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Policy

What Can We Learn From Charters? Same Thing We Can Learn From Magnets.

There are two big arguments about why you can't compare public schools with charters. They're both wrong.
By Eric Celeste |
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I went to a crappy public high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. (Go Cardinals!) During those three years, I also held a full-time job, meaning I missed a lot of school to sleep. By the end of my senior year, I had been absent 101 days of 10th-12th grade. I’d missed so much school that the administrations threatened to withhold my degree. The problem: I had a GPA over 4.0. I was a manifestation of what we all knew to be true: My high school was easy, filled with well-meaning but poor instructors.

Mr. Owen taught philosophy, among other subjects. He was an outstanding instructor. One day, when I showed up as class was ending, he told me the following: I don’t care what your grades are. You miss one more day of my class, I’m flunking you, and I can do it by state law. I never missed another class of his. Sometimes I would wake up, come to his class, then go back home to sleep.

Mr. Owen had a tremendous influence on my education and life track. He was the reason I took philosophy courses in college, which helped make me a much better thinker, student, and person. He was the reason I tried to write plays, which led to my reviewing theater performances for my college paper, which led to my career in journalism. He was the only great high school instructor I had, but sometimes it takes only one.

This is to reiterate what we all intuitively believe: Quality of instruction is enormously important in determining how much kids learn, and whether they find within them the grit to overcome obstacles placed before them. And if one teacher can help a stubborn brat like me, what can a host of great teachers do? And can their behaviors be copied and taught to improve other schools?

To me, these are the central questions we must answer: How do we properly find/evaluate great teachers? Then, how do we take and apply their magic to other instructors and schools in North Texas?

If you ask the questions this way, I think you can get past tired debates that we also realize have little to do with finding these answers. Primary among those: Are charters better than public schools, or vice versa? This is important to get past, because the search for best teachers will lead us to the schools that show the best outcomes, and that inevitably will lead us to BOTH the best-performing charter schools and best-performing magnet public schools. Once we arrive there, we have to ask, “What are charters and magnets doing right, and how can we copy it?”

Part of this analysis requires we make a grown-up admission up front: Just as DISD is not defined by its worst schools, so too are charters not defined by crappy charters. If you want to look at the failure of Prime Prep and make a case that this proves charters are bad, then I have a rock that keeps away tigers I’d like to sell you. What we’re going to do is look at the best charter schools and compare them to our best public schools in DISD and ask, “Are they doing better at educating poor kids?” Because that is the primary task of DISD and many of its outstanding neighboring systems (like Richardson ISD).

Here is the data I’ve been working on. It compares two acknowledged outstanding charter school networks, KIPP and YES Prep, with what are for the most part our best-performing schools in DISD, the magnet/choice schools.

Take a look at this data —  Charter-Magnet_LC — which compares demographics, zone/residency data, and outcomes for these two charter systems and DISD magnet/choice schools.

There are two big rubs on charter schools, two reasons charter critics say we can’t take compare them to even the best public high schools:

1) They pick their kids (i.e., parents must opt-in, which is not the same thing but it’s the argument that is made), so of course their kids do better.

2) They don’t take special ed kids, and otherwise try to keep out hard-to-educate kids (like LEP kids — “Limited English Proficient”).

Compare YES Prep or KIPP to DISD’s magnets, and you’ll see that those two arguments don’t hold water. Both charters are substantially poorer than DISD magnets as a whole. (This is with the caveat that I don’t have apples-to-apples numbers, so if you isolate for just their high schools, you might find that they are closer.) They’re also much higher in terms of the number of LEP and Special Ed kids than the magnet schools, which is the most relevant comparison population if you think like someone who says we have nothing to learn from good charters (i.e., you say they get to pick their kids).

To the second point: There are lots of kids in DISD schools that explicitly choose their traditional school. You can get the floor of this number by looking at DISD’s attendance data by original enrollment zone, which is one tab on the sheet above. And the number is: 11.4 percent of kids in DISD attend a neighborhood high school for which they aren’t zoned, so they’ve had to transfer there. So, anybody who says charter’s get to pick their kids and traditional schools don’t would need to amend that statement like so: Charter schools get to pick their 100 percent of their kids, and traditional schools get to pick at least 11.4 percent of their kids. I say “at least,” because this 11.4 percent is a floor. It doesn’t count the number of kids who attend their neighborhood school and do so cause they actually want to go to school there, not because their front door has some sort of conveyor belt directly to the neighborhood high school preventing them from going anywhere else. (In other words, because parents made a decision to live in that school zone — which is nearly every single human being I’ve ever known. Factoring in people who made the decision to live in that school zone, well, does that get the number up to 50 percent of their kids are there by choice? I don’t know. But the moral of the story is this: The argument about charters cherry-picking their kids a) WAY overstates any advantage that would be reflected in the numbers and, b) is completely irrelevant when doing a DISD comparison.

Of course, there’s independent research that backs this up that simply concludes, “The average impact of KIPP on student achievement is positive, statistically significant, and educationally substantial.”

So, KIPP & YES Prep are comparable to DISD’s magnets in my estimation, at least comparable enough that you can try to take lessons from the best aspects of each. You’ll see from the notes at the bottom of the chart that YES Prep does some kind of magical job with college completion (72 percent). That’s just astounding. KIPP on the surface is worse than DISD’s magnets (45 percent to 51 percent), but I’ll bet that evens out when you look at 4-year degrees vs. 2-year degrees. Either way, comparable.

DISD’s magnets do better with college readiness. This would seem to be perfectly understandable, since our magnets only allow smart kids while KIPP and Yes Prep accept everybody, and KIPP and YES Prep make sure their kids work really damned hard and testing scores be damned. (The “grit” we talked about.)

The point being that if you believe the best charters are at least partially comparable to traditional public schools, because the selection effect is important but not game-changing and the rest of the demographics are pretty comparable … then, damn:

Let’s say DISD’s traditional schools could close just HALF the gap between these high-performing charters and magnets, and go from a 12 percent college completion rate to a 25 percent one. (See this post.) There would be 949 more college graduates from Dallas ISD just from the Year 2006.To put this in financial terms, compare lifetime earnings of these 949 kids had DISD done right by them. The difference in lifetime earnings for a bachelors vs. high school diploma is $900,000. For an associates, it’s ballpark $200,000.

Let’s say we’re half & half on the bachelors vs. associates breakdown for these kids. That translates to a lifetime earnings difference of $521M for the DISD Class of 2006, had we performed like we could have — using whatever secret teacher sauce they’re using at the best magnets and the best charters.

This is why it’s so important we set the conversations thusly: “What are the best schools that teach mostly poor kids, and what are their best teachers doing right?” (Also, of course: How are they correctly supported and incentivized? That’s another post.) And cutting charters out of that discussion is silly.

Once we do this, we can start looking for associations that are important — does tenure correlate with achievement, does amount spent per child correlate with achievement, etc. — but not until we include all the best schools that educate poor kids into our analysis, and that includes charters.

 

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