above all, the teachers’ unions.

The fact that there are so many poor charter schools is a fact, indicating that they aren’t magic. The fact that some perform well is a clue that the concept can work.

Some public schools perform well as well. so…?

I think public schools would improve tremendously if they could do this, and not just through the statistical effect of the exclusion. The “bad” kids set the tone if they are tolerated. But I have no idea, then, what to do with the “bad” kids).

Actually there’s a ton of research on what you can do with “bad” kids prior to excluding them. The trouble is getting people to pay attention to actual research, rather than their prejudices. This of course applies more generally to education, a subject on which everyone apparently considers themselves an expert.

Is there anything you can do that does not involve putting significantly more resources into the “bad” kids? Because, if they demand extra resources, they are still degrading the education of others. Resources are limited so, within a lot of domains, it is a zero-sum situation. Perhaps there are. I don’t know the research and would be happy to hear of a solution. BTW, one reason people have opinions on this subject is that we all went to school. In my case, I went to fairly bad, lower-class, black majority or plurality public schools. So I have some experience with the types of schools and students we are talking about here.

Why not experiment with ending child poverty and mis-allocation of medical resources?

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/09/27/100927taco_talk_lemann
Overblown crisis in American Education by Nicholas Lemann

On the issue of tenure, the clear implication of most school-reform writing these days—that abolishing teacher tenure would increase students’ learning—is an unproved assumption…One should treat any perception that something so large is so completely awry with suspicion, and consider that it might not be true—especially before acting on it.
We have a lot of recent experience with breaking apart large, old, unlovely systems in the confidence of gaining great benefits at low cost. We deregulated the banking system. We tried to remake Iraq. In education, we would do well to appreciate what our country has built, and to try to fix what is undeniably wrong without declaring the entire system to be broken. We have a moral obligation to be precise about what the problems in American education are—like subpar schools for poor and minority children—and to resist heroic ideas about what would solve them, if those ideas don’t demonstrably do that.

http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2011/03/15/report-sky-not-falling/
The Sky is Not Falling by Richard Pondiscio

True or False:
1. The United States produces many more high-achieving students than any other OECD nation.
2. In both reading and math, the U.S. produces more high achievers than France, Germany, and the United Kingdom combined.
3. In both reading and math, in raw numbers, the United States produces more high-achieving Hispanic students than Asian students.
4. There are more high-achieving African-American students than high-achieving Finns.
All true, according to an interesting new paper American Achievement in International Perspective by Fordham’s Mike Petrilli and Janie Scull. The moral of the story? Size matters and the large number of U.S. students ensures a high number of high achievers across the board. “In raw numbers, at least, our high-achieving Hispanic and black American students outnumber the high achievers of several other countries,” Petrilli observes at Fordham’s Flypaper blog. “At the least, this indicates that they will have a seat at the international table—on prestigious college campuses, in the board room, and in the laboratory. It’s a start.”

Harold, raw numbers are a terrible measure of average education. Nor can the US expect to be competitive based on scale: China and India absolutely swamp us there, as does Europe, taken as a whole. I can see the case for a bit of Burkeanism regarding large-scale transformation, but not small-scale experimentation, providing that the Burkeanism is overridden if the experimentation works out. I don’t think kids today are being well-prepared for the 21st century.

Harold, to be more specific, what is the significance of the US producing more Latino than Asian high achievers? Isn’t this just a pure statistical artifact of having more Latinos? How does this say anything about US educational quality? How does it even say anything about relative Asian and Latino achievements? What does it tell us about anything?

@63: The virtual charter schools are utter frauds; no doubt about that. My son had friends who enrolled and they had about as much substance as the “send us 50 bucks and get a college diploma” places. Except, of course, that they milk the system for thousands.

Harold, to be more specific, what is the significance of the US producing more Latino than Asian high achievers?

Never mind Asians, is it possible to take seriously a thought train that includes the amazing news that There are more high-achieving African-American students than high-achieving Finns…?

From Wikipedia:

African-Americans — about 38.9 million.

Finnish Americans — about 700,000.

Also, JFTR:

Asian-American — about 14.9 million.

Hispanic_and_Latino_Americans — about 50.5 million.

The raw number statistics at 62 are positively bizarre. Is this supposed to be a case study in functional innumeracy?

Harold, well, if that was the point, those statistics don’t support it at all.

K. Williams: “The best charter schools—the top 10%—demonstrably achieve superior educational results with inner-city kids.”

Why do you think that that is not a chance result? After all, the top 10% of anything will achieve superior results. And in just about any group of schools you will have a top 10% that achieve superior results. If charter schools are good, you can’t tell that by just looking at the ones that achieve superior results, you have to look at how they perform as a whole.

AFAIK a lot of the KIPP stuff seems to add up to “demand individual heroism from the teachers”. But then, essentially all academic productivity appears to rely on liberal quantities of good old unpaid overtime.

We have a KIPP school here in Albany. They have the highest achievement statistics of any school (public or charter) in our city. How do they do it?

Very simple. They self-select at the beginning, then they expel about 65% of all the kids who have ever enrolled in the school. The survivors are indeed good test-takers. In KIPP’s case, the number of high-achieving students actually DECREASED over time, maybe because they expelled a few too many. But the proportion of high achievers rose.

Statistics for all 11 of Albany’s charter schools are similar – between half and two-thirds of all students are pushed out, leaving a small core of high achieving students. Movement of students between the 2,000 or so in charters and the 8,600 in public schools is continuous, and is in the range of about 200 annually until the last two years, when about 700 swapped places and the public schools had a net increase of about 400.

As someone noted above, with an experimental design like this, all the data are useless and prove absolutely nothing. But yes, it was damned expensive. Albany taxpayers could get by with about a half-dozen fewer schools than we now have, and could give our citizens a tax reduction, simply by closing all the extra unnecessary school buildings we have.

AFAIK a lot of the KIPP stuff seems to add up to “demand individual heroism from the teachers”. But then, essentially all academic productivity appears to rely on liberal quantities of good old unpaid overtime.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it. The students who groan about how much homework is being assigned and how hard the tests are and anyway this is a boring subject that they’re only taking because they have to and they’ll never use it in real life don’t seem to realize that I have to grade all that stuff. If I give a Friday quiz and I have 60 students overall, that’s 60 quizzes I have to grade. And get back to them by Monday and have them marked with helpful comments showing why they went wrong where they did. Say it’s just two to three minutes a quiz on average – that’s two to three hours of weekend that I’m sacrificing every weekend. Another example. If there’s one positive attribute on which I stand out and that students comment on at the end of the semester, it’s that I have some really – ahem – kick-ass presentations, as one student put it on his evaluation form(this really is the golden age for visual aids for the teachers able and willing to take advantage of them). But those presentations take time – and lots of it. That demo on conditional probability with the various sliders to demonstrate how true/false positives/negatives for a given test depends not only on how accurate it is, but on the incidence of the property being tested for in the population? Glad you liked it. Nice to know that you finally understand that sniffing out true positives can be 99% reliable even though the test itself is only 60% accurate in detecting the condition. It took me almost four hours to put it together in a way that didn’t look absolutely shoddy and contrived. Four hours that came out of my supposed “private” time.

I’m not saying this to be self-aggrandizing; I’m just pointing out that – like practically every other skill or job – good teaching takes a lot of work that’s not readily apparent to an outside observer. Other teachers can see it, usually, because they know who’s in their office on the weekend, setting up extra hours outside of regular office times to accommodate their students, etc., and who’s students regularly come knocking on your door wondering where X is since they’re not in their office during their explicit and official office hours.

Turns out – whoda thunk? – that “better” has a rather high correlation with “works a lot and outside regular hours”. And while it’s nice to know the secret formula for producing superior teachers, it’s not exactly something that can be implemented on a larger scale.

“Turns out – whoda thunk? – that “better” has a rather high correlation with “works a lot and outside regular hours”. And while it’s nice to know the secret formula for producing superior teachers, it’s not exactly something that can be implemented on a larger scale.”

I’ve never understood this argument. What’s the practical or theoretical obstacle keeping hundreds of thousands of teachers from “working a lot,” rather than just a few thousand? Professionals in pretty much every field now work much more than they once did, and work outside regular hours — if this scales for law, or journalism, or medicine, or finance, why doesn’t it scale for teaching? And if the answer is that teachers aren’t paid enough, I’m certainly in favor of paying teachers significantly more in exchange for having them give up tenure (as KIPP teachers do).

Also, I’ve never understood the self-selection argument. The performance that’s being measured when we talk about the success of models like KIPP isn’t the number of high-achieving students in these schools—it’s the improvement in the performance of the kids who go to these schools.

1. That assumes a fact not in evidence- that this highly motivated subset of students in fact did much better than they would have done in their old school. How often this true is a thing not easy to determine from the existing data.

2. Even granting that premise for the sake of argument, the whole justification for expending significant public monies on charter schools- monies therefore no longer available to educate the students remaining behind- is that they serve as laboratories whose innovative practices can then spread to the rest of the school. But the practices that give KIPP its advantage, even if we grant (what is not proven) that the advantage is not illusory, are not of the kind that can be scaled up to a large unselected population.

We are forgetting the strongest argument for privatization: parents, rather then elected officials, can best decide what their children need to learn. Why should school boards dictate what children learn and when they learn it? If charters underperform, the question is why students go to them, and it is not because the charters exist that they end up with students.

First of all, K. Williams, it’s not just teaching practices that are not scalable, but the ability to expel all but the very most motivated and compliant students.

As for the teachers, it’s not just a matter of making them “work harder” in some reasonable and sustainable way; KIPP schools burn out teachers at an alarming rate. Hardly scalable. Nobody not paid financier bonuses can reasonably be expected to work financier hours. You are just not going to find a large number of teachers prepared to make such a poor bargain for the duration of a career. I don’t believe for a minute that the people who prate about this would put up with it themselves.

I am not dismissing out of hand the possible value of “rescuing” a handful of inner-city kids by virtue of heroic efforts (and that’s what it takes). But 1) not financed in a way that’s detrimental to all other students, and 2) the truth is nothing will really work on a large scale short of a societal commitment to mitigating the awful socioeconomic conditions in which too many inner-city kids grow up. But that’s not something you can do on the cheap while patting yourself on the back over screwing over the evil teachers’ union. And the fact that the very people moistly exclaiming over how it’s all about the kids, are NEVER found clamoring for major resources to actually do something about the economic tragedy of our inner cities, and indeed more often than not vigorously oppose any such efforts, is pretty damn telling.

“First of all, K. Williams, it’s not just teaching practices that are not scalable, but the ability to expel all but the very most motivated and compliant students.”

Why? Why not just make the KIPP model — in terms of the number of hours kids are required to be in school, the summer classes, etc. — the rule in inner-city schools? If that’s the basic standard, then it’s not a question of whether kids are motivated or not — it’s just what school requires. This isn’t a radical suggestion — in other countries, the school day is considerably longer, and summer break is much shorter. Sure, you’re always going to have problem kids, and their presence will mean that schools will be less effective than they otherwise would be. But the notion that it’s only a tiny fraction of inner-city kids who would benefit from spending significantly more time in school is absurd.

“parents, rather then elected officials, can best decide what their children need to learn.”

Really? Can they? I’m not unsympathetic at all to the idea of parental participation but how would they decide what their children need to learn about maths, physics or biology, not to mention evolution or climate change or condom use … why if we let parents decide that, we might even get something like the US education system.

Parents can decide exactly as the school boards do, but without the lobbying and the separation from the results that school boards today have. What makes the school board more competent then parents? I think most parents would know that reading is essential, but the Detroit school district didn’t get the message.

If the schools were an arena for the free development of children then the State would be better suited to provide it then the parents. But that is not what the schools we have today are. When I was in fourth grade I was given a talking to by the teacher for having the audacity to draw a triangle on the paper of a friend of mine who did not understand what an obtuse triangle looked like. She demanded that I stop disrupting *her* lesson. My sixth grade science teacher knew less about science then I did, and taught no science to any of us. The school board for my local high school decreed that no one would learn the rudiments of calculus that is Calc BC until the senior year. This is in one of the wealthy areas of the US.

Thankfully I was able to attend BCA where I learned calculus and real analysis my second year, and then multivariable calculus the year after that. Some of my friends at BCA did not have the means to attend private school as an alternative to their local high schools, like Garfield High School. BCA was a chance to go to top universities, which otherwise they would not have had. I have heard teachers say that some schools do not teach calculus. Children in those schools are not going to get into MIT, and are probably underprepared for many other good schools. Our schools are failing to provide the rudiments of freedom to many children. Should anyone wonder that I want to expand the range of alternatives available to those without means?

What makes the school board more competent then parents?

Or the hospital administration more competent than patients. Or the city sewage and sanitation service more competent than rate payers. Or the corporation’s legal department more competent than the board on legal matters.

I’m fed up with this bollocks that parents know best. Other than the ones who’ve some experience of teaching they really don’t. That doesn’t mean that teachers, or education professionals are perfect; any more than doctors, or civil engineers are perfect. I mean lets not kid ourselves.

Cian, quoting and responding to Watson Ladd:

What makes the school board more competent then parents?

Or the hospital administration more competent than patients. Or the city sewage and sanitation service more competent than rate payers. Or the corporation’s legal department more competent than the board on legal matters.

I’m fed up with this bollocks that parents know best. Other than the ones who’ve some experience of teaching they really don’t. That doesn’t mean that teachers, or education professionals are perfect; any more than doctors, or civil engineers are perfect. I mean lets not kid ourselves.

*****

None of these comparisons are apt, at least in the US. Hospital administration, city sewage departments, and corporate legal counsel mostly likely have training specific to their jobs. School boards in the US are usually elected and the members aren’t required to have, and often don’t have, any training relevant to the role at all. Where I live, the school board is mostly composed of parents, and the only thing likely to make them more competent than any other parents for the job is that they probably pay more attention, and/or have some longevity on the board.

If you made the original comparison between parents in general and the superintendent’s office of a typical American school district, the balance would be different. But it isn’t the superintendent’s office that sets policy, it’s the school board.

My son went to a largely Hispanic local Jr. High School here in Brooklyn and missed getting into NY’s selective Stuyvestant High School by 5 points. No extra tutoring in math was offered at his school. My friends’ two daughters went to a more middle class school a few blocks away where they had an extra hour of math a day to prepare for the high school entrance exams. Both girls got into Stuyvesant (though neither of them went there). My son’s two best friends were the only ones from his entire school to get into Stuyvesant, one was an immigrant from Hong Kong who was very self motivated, the other from the former USSR, whose mother and father were both mathematicians and who went to math camp, etc. One ended up at Harvard the other at Stanford (and then Harvard).

If I had known, I would have gotten tutoring for my son (then 13). As it happened, he was offered a scholarship at a prep school, so it was ok, though the private school was no where near as good as Stuyvesant would have been. It did have excellent athletics, however.

Teachers already work really hard; SoV isn’t some outlier or another.

No, I’m not, and I certainly hope I didn’t convey that impression. It’s depressing to go in every other weekend to catch up work and report forms only to see seven or eight people ahead of you with the same idea, or to notice that practically every time you drop in unexpectedly on a teacher acquaintance, they answer the door with red pen in hand and there’s a stack of papers on the kitchen table or on the the coffee table.

I honestly don’t know where a certain set of people have got the idea that teachers as a group are congenitally lazy under-performers.

Parents can decide exactly as the school boards do, but without the lobbying and the separation from the results that school boards today have. What makes the school board more competent then parents? I think most parents would know that reading is essential,

Cutting to the chase here (it’s that time of year and I just handed in my last batch of official grades, heard the usual pleas for clemency and the usual threats of dire consequences should it be denied), bluntly, no they don’t know that reading is essential.

Yeah, sure, they’ll mouth the usual platitudes and bromides about how a well-educated citizenry is vital to the health of the nation, how having some sort of degree is essential to make it in today’s world, etc.

But ignore all that and look at what these parents actually do. Which is mainly nothing except perhaps to complain about all the useless stuff their kids have to learn. And the po’ folks are far from being the worst offenders in this regard. Ever been in the house of somebody who makes five times what you do (and convinced of their superiority because of that fact) only to realize there’s not a single book to be seen? And that the living is room dominated by a $12,000 “media console”?

That’s depressing.

SoV: that last question is only applicable if the Dad/Mum knows mathematics. My parents lost the ability to help me with my homework when I was about 13, because they left school at 13/15 in the 40s or 50s. You can certainly expect parents to make their kids do homework, but you can’t expect them to help, in general.

In fact, my parents’ understanding of education methods in general was so weak that had they been around to help me when I was 17 (they weren’t) there’s no way they could have advised me effectively on the right study methods or style to pass my final year. As it was I stumbled on this myself, and got some help from a good teacher.

Which makes me think that the key factor is not so much that parents understand and help their kids with homework, but that parents cooperate with teachers, rather than (as my parents did) dismissing them as lazy stuck-up profs who get 6 months off a year.

I also find the idea of scaling up the hard work that teachers do to all teachers quite laughable. You do that with any workforce, you’ll lose a large portion of them very quickly.

In answer to why I didn’t work with our son in math, we did attempt to work with him, but he was resistant and insisted he understood the material. In retrospect, I think he would have responded better to a tutor than to his parents at thirteen when the hormones are starting to rage. We also bought him practice booklets but he did not work at them systematically enough, I guess. You understand, he was not bad at math at all and was getting high marks in school. But Stuyvesant had become extremely competitive and, as I said, he missed the math entrance requirement by five points (out of several hundred). So it seems very probable to me that if he had had the two years of an hour of extra prep in math every day that was offered in the more prosperous (i.e., non hispanic) school that our friends’ daughters went to — it was a special program — he would have very likely gotten in, as they did. (They ended up getting scholarships to a private school also). He did do better on the English section of the Stuyvesant exam than the two girls without tutoring. He is now a grown man and is doing very well as a computer programmer. I only mentioned our experience to illustrate that what is offered to students differs according to neighborhood property values and dumb luck.

Incidentally, I have just looked at the Core Curriculum Website sample curriculum and have to confess I was slightly disappointed — it seems a trifle pedestrian. Nothing is perfect in this imperfect world. But I do agree with their principle of a uniform, age appropriate and cumulative curriculum rather than the ad hoc one that seems to prevail.

I think there is a difference between someone not getting into MIT because of a shortage of spots, and that possibility being foreclosed on because the school does not offer calculus. One is bad luck and inevitably going to happen to someone. The other one insures that it happens to someone very definite. Equality of opportunity is one of those bedrock principles which is clearly violated by having only some children have the ability to ever take certain course because of where they live. In an urban area that is very unjustifiable. The school board can be indifferent to this problem, more so then the child who dreams of being an engineer or their parents can. Do parents really not want their children to succeed?

As for the claims about parents: sanitation engineers and civil engineers have clear tasks which can be rationalized. We can agree when a sanitation engineer messes up, as it clearly stinks. Education cannot be. To say that the promotion of skills according to tests is the end of teaching and those tests must be created by experts ignores the real questions. What is the purpose of teaching? How should teaching happen? And should we force those who disagree with us on these questions to do it our way?

There is a strange double dance in the comments section in which parents are too incompetent to educate their children, and yet are capable enough to be blamed when the state cannot provide their children with an education. I’ll agree that parents can be very incompetent, and the state can probably do a better job, but that isn’t independent of what kind of person one wants to produce through education. Does anyone seriously think that official state curricula are creating humans worthy of the name today?

“Does anyone seriously think that official state curricula are creating humans worthy of the name today?”

Unless things have changed since I was in school. humans are created biologically. And those who attended public schools, like me, are certainly as “worthy” of the name human as anyone else. “Less than human” is an epithet normally applied to despised racial or religious groups, Assigning it to public schools graduates is, to my knowledge, an innovation.

@Martin: Does anyone think the average high school produces graduates who can appreciate the highest expressions of human achievement and possibly participate in them? That is what it would mean to be truly human. Certainly calculus is one of those achievements, unless you would like to be a slave to the tides or the floodwaters of the Mississippi.

@Cian: I do not know how to make lightbulbs, the art of architecture is a lost book to me. But that does not stop me from evaluating the products of both, nor does it force me to submit my will in consuming these products to the guidance of another.

As for a defense of equality of opportunity, if we apportioned the goods of education by race rather then by geography I think we would quite rightly be up in arms about it. Why should some students be allowed to develop to their full potential and not others? Calculus is not irrelevant to the vast majority of students: failure to take calculus will mean there are majors they cannot major in at most schools and expect to graduate in four years.

Does anyone think the average high school produces graduates who can appreciate the highest expressions of human achievement and possibly participate in them?

Given that the average high school graduate is functionally illiterate, perhaps you should try for a more modest goal.

@Cian: I do not know how to make lightbulbs, the art of architecture is a lost book to me. But that does not stop me from evaluating the products of both

Nor apparently would it stop you from telling the makers of lightbulbs, or achitects, how to do their job better.

As for a defense of equality of opportunity, if we apportioned the goods of education by race rather then by geography I think we would quite rightly be up in arms about it.

Currently the goods of education are apportioned by class and income, and most people seem fairly relaxed about it. Well people who “matter” anyway, I doubt the poor are relaxed about it.

The better the tax base for the schools, the more money the schools have to spend. Is it any wonder then that the schools that serve the poorest kids with the most problems, also do the worst given they tend to have the least money. But nobody ever talks about it, instead they propose frauds such as charter schools.

Why should some students be allowed to develop to their full potential and not others? Calculus is not irrelevant to the vast majority of students: failure to take calculus will mean there are majors they cannot major in at most schools and expect to graduate in four years.

You realise that this is an argument for standardisation and some form of national curriculum, right? I agree those would be excellent things. Maybe the US could join the C20th and have some kind of modern national examination system at 18, such as the Bac, rather than the ridiculous SATs. And sure, there are other things one could do. A system where increased seniority and pay is dependant upon post-graduate degrees is nuts, for example.

some form of national curriculum, right? I agree those would be excellent things. Maybe the US could join the C20th and have some kind of modern national examination system at 18, such as the Bac

Oh fuck no please. The amount of politicking that would go on in Congress about this would drive anyone to sheer, inanimate horror. Congress is annoying as is; let’s not throw the bombshell topic of “education” on top.

It would also lead to a narrowing of the curriculum to exactly what is required, and wouldn’t solve the basic problem of school disparities, namely that some districts are better run and better watched then others.

No. Life is unfair. You do realise that charter schools aren’t going to solve this fundamental problem either? Its extremely hard to take somebody seriously when their basic complaint is that some places are better run than others.

Charter schools are not frauds

Well some of them are financial frauds, but no, nobody is denying their fundamental existence. As a group they underperform public schools slightly, which suggests that charter schools in themselves are not the solution. Your inability to grasp this statistical fact does not actually change it.

if we assume that of two schools A is better then B, letting students choose to go to A rather then B for free achieves equality of opportunity better then drawing a line in a map and decreeing those on the wealthier A side go to school A and those on side B go to B.

So what, everyone goes to school A? How exactly do you propose to achieve this logistical miracle? Failing that, somebody doesn’t get to go to school A. This can either be done based on distance from the school (entrenching economic privilege), or lottery (meaning somebody still goes to the poorer school).

Add this to the potential for competition to reward successful schools and close the unsuccessful

How exactly are you going to reward them.

a) By money, well there’s a system designed to make teachers/headmasters “cheat” (I’m British, I’ve witnessed nearly 20 years of exactly this behaviour). Your test scores have now become largely worthless.
b) By students? Please, no principal is going to want the kids from the failing schools.

How exactly are you going to rate the successful schools?
a) By test score. Then the schools serving wealthier kids will become the “good schools.
b) By value added? Well now anything that is not on the test will not get taught. This is unlikely to produce the kind of education you claim to want. If calculus is not on the test, calculus will not get taught. As for Webern? Are you crazy?
c) Parents making choices? Because parents definitely have access to good information, together with the skills and time to make sense of it. Just as the great American consumer is so brilliant at making healthcare decisions, or financial decisions, or at so many other things. And being British, again, this is something I have direct experience of.

Incidentally, one reason that New Jersey and New York spend more on education, is because salaries in both those states are higher than the average for the US, as are the costs of many other things. New York city also has a lot of deprivation, which depresses educational outcomes, and costs more educationally.

John Quiggin said:

No amount of evidence that they underperform traditional public schools at higher costs seems to shake the idea that more of them are needed.

This is misleading and wrong.

1) The evidence suggests that charter schools on average do just about as well as traditional public schools (see http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20104029/).

2) Overall averages are misleading anyway, because the charter sector is so diverse. Some schools (those serving urban kids) do significantly better, while others (those serving rich white kids) do significantly worse. See http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2011/03/charter-schools-and-averages.html

3) Charter schools do not on average have higher costs. On average, they get thousands of dollars less per pupil per year.

Some charters do get private donations, but those are mostly the high-profile ones like KIPP (99 schools). I haven’t seen any evidence that the majority of the 5,400 charter schools out there are getting significant private donations.

Martin Bento, in Texas physicist Michael Marder’s analysis, 5 out of a hundred and forty charter secondary schools in Texas did well enough in 11th grade math to have commended scores (none prepared students for college and the 12th grade SATs).

About 30 of these 140 charter schools performed comparably to the public schools.

But 100 of them (serving both black, white and hispanic students) were at the very very bottom and did much much worse than the present public schools.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddp0qgQFyS0&feature=related

Marder concludes that these alarming results do not justify mass firing of teachers and dismantling the present system of public schools. According to him, the charter school model, while seemingly attractive, are the disastrously wrong solution to our educational problems. Furthermore, we have had over fifteen years of fruitless experimentation of this kind.

Check out this link to see an exchange between me and Marder, (Short version: he wouldn’t get a passing grade in a beginning econometrics course.) http://www.texastribune.org/texas-education/public-education/is-poverty-the-key-factor-in-student-outcomes/

I looked at the comments Mr Buck links to, and don’t find Mr. Buck’s objections very convincing, however so they may be in his own mind. Not only that, but Marder’s data for other states is similar to that from Texas, though not as stark. http://uteachweb.cns.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/BrokenEducation2011.pdf

Finally, I would be interested in what Mr. Buck, lawyer from the Delta state of Arkansas, would propose as the solution to the “acting black” problem he identifies. Reinstating segregation? Having spent some brief time in the Arkansas Delta visiting black families, in connection with a project I was involved in some time ago, I would say that what is desperately needed and wanted there is adult education (along with better jobs and housing).

Where I live, in NYC, one can observe plenty of black and hispanic families from all walks of life, who act in every way very much like whites. Many many more than there were when I was young. Though there were many such, then, too, no doubt. Only one didn’t see them so much because of de-facto segregation in employment and housing in the North.

Harold, are you familiar with the term “selection bias”? It’s not much point discussing further if you’re not.

John Quiggin: As I already pointed out, it’s not useful to make generalizations about “charter schools.” There are 5,400 charter schools in the US, and they have vastly differing characteristics.

The best evidence so far suggests that the charter schools focusing on helping impoverished inner-city populations are doing substantially better than other public schools, while charter schools serving richer and whiter kids are doing worse.

(This is probably because there are a number of “progressive” charter schools that are focused on things other than reading and math scores — and more power to them, but it’s highly misleading to lump them in with all the other charter schools and then proclaim, “HA! No Average Improvement in Math and Reading Scores!!!”)

I live in a racially mixed “inner city neighborhood” and I doubt very much that Stuart Buck has ever even visited one. If Mr. Buck were truly interested in helping inner city populations, then he would know that what is needed most in inner city neighborhoods is medical care, substance abuse help, housing assistance, and relief from the iniquitous stop-and-frisk laws.

Mr. Buck is the author of an article favoring school charters with a certain Jay P. Greene
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2005/07/who-is-jay-p-greene-and-why-is-he.html

http://educationnext.org/blocked-diluted-and-co-opted/

Interesting that this publication, Education Next, should be sponsored by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, The Hoover Institute, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. There are wheels within wheels, in the immortal words of P.G. Wodehouse.

I suppose the answer is no, then? One can’t hope to understand the charter school literature (or any social science literature, really) without knowing what selection bias is, why it matters, how to address it, etc.

Well we all know how awesome things got once we privatized utilities, so I guess it’s only natural to extend that same free-market magic to education. “Maybe someone could innovate some awesome unforeseen solution if there was a money incentive” is quite an obtuse way to say “I don’t mind if people make money off us by slickly marketing the same old junk and dodging problem clients.”

Admittedly I still haven’t figured out what innovations my water and gas companies figured out, other than demanding various deregulation bills and somehow finagling the right to pipe stuff in from less regulated counties… which the government could have just granted its public-utility self, right? I’m paying more per unit water and more per unit gas, even in inflation-adjusted numbers, to get… water and gas. Service is not noticeably different. The same old public service announcements on billboards now have a company logo adorning them these days, for whatever that’s worth.

I’ll be more open to charter school proposals once somebody explains to me how the magic-of-the-market is getting me (and the rest of us living under privatized utilities) reliably better utility service.

Besides, remind me, why don’t we just hire these genius charter school innovators for cushy salaries as administrative contractors, and quite publicly can the hell out of any of them whose innovations don’t result in awesome improvements after 2 years? If their innovative genius brains wither as soon as they’re denied a marketing budget, we should be trusting them with public funds… why?

It’s not much point discussing further if you’re not.

I have a special place in my heart for people who stop by a place several times to protest that there’s no point in their being there. (I just wish it would happen less often online and more often in real life, because it seems like it would be more comical in person.)

Check out this link to see an exchange between me and Marder, (Short version: he wouldn’t get a passing grade in a beginning econometrics course.)

In general, this assertion about “passing grades” is nearly always bullshit when made by someone who actually teaches such a course and 100% always so when made by someone who doesn’t.

As anyone who does click the link would see, Marder would in fact get an excellent grade in any sensibly designed and marked introductory econometrics course, although since he is a professor working in complex systems dynamics, I doubt he would ever enrol for one. Stuart’s side of the debate involves nothing more than raising constant and ill-defined quibbles about “selection bias”, asserting without evidence that the careful like-for-like comparisons Marder makes aren’t valid. Nevertheless, in my experience of introductory econometrics courses, they tend to reward exactly this sort of nitpicking bullshit even though it is amazingly irrelevant to real-world research (for the laudable reason that it’s important to test that introductory students are aware of the issues), so I hypothesise that Stuart would also pass.

Dsquared — do you really think that a video contains “careful like-for-like comparisons” when all it does is present scatterplots of charter school test scores and public school test scores on one axis and poverty on the other axis? You think it’s just “quibbling” to say that such scatterplots at best show correlation, not causation? It’s “amazingly irrelevant” to point out that there are huge selection effects in Texas charter schools, given that many of them are specifically designed for “at risk” students (on drugs, pregnant, etc.)?

Harold — the need to help inner-city populations in several different ways doesn’t mean that school reform is irrelevant. Healthcare and charter schools aren’t mutually exclusive, after all.

Dsquared—do you really think that a video contains “careful like-for-like comparisons” when all it does is present scatterplots of charter school test scores and public school test scores on one axis and poverty on the other axis?

Yes, when the author has carefully made sure to get an underlying dataset as closely matched as possible (as Marder explained, in detail, to you in the comments thread linked). And if you google my name and the phrase “devastating critique”, you will find out exactly how little regard I have for people who say “there are issues of selection, etc etc,” in debates with actual researchers who have got their hands dirty, without ever doing the work themselves to demonstrate why these issues actually matter in the case at issue.

Talking about “correlation, not causation” is another example of the sort of thing that will help you pass an introductory exam in econometrics, but which is b-useless in the real world. In this case, Marder was demonstrating that there was no correlation between charter schools and better results, and thus no causation either.

To be sure, I’d agree with you that if someone has a great dataset and does a good job coming up with a sophisticated model* with lots of robustness checks, etc., and a critic says, based on no evidence or knowledge whatsoever, that maybe there are still some completely hypothetical selection effects lurking somewhere, then it’s not a very strong critique.

But that’s most certainly not what is occurring here. As far as I’ve seen, Marder doesn’t have a sophisticated model — he has scatterplots. And selection effects in Texas charter schools aren’t hypothetical: we know that, proportionally speaking, there are 13 times as many Texas charter schools serving “at risk” students. When so many students enter Texas charter schools having been designated as at risk for dropping out, it’s clear that a scatterplot with poverty as the only independent variable isn’t going to capture what’s going on.

* Say, a strong IV, or the latest propensity score matching technique (I like the sound of coarsened exact matching, as Gary King has recently written about), or RDD.

No Stuart I don’t accept this. As Marder repeatedly explained to you, his sample matched students with the same scores in the two types of schools; ie, it matched “failing students” in public schools with “failing students” in charter schools. You then started blowing a lot of smoke by claiming that a student scoring ten out of a hundred in a charter school was likely to be doing so for totally different reasons to a student scoring ten out of a hundred in a public school. It was very unconvincing.

You’re conflating the different charts that Marder made. In one of the videos (linked above), he presented charts that were NOT following individual students over time, but that rather presented a cross-sectional snapshot of school-level passage rates, etc. Those charts are available here: http://uteachweb.cns.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/TexasAccountabilityAll.pdf

That’s what I was initially criticizing as simplistic. Then Marder finally pointed to some additional charts — available on page 21 here: http://uteachweb.cns.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/EducationBare2010.pdf — where he apparently does look at individual students’ score growth over time.

That’s certainly an improvement over all his other charts. But selection is almost certainly still a problem. Think about a pair of students: John, who scores at the 20th percentile on his 8th grade math test, and who stays in a decent public school for the 9th grade. Then there’s Joe, who also scored at the 20th percentile on his 8th grade math test, but who for some reason is sent to a charter high school meant for potential dropouts.

Don’t you think there might be something different about Joe? There must be SOME reason why his parents chose the dropout school while John’s parents didn’t make that choice. That’s going to make any comparisons very tricky. Certainly beyond what a bivariate scatterplot could tell you.

Keep in mind as well the larger context here. I was frustrated that someone who is obviously capable of such sophisticated work in other fields was coming out with such simplistic charts on issue after issue. Check out page 8 in the file linked above — he has a chart of math scores vs. poverty, with each state’s bubble color-coded by union status (right to work or not). From this he tries to conclude that poverty is more important than union status.

Which it almost certainly is, but this sort of chart isn’t informative . . . many smart social scientists have struggled with the question of how to measure the effect of union laws, and it’s common to observe that there’s too much endogeneity to say anything definitive.

It’s just odd to see someone blithely ignoring all of the difficult issues that education scholars struggle with every day, and then getting credit because he’s a “physics professor.” Well, if David Figlio put out a series of physics videos purporting to analyze relativity by dropping apples from trees, one would hope that people wouldn’t swoon over his experiments just because he’s a famous education economist.

Back at you: if it’s my job to prove that there are negative selection effects that would make someone choose a school meant for potential dropouts (hmm, maybe it’s that his parents see something in his life that makes him at risk for dropping out), then it’s now your job to prove that there are positive selection effects behind the same choice.

Absent such proof in either direction, the proper attitude for a social scientist here would not be, “Look at these swell bubble charts!”, but “there are too many unobservables and possible endogeneity for us to make causal inferences.”

Here are some examples of legitimate charter school studies (actual studies).

http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20104029/pdf/20104029.pdf
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG869.pdf
http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/MULTIPLE_CHOICE_CREDO.pdf
http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/NYC%202009%20_CREDO.pdf
http://www.kipp.org/files/dmfile/KIPPJune2010FinalReportPublic.pdf

I also recall occasions where you had to have fundamental concepts like the difference between “significant” and “statistically significant” explained

You recall falsely.

: why do you think you’re right and all of the more knowledgeable people are wrong?

I think no such thing. For example, I am not as knowledgeable as many of the authors of the reputable studies that I cited in comment 164, but I don’t think they’re wrong; they’re on the right track. If you’re referring to my disagreement with Marder, I’m the one who is more knowledgeable about education research and its endemic difficulties.

if it’s my job to prove that there are negative selection effects that would make someone choose a school meant for potential dropouts (hmm, maybe it’s that his parents see something in his life that makes him at risk for dropping out), then it’s now your job to prove that there are positive selection effects behind the same choice.

Awesome. Well this really has been a thread for incompetents to strut their stuff.

If they offer an introductory course to research methods for Social Scientists at Univ. Arkansas, you should take it toot sweet.

SamChevre: “And so IF the Texas charters are disproportionately focused on particularly troubled students, I think the same would apply.”

Stuart Buck has been claiming that without offering any actual evidence. E. g. 156: “And selection effects in Texas charter schools aren’t hypothetical: we know that, proportionally speaking, there are 13 times as many Texas charter schools serving “at risk” students.” Not only is there no evidence for the claim but it is unclear what is claimed here. 13 times as many as what?

At 136 he states: “The best evidence so far suggests that the charter schools focusing on helping impoverished inner-city populations are doing substantially better than other public schools, while charter schools serving richer and whiter kids are doing worse.” But Marder shows precisely that charter schools serving poor and minority students are not doing better. The objection that the richer kids’ charter schools are masking the “success” of the inner city schools is frankly ridiculous when you look at Marder’s charts.

At the Texas Tribune, the best Buck can do is point to a Rand study that finds only a “small negative effect on students who transfer into charter middle schools in Texas”, and then Buck tries ad-hoc to explain that negative effect away.

Piglet —

As for the composition of Texas charter schools, see http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/research/pdfs/2008_comp_annual.pdf, page 147. Here’s the relevant quote:

Charter campuses that serve predominantly students
identified as at risk of dropping out of school have the option to register to be rated under alternative education accountability (AEA) procedures. In the 2007-08 school year, approximately 43.3 percent of charter campuses were registered under AEA. By comparison, approximately 3.3 percent of school district campuses were registered under the AEA procedures.

In other words, Texas charter schools are overwhelmingly more likely to be filled with kids identified as potential dropouts.

It really shouldn’t be that hard to understand why it would be tricky to make comparisons here.

Had a look at the third study recommended by Buck, “Multiple Choice”. The authors themselves call their results “sobering”: 17% of charter schools performed better and 37% worse than public schools. The study doesn’t help Stuart Buck at all, so why cite it?

One curious aspect of the study is its discussion of caps. The authors find a significant correlation with charter school performance and the existence or not of a state wide cap on charter schools:

Our results show that, in general, the presence of caps puts significant downward pressure on student results. Per year, states with charter caps experience about .03 standard deviation lower growth than states where no cap exists. Where the supply of charters approaches 90 percent of the cap, that effect is magnified to .04 standard deviations each year. However, when a state elects to eliminate its cap, it can expect a gain in academic achievement growth of about .04 standard deviations. Alternatively, were a state to elect to impose a cap where it previously did not exist, it should expect a decline in growth of .04 standard deviations.

That conclusion is invalid. It is hard to believe the authors don’t know better than to conflate correlation with causation.

Except that Marder’s results for other states are comparable to those from Texas. Stuart, if you and Walmart are so keen on helping inner city school and you are interested in music education, why don’t you persuade them to open up hundreds of “charter” Koldaly or Orf after-school music theory centers (using material from Ruth Crawford Seeger’s American folk music collections) in low-income neighborhoods (or better lobby to have these subjects taught in the schools nationally in a cumulative way)? These are proven methods.You and Walmart should also throw your weight behind union jobs, subsidized affordable housing, high quality day care, and universal single payer health care. These things would go far toward helping these neighborhoods.

The “Department of Education Reform” at the University of Arkansas (Harold 145) is extremely troubling. There’s a more recent interview here with Robert Maranto, one of its leaders.

There are some impressive resumes in the Department of Education Reform, Maranto said, and their owners are conservative. “Without the Walton money, I’m not sure the people on the far right would be here.”

That’s affirmative action to the rightwingers’ liking. As one commenter aptly observed:

Irony abounding. Maranto owes his job to a conservative affirmative action initiative brought about by a big corporation as a result of which the University of Arkansas now has a whole department staffed exclusively by conservative to right-wing extremist professors. For such a professor to complain about liberal bias is more than chutzpah.

Interesting also that Maranto publicly associates himself with the fascist liberal-hater Horowitz who hates nothing more than intellectual freedom and diversity. Horowitz would gladly establish Concentration Camps where he would send off every American academic slightly to the left of Maranto if only he had the power. Thanks, Prof. Maranto, for showing your colors.

But there are several legitimate studies using randomized trials where we can be more confident in making causal inferences.

I doubt that; causality is a slippery sucker. But there’s a deeper problem with the charter school craze: if (some) charter schools are getting better results, it’s very likely to be *because of something they’re doing differently*, rather than the mere fact of being charter schools. (Although it would be interesting if it turned out to be a morale or expectations effect that *was* based on the mere fact of being charter schools. That would suggest that expanding the program would weaken it by diluting the morale-improving “specialness” of the charters.)

So assuming you have found that schools that use Method X produce better results than schools that don’t, isn’t that at least as good an argument for public schools adopting Method X as for founding more charter schools to have them implement Method X?

P.S. Of course if the charter schools and the non-charter schools use different methods, then in a sense, you haven’t said much about causation after all, because the charter-status variable and the method variable are confounded. Like I said, causation is slippery.

Buck, a trial lawyer engaged in a propaganda war, is not interesting in rational discussion. He changes the subject when it is pointed out that his conclusions do not follow from his premises and simply returns to his systematic repetition of attempts to belittle and discredit anyone who disagrees with him.

Harold — you’re the one who is constantly trying to change the subject from statistical and econometric issues to whatever you googled about my c.v.

(some) charter schools are getting better results, it’s very likely to be because of something they’re doing differently, rather than the mere fact of being charter schools.

Well, obviously so . . . presumably if charter schools get better results somewhere, it’s not because of the word “charter” but because of something that is substantively different.

Now suppose, just hypothetically, that we can prove that the reason KIPP gets such incredible results with inner-city middle schoolers is because 1) they have the freedom to hire and fire teachers; 2) they have the freedom to pick a strong curriculum; 3) they have the freedom to expand the school day and week; 4) they have the freedom to kick out especially disruptive students; and 5) they are governed by boards that fear losing the affiliation with KIPP if they don’t keep an eye on performance.

Then what? You say that the conclusion would be this:

So assuming you have found that schools that use Method X produce better results than schools that don’t, isn’t that at least as good an argument for public schools adopting Method X as for founding more charter schools to have them implement Method X?

This conclusion is a distinction without much of a difference — if you allow public schools to adopt all the methods that make KIPP great, and it turns out that all of those methods are things that only charter schools (today) can do, then you’ve basically said that public schools should be converted into charter schools. How is that much different from “founding more charter schools”?

“Harold—you’re the one who is constantly trying to change the subject from statistical and econometric issues to whatever you googled about my c.v.”

I was referring to your treatment of Marder’s arguments and of Chris’s objections. Nor have you addressed the issues raised in the Jamell Bouie’s response to your book. In fact, you mentioned it without linking to it, so that no one would know what he said.

As far as the political slant of the Walmart-funded Arkansas U.’s “Department of Educational Reform,” res ipsa loquitur, as the lawyers say.

By the way, do you characterize yourself as a liberal? Are you in favor of unions? Do you support universal health care?

Harold — you’re not identifying any conclusions that don’t follow from my premises.

As for Jamelle Bouie’s response to my book, that is a completely different subject, and I certainly haven’t “mentioned it without linking to it.” If you’re sufficiently interested, however, here’s what I wrote in response to him last July: http://www.stuartbuck.com/?p=118 and http://www.stuartbuck.com/?p=125

No, I didn’t mention it — I never brought up my book or anything connected to it.
Have you even been reading this thread at all?

Well it’s obvious that you dislike what I’ve said, though you are not willing or able to articulate any reasons why, at least not at a level of detail that would allow me to have any idea how to respond. I’ll just have to chalk it up to my not being able to persuade every anonymous Internet commenter.

Mr. Buck,

You couldn’t persuade anybody, because the facts are against you.

OK, that wasn’t formatted correctly.

If you read everything else he says about Horowitz (in the very link that you provided), you’ll see that Maranto doesn’t think much of him overall:

too confrontational and given to overstatement for Maranto’s taste. * * *

Maranto also knows a professor who was fingered by Horowitz as one of “The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,” in a book by that name. “I think he’s pretty good,” Maranto says of the professor in question. “He didn’t deserve a couple of hundred e-mails calling him un-American.”

* *
He’s not so enthusiastic about state laws that would prohibit discrimination against conservative students and faculty. Horowitz has founded an activist group, Students for Academic Freedom, that seeks passage of such legislation.

“State legislators don’t understand how universities work,” Maranto said. A prohibition against discrimination sounds harmless, “but potentially anybody who gets a ‘C’ in class could say it was because of ideology.”

He says he’s more moderate than Horowitz, and to all appearances he is.

* *
“When you attack the whole institution, people tend to act in an us-against-them way,” Maranto said.So you have Bob Maranto saying something nice before delivering about six criticisms of Horowitz and his approach.

That’s Bob alright—he could say something nice about the devil (“a hard worker”). But it’s quite incorrect to cherrypick one positive comment out of a pile of criticisms and pretend that you’ve summed up what someone said.

Well, yes, the something deeper is a desire to dismantle the public schools, destroy the unions, and create an atmosphere of fear and and distrust among the people, that will enable a select few to rake in the $$.

The bogus (and in all likelihood insincere) thesis of “acting white” is particularly egregious.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-americas-schools/2011/05/09/AFunW27G_print.html

Let me show Stuart how this sort of thing is done: You don’t explain a third party’s claims without linking to their actual words on the subject. In this case, it’s one of McArdle’s (many) posts on bias against conservatives in academia. And what does Stuart say way back when to my observation (in italics below) about this nutbar theory and its proponents that just can’t get a fair shake in liberal academia? Well, this:

In fact, [Ogbu’s theory] is regarded as widely debunked.

To the extent that that’s true, it’s precisely because of bias. The best and most recent evidence on “acting white” is Roland Fryer’s study, which is based on a huge and nationally representative sample, which relies on an objective measure of popularity (i.e., how often a student is named as a friend by other people), and which shows that blacks with a GPA of over 3.5 suffer a penalty in popularity that is not experienced by white students.

At which point I had to explain to Stuart – slowly and patiently and many times – how even if this study was scrupulously done according to the most exacting standards, it was impossible for it to prove the “acting black” hypothesis; at best it could disprove it. I went into some detail about what inverses, converses and contrapositives were, how if this type of study was going to “definitively” prove the theory, you’d have to see if the more popular students were poor performers academically. You know the whole if A implies B, then not-B implies not-A thing. I also explained why the “best” study’s conclusion did not follow, even taken on it’s face: there could have been many other reasons for academically successful black students to have fewer friends, that is, students who did well academically could be a subset of the set of all students being “shunned”. Well, actually, let me quote myself so that Stuart can’t claim that I’m misrepresenting the conversation:

Assume for the sake of arguement that all this study is dead-on accurate in it’s statistics.

Tell me, just how does that support the hypothesis that ‘fear of acting white’ is a problem? It seems, quite frankly, that you have a poor idea of the flow of logical causality. If the hypothesis is true, then yes, this would be one plausible consequence. But the _inverse_ does not hold, that reporting differentially fewer friends does not logically imply a fear of acting white.

I think that what you are looking for is what is called the contrapositve, with is the negation of the inverse. That is certainly true, given the original statement holds. In this case, specifically: If the ‘fear of acting white’ is true implies that having fewer friends when having a higher GPA, then the contrapositive is also true, if having fewer friends while having a higher GPA is false, then the fear of acting white as a working hypothesis is also false.

Do you understand the distinction? Let me give an example more relatated to what I do. If a prime number is greater than two, then it is odd. (Ogbu’s hypothesis). This study is the equivalent of saying that if a number is odd and greater than two, then it must be prime. Surely you see the absurdity of this line of reasoning. Otoh, the contrapositive in my example is most definitely true – if a number is greater than two and not odd, then it is not prime.

I then went on to speculate that maybe those mean liberal academics don’t think much of this guy because of his methods as opposed to his “conservative” claims . Nah, couldn’t be. Has to be liberal bias against conservatives :-) It’s all there, if you care to read the thread, not that I expect anyone to actually do this. I’m just showing Stuart how it’s done, and why his style of bafflegab fails to convince :-)

It’s odd that every time we cross paths, rather than say anything substantive and relevant, you bring up an occasion when you were trolling someone who was in the middle of writing a Yale book on a subject that you knew nothing whatsoever about. I’d just point you back to a comment that I wrote at the time, as to which you whined that I was posting citations from actual scholarly articles and books rather than from your preference, Wikipedia.

* * *
Given what you say about logic, you sound like a fan of what McCloskey and Ziliak say about hypothesis testing. They make the argument that hypothesis testing is illogical, as it consists of saying, “If the null hypothesis were true, such-and-such data would be unlikely. We see such-and-such data. Therefore, the null hypothesis is unlikely.”

But I think this sort of criticism is overstated. Much social science consists of something more like this. “If there were no fire, we wouldn’t see smoke. But we do see smoke, and [this is a crucial bit] we’ve ruled out lots of other possible explanations for smoke. Therefore it’s reasonable to think there might be fire after all.” While such a model can’t prove causality, it points in the right direction.

If you feel to ignore that sort of reasoning on the grounds that it isn’t a strict logical proof, it’s a wonder that you’ve managed to survive to adulthood.

* * *
Anyway, this is all a huge digression, caused by your inability to say anything relevant and substantive.

Yes, chris, I’m presupposing some familiarity with the scholarly literature here, which doesn’t seem to have been true as to anyone who has responded to me thus far. For the best paper on KIPP’s results with middle schoolers — and I’ve seen education researchers sit astonished at a professional conference when listening to its presentation — see this: http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/pdfs/education/KIPP_middle_schools_wp.pdf

Notice that your complaint about cherry-picking the student body doesn’t quite hit the mark: Mathematica kept all initial KIPP students in the treatment group even if they left KIPP schools. In other words, their subsequent performance (even if horrible) was counted against KIPP’s performance. (This is the way to deal with non-random attrition, by the way, so as to limit the influence of selection effects. Real education researchers are always worried about selection effects.)

In any event, you’ve gotten quite busy trying to refute a list of reasons that I just threw out there hypothetically. The point wasn’t to say that any one, or any combination, of those reasons is necessarily true. The point was to ask you: What if KIPP is successful for a reason, or bundle of reasons, that exist precisely because of the ways that charter schools are different from other public schools? IF (notice the word “if”) that’s the case, then your clever quip about just letting all the public schools do these things too would really amount to turning public schools into charter schools. (Such a process exists in many states: look up “conversion” charters.)

Notice that your complaint about cherry-picking the student body doesn’t quite hit the mark: Mathematica kept all initial KIPP students in the treatment group even if they left KIPP schools.

Fair enough, as far as it goes, but if (hypothetically) kicking them out is the reason for the success of the *other* students, it’s still a method that can’t be scaled up to improve the whole school system. Where do you put the kicked-out students? They have to go somewhere else and if they’re really that bad for the performance of other students around them, the somewhere else will suffer for it.

You have to find a way to make them less harmful to other students, and kicking them out isn’t even an attempt to do that.

Selectivity combined with peer effects can *actually work* on an individual-student level, and be proven to do so, but it still fails on a systemic level.

We now know, after 20 years, that there are 5,000 charter schools, virtually all of which, except for the KIPP schools, do worse than public schools

We don’t know any such thing, as anyone can see by reading the studies I linked in comments 164 and 177.

But I do commend you for at least reading the KIPP study. Are you starting to get a feel for how a real study differs from Marder’s series of charts?

Also Harold, you were spot on with this:

Again, the question is why, and are these results scalable and transferable to public schools or even to other charter schools. What is/are the the critical variable(s) in what they do, if there are any? Wouldn’t it be a service to pedagogic science to find this out?

Yes, exactly.

It’s not really about attrition. It’s about the money. The argument for Charters is that if successful, they can serve as models. If they can’t serve as models, then they are simply private schools and ought not to receive tax monies.

According to a recent study by the College of Education and Human Development Western Michigan University, “What Makes KIPP Work? A Study of Student Characteristics, Attrition, and School Finance” (March 2011):

http://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/OP195_3.pdf

“High rate of student attrition with nonreplacement [financial benefit derived by].

The departure of low-performing students helps KIPP improve its aggregate results. Unlike local school districts, KIPP is not replacing the students who are leaving. When a student returns to a traditional public school after the autumn head count, KIPP retains most or all of the money (the amount depends on the particular state) allocated for educating that student during that school year. Traditional public schools do not typically benefit in the same way when they experience attrition, since vacancies are typically filled by other mobile students, even in mid-year. The discussion of findings at the end of this paper describe how “peer effects” play to KIPPs advantage, especially given its practice of filling few of the large number of vacancies from students who leave.”

According to the NY Times, KIPP officials disagree that more black students drop out of its schools than out of neighboring public schools. They say this finding is contradicted by the Mathematica study, which found that attrition rates at KIPP are no different than those of surrounding public schools. The Mathematica study, however, doesn’t mention what happens to the funds allocated for children who leave during the year, and I gather than KIPP doesn’t accept new students in the middle of the year. Therefore, what the Michigan study alleges about the financial advantage that KIPP acquires from this high attrition rate still stands. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/education/31kipp.html

The Michigan study concludes that:

“If KIPP wishes to maintain its status as an exemplar of private management of public schools, rather than a new effort to privatize public schools, it will need to convince policymakers and the public that it intends to recruit and serve a wider range of students and that it will be able to do so with sustainable levels of funding comparable to what other traditional public schools receive.

Before KIPP can be considered a model to be widely replicated, it has to be committed to serving all the students it admits and to serving a portion of the students who are mobile, ***including those who require a place in the middle of the school year***, after the cut-off time for public funding to follow the student. Furthermore, to be considered a viable contributor to a system of public schools, KIPP also needs to recruit and serve a reasonable share of students who are more costly to educate, especially students with disabilities and students who are not native English speakers. The limited range of students that KIPP serves, its inability to serve all students who enter, and its dependence on local traditional public schools to receive and serve the droves of students who leave, all speak loudly to the limitations of this model. Furthermore the funding KIPP receives from public and private sources—more than $6,500 more per pupil in addition to what local school districts receive—is not likely to be sustainable in the longer run.

KIPP’s only effort to take over a traditional public school—with a representative range of students and with the responsibility to serve all students who came and went during and between school years—ended in failure after only two years. This short-lived experiment with Cole Middle School in Denver speaks loudly about the viability of the KIPP model for public schools. Even though the KIPP model may not be replicable on a larger scale . . . the existence of KIPP schools has pushed the conversation about the value and importance of more instructional time for low-income students. Similarly, KIPP’s practice of recruiting and preparing administrators who can lead urban schools is another aspect of KIPP that is changing thinking about our public schools in a positive way.”

The Michigan study says that when students leave, KIPP gets to keep the money allotted to them and does not replace students who have left. Thus every student who leaves is a money maker for the KIPP schools.

True or false?

The Mathematica attrition study looks at whether KIPP replaces students who leave. Read it for yourself.

Re: 216: I have no idea. I doubt it based on my experience in Arkansas (charter schools here most definitely see their allotment of money go up or down from quarter to quarter based on ADA), and the mere fact that Miron says it is enough to make me doubt it even more. Why don’t you investigate all of the state finance formulas where KIPP operates, and figure it out for yourself?

Re: 217: KIPP students are 50% more likely to be black than in their host public school districts, are more likely to be poor, and when they start KIPP are “significantly lower achieving.” In light of those baseline characteristics, all you can do is scoff that KIPP has 9% special needs students compared to 12% in the public schools? Please. [See pages 6 and 7 of http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/pdfs/education/KIPP_middle_schools_wp.pdf%5D

I know what special needs means. The point is that it’s astonishing to wave away KIPP’s success as a “mouse” merely because they have 3 percentage points fewer special needs kids, while ignoring the fact that their student bodies consist mainly of poor black kids with significantly lower test scores at the time they enter KIPP.

Your state of Arkansas was one of the most resistant to extending benefits to poor agricultural workers and was the epicenter of agri-business/slavery, debt peonage, and Walmart.

You are touting the Mathematica study as being the only one worthy of paying attention to. I said this very sophisticated study issued a mouse — the conclusion was merely that KIPP’s results were “significantly positive”. The subsequent study on attrition was equivocal. In any case it was a very small sample. And more studies will have to be done.

Nevertheless, why would I want to diminish the success of KIPP? I think everyone grants that KIPP has had success.

I myself favor investing more time and resources on our poorest and most disadvantaged students and their parents, including daycare, medical care, and early childhood enrichment. It’s a no brainer.

I don’t especially dislike Arkansas, but I very much dislike companies that are anti-union and which exploit workers, like Walmart, which is run on the agri-business model. It was Agribusiness from Arkansas that was most opposed to the New Deal for farmers in the 1930s, with the result that they were excluded from many of its benefits, including Social Security and low interest loans. When Martin Luther King visited Clarksville, Mississippi, in the Delta (across from Arkansas and where the same plantation system prevailed) in 1968 for his March on Poverty, he found workers who had never seen money, only plantation scrip. This is a matter of historical record. I myself met agricultural workers in Arkansas in 2003, who had left school at age nine to pick cotton and were now illiterate and innumerate as a result and very unhappy about it.

Massachusetts, with a strong historical tradition of public schooling, has the highest NAEP scores in the USA, Wisconsin is second — both fully unionized. Vermont is also very high scoring. All of these states have a strong social safety net and decent pay and work protections for teachers. Arkansas is no. 42, so far as I can gather, and Alabama and Mississippi are last.

I said this very sophisticated study issued a mouse—the conclusion was merely that KIPP’s results were “significantly positive”.

Merely? Are you kidding? Here’s the summary from the initial evaluation (linked above):

We
find
that
students
entering
these
22
KIPP
schools
typically
had
prior
achievement
levels
that were lower than average achievement in their local school districts. For the vast majority of KIPP schools studied, impacts on students’ state assessment scores in mathematics and reading are positive, statistically significant, and educationally substantial. Estimated
impacts are
frequently
large
enough
to
substantially
reduce
race-
and
income-based
achievement
gaps
within

three
years
of
entering
KIPP.

If you read education research all the time, the typical results are disappointingly small, for almost anything that’s being studied. KIPP’s results, so far, are huge.

@Cian:
If you are saying americans make the wrong financial choices, then you are implying you know better then the people making those choices what they should do. Why should your will override theirs?

My will probably shouldn’t except in a very narrow area. But there are plenty of areas where the data is too complicated for laymen to make much sense of. Either you have experts make decisions, or (ideally) present decisions in as neutral a fashion as possible; or the decisions will be made based upon ideology, marketing and propoganda.

Pretending that individual Americans are going to be able to make sense of statistics, or educational theory, and the various problems with evaluations is ridiculous. They won’t, and even if they could, they don’t have time.

But judging by your comments, you think Americans are also able to make decisions about the medical health unassisted.

By definition people make the right choice when they are given all the relevant information.

Various problem with this, but to pick a few, this assumes:
+ They can properly evaluated the information
+ They are able to make rational decisions, rather than decisions based upon heuristics, emotion and other biases (they can’t)
+ That people can get access to the relevant information
+ That the relevant information is available (what do you mean test scores are faked, or are unreliable proxy for educational performance. Scandalous).

Incidentally, you seem surprisingly liberatarian for somebody who links to a marxist site.

How else do you define the right choice?

A choice that leads to a good outcome for them? A choice that leads to the outcome they wanted? I’m sure I could come up with other examples?

A lot of commentators seem to be failing to grasp the idea that bad schools facing incentives will respond to them.

Oh they will, just not necessarily in the way that you want them to. As I said, I come from the UK and we’ve had nearly 20 years of this now. We’ve also had 20 years of fudging statistics, cheating, of unexpected (and quite bad in some cases) outcomes and all the rest of it. In the US there are plenty of cases of schools teaching only to the test (which isn’t going to give you the rounded students you claim to want), or cheating the tests, or excluding students who will fail (Lots of that going on in the UK also).

Its just a matter of getting the incentives right.

Well yes, but then school reform is just a matter of improving schools. Said like that, how hard could it be. There may be easier ways of getting to Shangri-La.

Back to the two school example: If school B is that bad, School C will respond to the existing demand for quality education and sap students and money until School B goes bankrupt or improves.

Or as happens in the UK take all the better students, leaving the worse students with school B until it closes; said closing being particularly disruptive for the pupils in school C.

Why is the public sector allowed to have innovation, while the already existing private sector innovation is ignored? In urban areas with multiple easily accessible schools there already is a competitive school sector outperforming the public schools (and which parents are willing to commit blackmail, arson, and fraud to get their kids into).

Huh? If you’re referring to private schools it isn’t at all obvious, and in the case of private schools there’s massive selection bias. And there are all kinds of reasons why parents want to get themselves into the better ones – they have more money to spend on pupils, and they don’t have poor kids, or difficult kids.

By definition people make the right choice when they are given all the relevant information.

Millions of smokers will be glad to hear it. Or maybe their existence ought to be a warning sign that people having — not to mention understanding — *all* the relevant information is rarer than you seem to think.

A lot of commentators seem to be failing to grasp the idea that bad schools facing incentives will respond to them. Its just a matter of getting the incentives right.

In theory.

Estimated
impacts are
”frequently
large
enough”
to
”substantially
reduce”
race-
and
income-based
achievement
gaps
within
three
years
of
entering
KIPP.

***
I should hope so, considering the extra time spent.

More current statistics on Texas charter schools vs. other public schools:

http://www.tea.state.tx.us/acctres/Comp_Annual_2010.pdf

Charter campuses that serve predominantly students identified as at risk of dropping out of school have the option to request to be rated under alternative edu-cation accountability (AEA) procedures, just as is the case with traditional school district campuses. In the 2009-10 school year, 40.4 percent of charter campuses were registered under AEA procedures. By comparison, 3.4 percent of school district campuses were registered under the AEA procedures.

How does a charter school become eligible for the “alternative” accountability system? By having 75% or more of its students be designated “at risk.” See http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/aea/2011/manual/Chapter7.pdf

What does “at risk” mean? One or more of the following, according to Texas Education Code section 29.081:

For purposes of this section, “student at risk of dropping out of school” includes each student who is under 21 years of age and who:

(1) was not advanced from one grade level to the next for one or more school years;

(2) if the student is in grade 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, or 12, did not maintain an average equivalent to 70 on a scale of 100 in two or more subjects in the foundation curriculum during a semester in the preceding or current school year or is not maintaining such an average in two or more subjects in the foundation curriculum in the current semester;

(3) did not perform satisfactorily on an assessment instrument administered to the student under Subchapter B, Chapter 39, and who has not in the previous or current school year subsequently performed on that instrument or another appropriate instrument at a level equal to at least 110 percent of the level of satisfactory performance on that instrument;

(4) if the student is in prekindergarten, kindergarten, or grade 1, 2, or 3, did not perform satisfactorily on a readiness test or assessment instrument administered during the current school year;

(5) is pregnant or is a parent;

(6) has been placed in an alternative education program in accordance with Section 37.006 during the preceding or current school year;

(7) has been expelled in accordance with Section 37.007 during the preceding or current school year;

(8) is currently on parole, probation, deferred prosecution, or other conditional release;

(9) was previously reported through the Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS) to have dropped out of school;

(10) is a student of limited English proficiency, as defined by Section 29.052;

(11) is in the custody or care of the Department of Protective and Regulatory Services or has, during the current school year, been referred to the department by a school official, officer of the juvenile court, or law enforcement official;

(12) is homeless, as defined by 42 U.S.C. Section 11302, and its subsequent amendments; or

(13) resided in the preceding school year or resides in the current school year in a residential placement facility in the district, including a detention facility, substance abuse treatment facility, emergency shelter, psychiatric hospital, halfway house, or foster group home.

So 40% of charters in Texas have student bodies where 75% or more of the kids are homeless, or pregnant, or previous dropouts, or are living in a psychiatric hospital, or have been expelled, or are on parole, etc.

It’s crazy to suggest that there’s an easy way to control for this.

http://www.wce.wwu.edu/resources/cep/ejournal/v003n001/a011.shtml

Cian—back in comment 168, you said that I was incompetent and needed to take an “introductory course to research methods,” merely because I had pointed out the indisputable fact that there are huge selection effects in Texas charter schools.

Not at all, I said you were incompetent because you said to Dsquared:
then it’s now your job to prove that there are positive selection effects behind the same choice.

When he had to do no such thing. If you think selection effects are behind the poor results of Texan charters its up to you to show that this exists (hint: handwaving and anecdotes are not sufficient here), to measure it and then show that when this is controlled for, charters do better. Even the first of these would be a start.

The selection effect for private schools is kind of obvious (hint, they charge ‘fees’), the affect this would have is fairly obvious (hint, people who can pay the ‘fees’ and think this is important for their children’s education). Given that socioeconomic status strongly correlates with children’s status, this gives private schools a massive advantage. This is also rather easier to measure, than the rather nebulous ‘selection’ affects you were throwing around above.

And yes, if a student has been on cocaine or on parole since 1st grade, or pregnant every year since age 10, then by the time he or she gets to high school, those life events might have already had plenty of downward impact on test scores. But most kids tend to get in that kind of trouble a bit later. So you’re telling me that if Johnny is doing fine through 9th grade, but then falls into a crowd that shoplifts to support their drug use, controlling for his prior test scores is all you have to do to predict his high school scores?

IV’s can’t be otherwise correlated with the error term. So are you saying that the absolute value of the prior test score isn’t correlated other than through an association with “at risk” status with gains in future years? Hmm. And if the dependent variable is future gains, then that’s the same as if prior test scores are on the right hand side with the parameter constrained to be 1. So you’re basically saying that prior test scores can be both an independent variable and an IV for a second independent variable? I’ve never seen that done before.

So we should assume charter schools are better based upon trust?

It’s this last bit that’s the nub of the whole discussion. There doesn’t seem to be anyone capable of measuring what it is charter schools do in a meaningful way better than “Some charter schools do well!”, and state-to-state comparisons are interesting, but there are also other countries out there capable of educating children to high standards. So it’s not a binary charter/non-charter choice except to those who have an axe to grind against public schools.

IV’s can’t be otherwise correlated with the error term. So are you saying that the absolute value of the prior test score isn’t correlated other than through an association with “at risk” status with gains in future years? Hmm.

I’m suggesting that as a sensible starting assumption, one might say that test score changes of low-achieving students are serially uncorrelated conditional on type of school and sociodemographics.

So you’re basically saying that prior test scores can be both an independent variable and an IV for a second independent variable?

I think you’re confused here. If rather than test scores, we were aiming to forecast the physical growth of the children during their school career, I take it that you would not object to including their starting height at age 10 as an independent variable? And you would presumably agree that the reason for including starting height was that it summarised a number of genetic and nutritional variables that were otherwise unobservable?

D:

On your first point, I don’t see how that helps. You said let’s use prior test scores as an instrument for “at risk” status. But if future test gains are the dependent variable, prior test scores are almost certainly correlated with them in more ways than just the correlation with “at risk” status. Therefore it’s not a good instrument.

On the second point, I’m not sure of this, but my gut instinct is that you can’t have gains on the left hand side and also have the prior level on the right hand side as an independent variable, because of multicollinearity.

Put it this way. If your equation is:
(Height2 minus Height1) = alpha + Beta1(stuff) + Beta2(Height 1) + error, there are two Height1’s. In fact, having the gain on the left hand side is equivalent to having Height1 on the right hand side with the parameter constrained to be one. So now you have Height1 twice on the right hand side. Ergo, perfect multicollinearity.

I do know that in typical school or teacher studies, scholars will either put gains on the left-hand side, or prior test scores on the right hand side, but not both. Here’s a typical passage from a Kane/Staiger study:

Rather than estimating a coefficient on prior score, a number of researchers have used test score gains as the dependent variable (score in year t minus score in year t-1)—effectively constraining the coefficient on baseline scores to be equal to one. Accordingly, we also estimated teacher effects using gains but no other covariates, and successively added student and peer controls (not including baseline test scores) and school fixed effects.

Anyway, my problem was with your seeming suggestion of using prior test scores on the right hand side both as an independent variable and as an instrument for “at risk” status. I don’t think you can do that either.

@Cian: Yes, state supported schooling was part of a moment of freedom that should be defended. But today it plays a role in capital that is very regressive. Why do we care about education? Because it is effective at indoctrination to some extent. Letting parents and students decide what they want to study and where is a step forward to the day when students freely develop and sexuality is delinked fully from reproduction. The idea that the public has a role in the socialization of students is an important step in that direction, but now that takes the form of the state preparing the students to work. The welfare state was regressive because it substituted the supposedly neutral knowledge of experts for the will of those affected, and its defense today is a reversal that isn’t recognized as such. We shouldn’t naturalize the form that educational freedom will take under capital, but that doesn’t make it unfreedom either.

Nope: it’s the responsibility of the researcher to show that selection effects are not important. Even in randomized experiments, education researchers are always trying to make sure that they don’t have non-random attrition.

He did control for it. You’ve just claimed what he did wasn’t valid, cited a bunch of factors and then said that you suspect they’re unmeasurable. Its up to you to show that these factors would escape his control, and thus invalidate his findings.

Incidentally if it really is unmeasurable, then that would suggest that its impossible to measure whether charter schools in Texas are doing a good job as they’re educating a different class of pupil. In which case that’s a serious problem, because they could be doing a worse job and nobody would know. It would certainly suggest that the whole program should be rethought until there are better metrics available. It certainly wouldn’t be an argument for pressing ahead with it.

I think you know that I wouldn’t even having this kind of discussion had I not already passed such courses with flying colors.

Yes, D2, you don’t actually estimate a parameter that is constrained to be 1, but the point is that now you can’t estimate the OTHER parameter.

In other words, with height gains as the dependent variable and with controlling for prior height, the equation is really something like:

Height2 = alpha + B1*stuff + 1*Height1 + B2*Height1 + error.

But if the first coefficient on Height1 is already one, then what is that B2 term doing in there? Giving you an error message, that’s what.

This is why you don’t see anyone using gain scores as a dependent variable AND controlling for prior year’s test scores, as Kane (of Harvard) and Staiger (of Dartmouth) pointed out, or as Todd/Wolpin point out on pages F19-F20 of their 2003 article, http://faculty.smu.edu/millimet/classes/eco7321/papers/todd%20wolpin.pdf You can do one or the other, but not both.

Now if you had enough longitudinal data, you could control for years even further back, but in the case of Texas charter schools, you’d be controlling for test scores that were further removed from whatever bad event is making kids “at risk” of dropping out right now, and therefore this wouldn’t get rid of selection bias.

Also, cian, I’m not arguing for pressing ahead with the Texas charter school program. I’m arguing for good research methodology.

Given that random assignment doesn’t seem to be possible, nor can I think of a plausible RDD cutoff (or fuzzy zone), nor is there a good instrument for charter school attendance, the only thing I can think of is to identify 9th graders who are already “at risk” of dropping out. Then follow them longitudinally and if you see some of them switch into charters, do a student-level fixed effects estimation to see if the charter switchers have anything different about their trajectories.

I’d still be worried, as would any researcher, about selection effects (there would still probably be something systematically different about the switchers). In the presence of unknown selection effects, the proper attitude is a touch of humility and agnosticism about one’s results, not an insistence that the “results” are correct until proven wrong (after all, the real reason selection is such a problem in education is you often have a very good reason to suspect it’s there but can’t prove it through observables).

But if the first coefficient on Height1 is already one, then what is that B2 term doing in there? Giving you an error message, that’s what.

no, you’re just estimating a different value for B2, because you’re estimating beta-1, rather than beta. It’s not a variable if it doesn’t vary. Your estimation program will probably give you an error, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, just that your rearrangement of the equation is wrong. And that paper you cited really doesn’t say what you said it said.

Economic growth studies standardly do this. They estimate the change in income as a function of variables including initial income.

Right. (I know that–I’ve done that.) But I think Stuart Buck’s point holds.

If I had a population that I suspected of being seriously different, in a recently-developed fashion (say, to be really extreme, people who lost their job recently), I can’t use previous income twice–once “normally” and once to control for job loss.

Similarly, I think Stuart is saying, if you are looking at test score gains, you can’t also use test scores to sort out the “at-risk” effect of drug use or mental illness or pregnancy.

Its easy for me to teach people the way I want if I can be the state will pay for it. Charter schools ideally let parents choose from other modes of education then the standard one. The whole defense that charter schools enable higher test scores is really not a very good defense. Besides, if billionaires want a well trained work force, and charter schools don’t work, why are they pushing for them? (And yes, I am very aware that privatization is a way for backdoor cuts to entire into the equation. But that’s already happened)

Stuart Buck 252: “But if the first coefficient on Height1 is already one, then what is that B2 term doing in there?”

Unbelievable.

Here in Philly, I would say Charter Schools haven’t really hit public schools that hard. OTOH, they’ve been death to Catholic schools, which are closing like wildfire. This is purely impressionistic, but has anybody looked at that data? For most of the folks I know whose kids attend charters, their choice list went: tried to buy a house in a catchment for a “good public school” but couldn’t afford it, played charter lottery and applied to private schools seeking aid, got into a desireable charter and attended, got denied at charters and weighed aid offers from private schools, took private school offer or moved to suburb. Many of these folks would have attended a parish Catholic school but they’ve been closing so many that most folks no longer have a local parish Catholic school. A smaller subset have tried the move to neighborhood with school that could be improved with some help, form parent support group for school, have kids, work like hell for 5 or 6 years and hope the principal that you targeted doesn’t get transferred route. This has mixed success as principals who do turn schools from marginal to good tend to get transferred/promoted and parent group is often left out in cold by new principal.

261: What is wrong is that in

GDPtime2 = a + B1(lots of stuff) + B2(GDPtime1) + GDPtime1

there is no coefficient on the second mention of GDPtime1. It’s not an estimation equation.

I have not “conceded” that matching test scores is a bad method, and I have not “conceded” your evidence-free assertion that negative social factors have a further effect which is correlated with charter school status. Frankly, your assertion that I have “conceded” your point is rather cheeky.

there is no coefficient on the second mention of GDPtime1. It’s not an estimation equation.

OK, I think I see what you’re saying.

But I think you’re also still wrong to suggest that prior test scores could be used as an instrument for “at risk” status when the dependent variable involves current test scores. You haven’t even started to explain how that fits the conditions for a good instrument.

I have not “conceded” your evidence-free assertion that negative social factors have a further effect which is correlated with charter school status.

There is plenty of evidence that charter school status in Texas is correlated with a bunch of bad stuff — teen pregnancy, drug use, prior dropouts, etc. No education researcher would dare put out a publication full of graph, 90% of which looked at no variable other than poverty. (Nor would any education researcher with a deep familiarity of how often publications get dinged for not sufficiently addressing selection think that just controlling for prior test scores was enough either.)

As I’ve said with no contradiction, if the situation were reversed, you wouldn’t have such a hard time admitting the point here.

Imagine that some right-winger put out a series of videos on Texas charter schools that said, “How do public schools perform in comparison with charter schools in Texas”? (That’s what Marder says in reverse here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ddp0qgQFyS0&feature=player_embedded#at=40 ) And then he showed a scatterplot of 2008 data showing how many kids passed the SAT criterion, in which public schools had fewer kids passing the SAT than charter schools. From this and similar graphs he concluded that public schools are “doing much, much worse.” (See 2:10 in the video.)

But then what if it turned out that 40% of public school districts were chock full of “at risk” kids who were doing well just to be in school at all, while charter schools were not? Surely you and all the other charter school opponents would be pointing out insistently that charters were cream-skimming, and that just putting poverty on the X axis doesn’t even remotely control for the fact that the two sectors of schools have very different student bodies.

You can’t seriously say that this video represents a good way to study anything.

Interesting, Harold, that the dropout rate for KIPP in the Delta school is about the same as in Albany, NY, as posted above at 189.

The dropout rate for all charter schools in Albany is in the range of 60-75%.

As for the one page of graphs in which kids who start out in the same decile of prior test scores are being compared (and then their subsequent performance averaged at the school level over a several year period — it’s not very clear what Marder does here):

I have on my desk a copy of Donald Rubin’s book “Matched Sampling for Causal Effects.” As you refer approvingly to “matching test scores”, can you point me to the page where Rubin talks about matching by prior score deciles?

I have on my desk a copy of Donald Rubin’s book “Matched Sampling for Causal Effects.”

Stuart, I really think you’d better sort out in your head why it makes sense to include initial absolute levels in a growth regression before you start digging back into the textbooks.

Chris, my example was a perfect reversal of what Marder does in that video.

Granting for the sake of argument that Marder is wrong, “charter schools are worse than other schools” and “charter schools are better than other schools” are not an exhaustive list of possibilities.

In the sentence “public schools do about as well as charter schools taking inputs into account”, switching the terms “public” and “charter” *does not change the meaning of the sentence at all*.

Harold – indeed.

This is one of the reasons charters exist. It’s a money grab. it is also a way to make a lot of money on construction loans (see ‘new market tax credits’) . Here in Albany, again, there are several disused school buildings available on the market, yet charter organizers want to build more.

But why don’t you go back to the textbooks and look up the conditions for having a valid instrument, and then explain why your proposed instrument would be strong and valid.

“I think this correspondence has reached a natural end”. You rude oaf.

It may be rude to ask for a defense of your proposed instrument, but after all of your strenuous insistence that prior test scores have to be in an equation as an independent variable, you have proven that prior test scores cannot possibly be used as an instrument for “at risk” status. To be valid, an instrument must be something that does not otherwise belong in the equation as an independent variable. So you’ve refuted your own IV idea.

Any other ideas to address the problem that you were attempting to solve in comment 237?

piglet — as was the case earlier, you should read your own links to the end, and not interpret them to say the opposite of what they say.