Esteban | ˈe-stə-vən - /books/charter-schools-and-their-enemies/

Charter Schools

Dec. 8, 2020

Read time: 70 minutes and 59 seconds.

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A Review

There’s often rhetoric surrounding children’s education about whether enough or too little is being done for their best interest. Thomas Sowell, American Economist and Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, finds comparable circumstances where students and their form of education are nearly identical to conduct cohort studies. Since so many elements must be considered in studies of this magnitude, Dr. Sowell contrasts charter and public schools taught in the same location to show the dramatic difference in performance charter school students tend to have based on the structure of their program.

Highlights

Many scholars and policy-makers already had their own explanations for the failures of black schools, and their own ?solutions? for that problem. What I had written was, to them, at best a passing distraction, if not something that needed to be discredited, so that they could get on with promoting their own prescriptions, policies and programs. Chief Justice Earl Warren had already declared racially separate schools to be ?inherently unequal? in the Supreme Court?s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, so racial segregation was the prevailing explanation of substandard black educational achievements. The fact that all-black Dunbar High School was only about a mile away from the Supreme Court where the Chief Justice made his historic pronouncement, and that Dunbar, at that time, sent a higher proportion of its graduates on to college than any white public high school in the city,1 was a fact that was probably unknown to those crusading for racial ?integration? in the schools, and that fact probably would not have made any difference to them, even if they had known it.

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Not all charter schools turned out to be successful, just as not all traditional public schools turned out to be successful?or all failures, for that matter. But particular charter schools, and especially some particular networks of charter schools, located in low-income black and Hispanic neighborhoods, achieved educational results not only far above the levels achieved by most public schools in those neighborhoods, but sometimes even higher educational results than those in most schools located in affluent white neighborhoods. No one expected that. Anyone who might have predicted such an outcome beforehand would have been considered to be hopelessly unrealistic. This story might seem to have had a happy ending?at least for that fraction of minority students attending successful charter schools. But, in fact, even the most successful charter schools have been bitterly attacked by teachers unions, by politicians, by the civil rights establishment and assorted others. How can success be so unwelcome? It is apparently not unwelcome to parents of low-income minority students. In New York City alone, there are more than 50,000 children on waiting lists to get into charter schools.2 Yet New York?s mayor has announced an end to the expansion of charter schools and threatened restrictions on those already functioning. It is much the same story in California?and in many other places in between.

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Public charter schools are public schools not created by the existing government education authorities, but by some private groups who gain government approval by meeting various preconditions set by authorizing agencies.4 These agencies issue charters enabling these schools to operate as public schools eligible for taxpayer money and to enroll public school students who apply. By allowing more autonomy and flexibility in public charter schools than in the more tightly controlled traditional public schools, it was hoped that new educational policies and practices that emerge from this experiment might produce some better educational results. In that case, traditional public schools would have these new policies and practices available to use if they chose to, thereby benefitting the much larger number of students in the traditional public school sector. If, however, a charter school has educational outcomes that fail to satisfy the authorities, those authorities can revoke its charter and end its access to taxpayer money and public school students.

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One important difference, however, is that students are not assigned to go to public charter schools, as they are assigned to attend particular traditional public schools. Those students whose parents want them to go to particular charter schools can seek admission to those charter schools, usually by entering a lottery. Choosing students by lottery?rather than by their ability or their educational track record?is supposed to keep the students in the two kinds of schools more or less comparable, so as to keep the experiment valid and its conclusions applicable to public schools in general. One major complication in studies comparing public charter schools with traditional public schools is that the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds of students in the charter schools as a whole turn out to be very different from those of students in traditional public schools as a whole.

- Page 7 (location ~ 103-109)

A striking example of how racial or ethnic differences among students can make it hard to determine the effectiveness of different schools?whether in terms of charter schools or in other contexts?is a study of educational test score differences among the 50 states. Students in Iowa scored higher on those tests than students in Texas. But whites in Texas scored higher than whites in Iowa; blacks in Texas scored higher than blacks in Iowa; Asians in Texas scored higher than Asians in Iowa; and Hispanics in Texas scored higher than Hispanics in Iowa.7 How then could Iowa students as a whole have scored higher than Texas students as a whole? Simply because ?Iowa?s student population is predominantly white?8 and students in Texas include far more minority students, mostly low-income minorities.

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Among the wide variety of statistics available on educational test results in charter schools and traditional public schools, the ones given the greatest weight here will be statistics comparing students in particular schools meeting all three of the following criteria: 1. There is a similar ethnic composition of students9 in a particular charter school being compared to a particular traditional public school serving the same local population. 2. The students in both schools are taught in the very same building, thus reducing whatever effect differences in particular buildings, or in the neighborhoods around those buildings, might be. This also reduces the likely range of dispersion in the locations of the homes from which students come, as well as the likely dispersion of their socioeconomic backgrounds. 3. The charter school and the traditional public school have one or more classes at the same grade level in the same building, so that students in these particular classes can be compared in their results when taking the same tests.

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- Page 9 (location ~ 131-145)

In a world where higher mathematics is required in many professions?not just for scientists, engineers or statisticians, but increasingly also for economists, psychologists, sociologists and others?an inability to master mathematics means that doors of opportunity into a wide range of professions are silently closing in the background as children go through elementary school without achieving proficiency in arithmetic. Having children talking in school about how they are going to become doctors or pilots, when they have not mastered fractions or decimals, is a cruel hoax?as they can discover later in life as adults, when it is too late.*

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In each of these 5 KIPP charter schools, at least 95 percent of the students in our sample were either black or Hispanic in 2017?2018. This was also true of the ethnic breakdown in the traditional public schools housed in the same buildings.1 Most of the students in both the KIPP charter schools and in the traditional public schools housed with them were classified as ?economically disadvantaged? by the New York State Education Department.

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Overall, KIPP students clearly did better on the English Language Arts test in these five buildings than traditional public school students in the same grades. None of the KIPP charter school grade levels had 40 percent or more of their students scoring down at the bottom in Level 1. But 11 of the 20 grade levels in the various traditional public schools scored that low. These included 8 grade levels where more than half the students scored down in Level

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In short, the disparity in outcomes was even greater in mathematics than in English. This is not uncommon as a general pattern. Some have suggested that this is because students? language skills depend on both the home and the school, while their mathematics skills are usually acquired only in school. But, whatever the reason, the pattern turns up often. Table 1B has more detailed information on the mathematics test results in 2017?2018.

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Low Scores in Mathematics Turning to the students who scored at the bottom, in Level 1 on the 2017?2018 mathematics test, in every grade level in all thirteen buildings the proportion of students in traditional public schools exceeded the proportion of Success Academy students who scored that low. In 22 of 26 grade levels, zero percent of Success Academy students scored at that low level in mathematics. Meanwhile, the proportion of traditional public school students scoring that low ranged from 4 percent to 74 percent. Among Success Academy charter school students in these same thirteen buildings, the highest proportion scoring at the bottom in Level 1 on the mathematics test was 3 percent in one grade level in one school. (Details in Table

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Conclusion The educational outcomes in the Success Academy charter schools and in the traditional public schools housed with them in the same thirteen buildings can be readily summarized: Success Academy charter schools have had an overwhelmingly higher rate of educational success in tests of both English and mathematics. Among the traditional public schools, P.S. 138 in Brooklyn had a creditable record in both English and mathematics, though not in the same league with Success Academy charter schools. Back in 2013, a higher percentage of the fifth-graders in a Success Academy charter school in Harlem passed the New York State Mathematics examination than any other public school fifth-graders in the entire state of New York. This included, as the New York Times put it, ?even their counterparts in the whitest and richest suburbs, Scarsdale and Briarcliff Manor.?

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High Scores in Mathematics On the New York State Mathematics test given in 2017?2018, a majority of the charter school students in the Explore Schools network reached the ?proficient? level or above in just 6 of their 20 grade levels, though they reached 50 percent in two other grade levels. Students in the various traditional public schools housed in the same buildings did even worse on the mathematics test than on the English Language Arts test. None of their 20 grade levels in these six buildings had a majority of the traditional public school students achieving ?proficiency? in mathematics. Their highest proportion reaching the ?proficient? level or above in mathematics was 39 percent. (Table 3B) In a few grade levels the Explore Schools students did well on the mathematics test. In five grade levels, from 60 percent to 86 percent of these charter school students scored at the ?proficient? level or above.

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High Scores in Mathematics On the New York State Education Department?s Mathematics test in 2017?2018, a majority of the Achievement First charter school students scored at the ?proficient? level or above in 17 of their 18 grade levels. Among the traditional public school students at the same grade levels in the same buildings, there was just one out of 18 grade levels where a majority of those students scored at the ?proficient? or above levels. These were fifth-graders in the Philippa Schuyler Junior High School, 76 percent of whom scored at ?proficient? or better. (Table 5B) Achievement First charter school students had the only grade levels where a majority of the students scored at Level 4?above ?proficient??in mathematics. There were six grade levels in four schools where a majority of the Achievement First charter school students scored that high, and these majorities scoring at the top ranged from 55 percent to 80 percent.

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The question here is: To what extent were the patterns seen among the five charter school networks discussed here also found among the much larger number of charter schools in the same circumstances in the city as a whole? When considering all such charter schools in New York City, and comparing their students? test results with the test results of students in traditional public schools located in the same buildings, the patterns turn out to be strikingly similar to what we have already seen in the five charter school networks examined here in some detail. The 65 charter schools in New York City in 2017?2018 that were located in the same buildings with traditional public schools?each with most of their students either black or Hispanic, and having one or more grade levels in common?had a total of 172 grade levels tested on the New York State English Language Arts test. In 65 percent of those grade levels, a majority of the charter school students scored at the ?proficient? level or above. The 72 traditional public schools located in the same buildings had a total of 191 grade levels. In 14 percent of these grade levels, a majority of the students scored at the ?proficient? and above levels on the English Language Arts test. In short, the disparity in achieving ?proficiency? was nearly five to one. On the New York State Education Department?s Mathematics test, 68 percent of the charter schools? 161 grade levels had a majority of their students scoring at the ?proficient? level and above. In the traditional public schools? 177 grade levels, just 10 percent had a majority of their students scoring at the ?proficient? level and above. Here the disparity in achieving ?proficiency? was nearly seven to one.

- Page 32 (location ~ 477-489)

In April 2019, for example, the Wall Street Journal reported on test results in New York City?s charter schools in general and traditional public schools in general?that is, not confined to schools located in the same buildings: The most recent state test results for grades 3?8 show that while the majority of New York students attending traditional public schools are not proficient in either math or English language arts (ELA), a majority of charter school students are. For New York City, the charter performance is even more impressive when broken down by race. At city charters, 57% of black students and 54% of Hispanic students pass ELA, compared with 52% of white students statewide. It?s the same in math, with 59% of black students and 57% of Hispanics at city charters passing, against 54% of white students statewide.

- Page 33 (location ~ 493-501)

Over the period from 2001 to 2016, enrollment in traditional public schools rose 1 percent, while enrollment in public charter schools rose 571 percent.4 Moreover, the concentration of charter schools in low-income minority neighborhoods across the country has made them a far larger presence in those communities, with the net result that most charter school students nationwide are either black or Hispanic. Most important of all, the abysmal educational outcomes that have long been the norm in such communities have now been highlighted in the glare of disproportionately better outcomes in many charter schools in those same communities. Not all charter schools are successful. But failing charter schools are no real threat to the education establishment?s traditional public schools. Failing charter schools can have their charters revoked, cutting off their access to the taxpayers? money. This can happen more readily to a charter school than to a traditional public school that is either educationally deficient or financially corrupt. Failing charter schools can even be beneficial to the traditional public school establishment, in so far as the failures of some charter schools can be cited as reasons for restricting the growth and the operations of charter schools in general.

- Page 35 (location ~ 533-542)

- Page 35 (location ~ 533-546)

Moskowitz?founder and head of the Success Academy charter schools?as a prime target. As the Wall Street Journal reported: Mr. de Blasio explicitly campaigned last year against charters?and against Ms. Moskowitz in particular. In May at a forum hosted by the United Federation of Teachers, or UFT, the potent government-employee local: ?It?s time for Eva Moskowitz to stop having the run of the place.? She has to stop being tolerated, enabled, supported.? In July, on his plans to charge charters?which are independently run public schools?for sharing space with city-run public schools: ?There?s no way in hell Eva Moskowitz should get free rent, O.K.??5 It is, of course, not Ms. Moskowitz who gets ?free rent.? It is the children in charter schools who need classrooms, just as children in traditional public schools need classrooms. But educational authorities seldom build schools for charter school children, as they do for children in other public schools. Instead, charter school students are often housed in existing public school buildings that have space available. This puts the power to deny classroom space to charter schools in the hands of local school district officials, who can protect their existing traditional public schools from competition by limiting charter schools? capacity to expand and admit the many students on their waiting lists. In Boston, the number of students on waiting lists to get into charter schools there was nearly three times the number of students already in those schools. In absolute numbers, there were more than 25,000 students on waiting lists in Boston and?as already noted?more than 50,000 in New York City.6 Large numbers of students on waiting lists to get into charter schools are common in other cities. These include cities where there are school buildings that have been completely vacant for years, but which charter schools have been blocked from using.7 Teachers unions have opposed letting charter schools lease or buy unused educational facilities.

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Teachers unions are the politically strongest of the organizations opposed to charter schools. Their millions of members and millions of dollars in political campaign contributions9 ensure that there will be government officials?from the local to the national level?responsive to the teachers unions? agenda. That agenda includes: 1. In addition to opposition to charter schools being allowed to teach their students in existing vacant public school buildings, teachers unions have opposed letting charter school students be taught in vacant classrooms in schools where traditional public school classes are housed.10 2. Teachers unions have also advocated placing legal restrictions on the number of charter schools permitted to exist.11 Many states already have such numerical limits,12 which are wholly independent of whether the quality of charter school education is better, worse or the same as in traditional public schools. Numerical ?caps? on the number of charter schools permitted to exist?independently of their educational quality?make no sense, except as a way of restricting the exodus of students from traditional public schools. 3. Teachers unions have advocated placing restrictions on charter schools? right to appeal adverse decisions by local school district officials to higher authorities.13 Murderers convicted in a court of law have the right to appeal, but apparently charter schools should not. 4. Teachers unions have opposed strict student behavior rules, such as those in ?no excuses? charter schools, which can lead to more suspensions or expulsions of students for disruptive or violent conduct.14 Whether this opposition is philosophical or financial is not easy to determine. But every disruptive or violent student who is expelled, or who drops out of school after being repeatedly punished, costs the traditional public school system as much money in lost per-pupil allotments as a student who leaves to go to a charter school. If charter schools are able to maintain stricter behavioral standards than those in traditional public schools, then that can be seen as an ?unfair? competitive advantage that should be ended. 5. Insistence that charter school teachers be required by law to have as many credentials?such as degrees from teachers colleges?as teachers are required to have in traditional public schools. This is depicted as an effort to guarantee that students in charter schools are taught by ?qualified? teachers, even though in New York City?s low-income minority neighborhoods, charter school students taught by supposedly less qualified teachers end up achieving ?proficiency? far more often than students taught by teachers who have more paper credentials.

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Among the arguments addressed to the public by teachers unions is that ?students in charter schools roughly perform the same as students in the rest of public education,? as the head of the American Federation of Teachers put it.15 Similar statements have been made by other critics of charter schools, even though comparing charter school students as a whole with traditional public school students as a whole is comparing populations that are very different, both ethnically and socioeconomically?and which have, for generations, had very different educational outcomes. If, as this teachers union leader said, charter schools as a whole produce about the same rate of educational success as traditional public schools?whether locally or nationally?that differs only semantically from saying that the black-white education gap has been closed in charter schools located in some low-income minority communities, such as those in New York City. But facts are far too important to let them be obscured by the particular rhetoric in which they are expressed. Much lofty rhetoric has been deployed by teachers unions in their public relations campaigns to promote their own interests, as if they were promoting the interests of schoolchildren. But the late Albert Shanker, head of the United Federation of Teachers, was honest enough to state the plain fact: ?When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that?s when I?ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.?16

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One problem that charter schools across the country have had to contend with, which traditional public schools do not have to contend with, has been finding some physical space in which to hold classes. Schools are automatically built to provide classrooms for traditional public schools, but many charter schools are simply housed in whatever vacant space might happen to be available in existing public school buildings or to make whatever other kinds of arrangements they can. Those charter schools with access to outside money can rent space or buy space on the open market. But new, non-profit charter schools, without a track record that would attract outside money, may not have such options.

- Page 43 (location ~ 657-662)

In Detroit, where a drastic loss of population over the years has left a number of public school buildings entirely vacant, a public school district sold a vacant school building, with a proviso in the deed that the building could be used thereafter only for residential purposes.25 Meanwhile, Detroit Prep?a charter elementary school?was holding classes in makeshift quarters in a church basement. A newly created school, its students had not yet reached the third grade, where they would begin to take statewide education tests. But there were other indications that they were meeting or exceeding educational norms for their grade levels.26 Eventually, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, an independent non-profit organization, reported on the controversy: Detroit Prep was growing and needed to move out from the church basement and into a new location. Luckily, a mile down the road sits the former Anna Joyce Elementary School. It was part of Detroit Public Schools until the downsizing district permanently closed its doors in 2009. Five years later, district leaders sold the building to a private developer. Today the building sits abandoned and in disrepair, but it?s in a perfect location and is just the right size for an expanding Detroit Prep.27 Here the issue was not the Mayor Bill de Blasio argument against providing ?free? classroom space to charter schools. Detroit Prep was prepared to buy the school building with its own money. But the local public school officials had already sold it to a developer, with the already noted restriction in the deed, which prevented the developer from selling it to the charter school. In this case, it took a combination of litigation, media exposure, public outcry and legislation to enable Detroit Prop to acquire that building.

- Page 44 (location ~ 666-681)

Tactics similar to those used in Detroit have been used in other places across the country, to block the ability of charter schools to acquire space in which to expand, even when there are many students on waiting lists to get into charter schools and much empty space in traditional public schools. Indeed, such practices have become sufficiently widespread, and sufficiently well known, that a number of states have passed laws aimed at requiring public school district officials to make vacant school buildings available for use by charter schools. Such laws have been met with various evasions. A newspaper account in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, for example, reported: A Cleveland School District plan for 30 closed buildings calls for slightly less than half to be torn down or used as storage. The rest would land in a classification that could be labeled ?miscellaneous.? By using vague designations or declaring that buildings are unusable, Cleveland can avoid Ohio?s requirement that the schools be offered to charter-school operators at fair market value.34 In other words, some public school officials would rather tear down vacant school buildings than let them be used by charter schools. Protecting their turf from competition is more important to them than letting classrooms be available for the education of children on waiting lists to get into charter schools.

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It was a very similar story in Chicago. The Chicago Sun-Times reported: Hoping to earn some much-needed cash and sweep away the troubles of vacant property, Chicago Public Schools officials are putting 40 empty school buildings up for sale, still with a caveat that they cannot be used for charter schools.42 In this case, these 40 vacant schools?costing more than $2 million a year in expenses?were not to be sold to ?any K-12 schools that don?t charge tuition.? In other words, these buildings could be sold to private schools that charge tuition, but not to charter schools. Local school district officials understand that charter schools are their real competitors, not expensive private schools that low-income parents cannot afford, so it is charter schools that must be prevented from getting classrooms in which to teach students who are on their waiting lists. The nation?s capital showed the same pattern of preventing charter schools from getting classrooms in which to teach more students. In school year 2015?2016, there were five public school buildings in Washington that were empty and six that were less than half full. School buildings that were no longer used as schools were used for administrative purposes, including being used by other government agencies and non-profit organizations.43 A commentary in the Washington Post in 2018 said that ?buildings that used to be schools? in the District of Columbia were being turned into ?apartments, retail spaces, museums and restaurants? in mixed-use developments, despite legal obligations to ?give charter schools the right of first offer.?

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A study the previous year found the American Indian Model Schools to be ?the highest-performing charter school network in the state, by a wide margin.? Regardless of its name, the American Indian charter schools have served low-income minority students in general. A local newspaper reported: ?Low-income black and Hispanic AIM students actually outperform the statewide averages for wealthier whites and Asians. AIM even outperforms Lowell, one of San Francisco?s most respected and academically selective high schools.?58 The haste to try to close down this charter school network, over legal issues not yet tried in court, and having nothing to do with the education of students, is another painful revelation of the mindset of those preoccupied with protecting their own turf from competition?and the loss of money when students transfer to charter schools. It also tells us something about how little the education of students weighs in the balance in their actions, as distinguished from their rhetoric. When a network of highly successful charter schools was threatened with extinction, based on unsubstantiated charges against a man who was already a former principal, that tells us more than any rhetoric.

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Traditional public schools are accountable for following innumerable rules, regulations and teachers union contract provisions. In New York City, teachers union contracts have been a monument of micromanagement. As New York City?s former Chancellor of Public Schools Joel Klein put it, the teachers union contract is ?an extraordinary document, running for hundreds of pages, governing who can teach what and when, who can be assigned to hall-monitor or lunchroom duty and who can?t, who has to be given time off to do union work during the school day, and so on.?1 The California Education Code has more than 2,500 pages.2 This is accountability for following procedures. It is not accountability for end results, such as the quality of educational outcomes for students. That is precisely what teachers, principals and administrators in many, if not most, traditional public schools do not have and apparently do not want, judging by their fierce attacks on what they call ?high-stakes testing? being used to judge the success or failure of students, teachers and schools. These tests are part of the kind of accountability that can affect teachers? employment, pay and promotion in many charter schools. These charter schools typically do not have the kind of micromanaging procedural accountability. They have accountability for end results. The difference is fundamental. It is the difference between putting the emphasis on inputs and procedures, rather than on outputs, in terms of educational results for students. Nothing so highlights this fundamental difference as the traditional public school policies and practices as regards standards of accountability for teachers? job performances and personal conduct in unionized traditional public schools. What also needs scrutiny are the standards?or lack of standards?of accountability for administrators who have used the school buildings they control, paid for by taxpayers for educating students, to instead prevent students from being educated in those buildings, if the students seek to go to charter schools.

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In 2009, a New Yorker magazine article estimated the number of teachers in the city?s ?rubber rooms? as more than six hundred, and described their routine: The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day?which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school?typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen.4 During all the time spent in the ?rubber room,? teachers not only received their full salary but also continuing contributions to their retirement fund and continued accumulation of seniority. One of the teachers in a ?rubber room? was there because she had been found unconscious in a classroom with 34 students, and a fellow teacher who came near her smelled alcohol. After two years in the ?rubber room,? she and the school system reached a negotiated agreement. She would be allowed to return for one semester of teaching, and then be reassigned to non-teaching duties in a school office, where she would be retained as long as she submitted to random alcohol testing. Eventually, however, she passed out in the office, and was unable even to blow into a breathalyzer to be tested for alcohol. But alcohol was found in her water bottle, so she was able to be fired, under the special terms of her special agreement.5 But that such an arrangement had to be negotiated, after two years of her being paid for doing nothing in a ?rubber room,? was one sign of how much more costly it would have been to have tried to fire her outright, when she was first found passed out in a classroom and smelling of alcohol.

- Page 57 (location ~ 872-887)

By contrast, in many charter schools teachers can be fired just for being incompetent. They do not get second, third and fourth chances to ruin the education of second, third and fourth classes of students. But unionized teachers who are hard to fire, even for some egregious behavior, make the idea of firing traditional public school teachers merely for incompetence seem almost quixotic. Moreover, the teachers in traditional public schools who are not egregious do not face either penalties for poor teaching or rewards for outstanding teaching, as do teachers in successful charter schools that both reward and penalize on the basis of which teachers get better or worse results from students. It should also be noted, as former chancellor of New York City?s schools Joel Klein pointed out, that in addition to teachers in the ?rubber rooms,? costing the city tens of millions of dollars per year, there was also another category called the ?absent teacher reserve.? These were ?more than 1,000 teachers who get full pay to perform substitute or administrative duties because no principal wants to hire them full-time.?6 These other teachers cost ?more than $100 million annually,? according to former chancellor Klein. He also mentioned still another category of teachers: Then there were the several teachers accused of sexual misconduct?at least one was found guilty?whom union-approved arbitrators refused to terminate. The city was required to put them back in the classroom, but we refused to do so. Of course, the union has never sued to have the teachers reinstated. It just makes sure these deadbeats stay on the payroll with full pay and a lifetime pension.7 As regards teachers in the ?rubber room,? the political embarrassment when they were revealed in the press led to different arrangements being made.

- Page 58 (location ~ 889-904)

Extreme job protection under teachers union contracts is by no means confined to New York City. The Los Angeles Unified School District spent 3.5 million dollars trying to fire 7 teachers?that is, half a million dollars per teacher?and ended up able to fire only 4 of them.11 In Woodside, California, it cost a school district $584,000 to try to fire just one teacher?unsuccessfully.12 It is against such a background that it is possible to understand why mere incompetence is seldom enough to get a unionized teacher fired. None of this is new or unusual. For decades, a common phrase, ?the dance of the lemons,?13 has been used in discussions of a widespread practice of transferring teachers out of schools where their behavior or lack of competence has become a local scandal, with potential repercussions for local officials. Because of the enormous investment of money and time required to try to fire them, under the terms of teachers union contracts, such teachers?the ?lemons??are simply passed from school to school.

- Page 61 (location ~ 926-935)

To Professor Diane Ravitch of New York University?long a critic of charter schools and defender of traditional public schools??tenure means due process.?14 But if ?due process? has any definable meaning, and hence boundaries, then there must also be undue process beyond those boundaries. It would be hard to find a clearer example of undue process than the bureaucratic labyrinth that schools are required to go through, in order to fire a unionized teacher with tenure. Data from the New York State School Boards Association, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, showed that ?firing an incompetent teacher on average takes 830 days and costs $313,000.?15 That is more than two years, and even that does not guarantee that an incompetent teacher will be fired.

- Page 62 (location ~ 937-944)

The Role of Tests In virtually every kind of organized endeavor?whether industrial, medical, musical, military, financial or innumerable other organized activities?there is usually some point where people are tested for the quality of what they are doing?usually with consequences when that quality is below what was expected or required. Only among defenders of traditional unionized public schools is it considered an unjustified imposition to judge students, teachers or schools by how much learning has actually taken place. But standardized tests seem especially appropriate in a subject like mathematics, where there is little room for subjective criteria. Professor Diane Ravitch and others make a sharp distinction between diagnostic tests?used by teachers to track how well students are learning what is being taught, so as to make adjustments for teaching individual students or classes?as contrasted with ?high-stakes? tests that lead to positive or negative consequences for students, teachers, or schools. According to Professor Ravitch, ?testing should be used diagnostically, not to hand out rewards or punishments.?17 Consistent with that premise, she declares: Test scores should remain a private matter between parents and teachers, not shared with the district or the state for any individual student. The district or state may aggregate scores for entire schools but should not judge teachers or schools on the basis of these scores.18 There could hardly be a clearer repudiation of accountability for educational end results. Amid Professor Ravitch?s many declarations of things other than teachers and schools that might be causes of low educational outcomes in low-income minority communities, it is hard to find anything that could test whether teachers or schools might have any conceivable effect, whether large or small, on educational achievement gaps. Her position is consistent, if nothing else: ?The achievement gaps are rooted in social, political, and economic structures. If we are unwilling to change the root causes, we are unlikely ever to close the gaps. What we call achievement gaps are in fact opportunity gaps.?

- Page 63 (location ~ 964-983)

Whatever the merits, in the abstract, of some of these things that are said by Professors Koretz and Ravitch, such arguments are like something out of Alice in Wonderland when applied to children unable to do arithmetic in their neighborhood public school, nor be fluent in the language of the wider society beyond their neighborhood?a society which they must ultimately deal with as adults. As the principal of a Washington, D.C. school put it, ?I?m not going to put my kids in art when they can?t read.?25 For low-income minority students, a mastery of mathematics and English is a ticket out of poverty, and a foundation for developing skills in a wide range of professions. Without such skills, these children will be lucky to find decent jobs when they reach adulthood, much less fulfilling careers. To say, as Professor Koretz does, that there is ?other important stuff? in no way changes the need for trade-offs, or even triage, in the education of some students from an educationally impoverished background.

- Page 67 (location ~ 1020-1028)

Mathematics and English may be depicted as narrow subjects, but their applications in the real world are far from narrow. Moreover, the bugaboo of ?teaching to the test,? as it applies to mathematics, seems hard to distinguish in practice from simply teaching algebra, geometry or arithmetic. If a mathematics test asks for the distance from home plate to second base on a baseball diamond?a square, with 90 feet on each side?you either know the Pythagorean theorem or you don?t. It doesn?t matter whether you learned it for a test or for its own sake. As a practical matter, the ability to determine distances without physically measuring them can be important in many contexts. Optical rangefinders, based on mathematical principles, have been used from photography to naval warfare, where this can be a matter of life and death. Skills exist for a reason. They are not just an arbitrary obstacle course in schools. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the real objection to standardized tests in a subject like mathematics is that the results cannot be evaded or concealed by rhetoric. Even the most talented dispensers of rhetoric cannot talk away the painful?and tragic?failures of too many schools in low-income minority neighborhoods to provide their students with a basic foundation in arithmetic for the higher mathematical skills required in a growing range of professions. These educational failures are harder to conceal when other children from the very same neighborhoods are mastering those same skills in the very same buildings.

- Page 68 (location ~ 1032-1043)

FINANCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY One of the most often used arguments against charter schools is that they ?take money from the public schools,? making it harder for the public schools to do their job. Often-repeated phrases about how charter schools ?siphon?30 money from traditional public schools or ?drain?31 money from traditional public schools insinuate a process very different from what happens in the real world. It is not charter schools that determine how many students transfer to them from traditional public schools. That initiative is in the hands of parents. And it is the transfer of students that causes money to be transferred with them, since these children cannot be educated without money to pay for the things that education requires, beginning with teachers and books.

- Page 70 (location ~ 1065-1072)

The Division of Money None of this is rocket science. Americans are a mobile people. At any given time, millions of American families are moving from one neighborhood to another, from one city to another and from one state to another. When families with children move from the east side of Manhattan to the west side of Manhattan, and the children go from one public school district to a different public school district, does anyone think it strange that the taxpayers? money?provided to educate those children?goes where the children go, rather than remaining back in the district they left? There is no public angst or outcry about the transfer of money to follow the children?unless the children are going from a traditional public school to a public charter school. What is the money for, if not to educate children? Why are traditional public schools then less able to educate a smaller number of students with a correspondingly smaller amount of money? If 20 percent of the children in a traditional public school district leave to go to charter schools, and 20 percent of the money is transferred with them, the amount of money per pupil has not gone down in the school district they left. Critics of charter schools who express great concern about the money ?lost? by traditional public schools seldom mention that per-pupil expenditures provided by local, state and federal government sources for children in charter schools are, on average, less than per-pupil expenditures on traditional public schools nearby.32 That difference has been an average of 28 percent less for charter school students nationwide. For an average-sized charter school, that difference has been estimated as being enough to pay the salaries and benefits for at least 20 teachers.

- Page 70 (location ~ 1072-1086)

Back in 1967, Democratic Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, in an exchange with Commissioner of Education Harold Howe, said: I wonder if you would make a comment? as to whether we are, in fact, doing more than just putting money in the hands of the authorities and whether we are just continuing practices that have been in existence for decades and which have not, in my judgment, achieved the education of the deprived child.41 Senator Kennedy clearly did not regard the spending of more money as the answer: I think what we do is appropriate sums of money and, in many of these communities and cities and areas of the system, the money goes into the educational system and they continue exactly what they have been doing for the last several decades, which means not educating the child properly and means turning out children undertrained to meet this world?s needs.42 Years later, Secretary of Education Roderick R. Paige, in a Republican administration, likewise said: After spending $125 billion of Title I money over 25 years, we have virtually nothing to show for it.43 More recently, Professor Walter E. Williams of George Mason University reported: In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore?s 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state?s mathematics exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. In raw numbers, 3,804 Baltimore students took the state?s math test and 14 tested proficient. Citywide, only 15% of Baltimore students passed the state?s English test. Money is not the problem. Of the nation?s 100 largest school systems, Baltimore schools rank third in spending per pupil.

- Page 75 (location ~ 1136-1156)

Whatever the intellectual or other potential that human beings may have at the moment of conception, that is no measure of what developed capabilities they will have when they enter schools. Nor is their intellectual potential at the moment of conception even a measure of their ?native intelligence,? because research has shown that nutritional differences among pregnant women have produced IQ differences when their children were old enough to be tested.1 There is no equality of circumstances, even in the womb. Newborn babies do not enter the world with equal chances, even in a society with equal opportunity for people who have equally developed capabilities. Where one might expect to find the greatest equality?among children born to the same parents and raised in the same home?there are nevertheless striking inequalities, not only in the United States but also in countries on the other side of the Atlantic, as shown by studies going back as far as the nineteenth century.2 A specific example of a general pattern was shown by a study of National Merit Scholarship finalists. More than half the finalists were the first-born child in their family, whether in two-child, three-child, four-child or five-child families. Even in five-child families, the first-born was the National Merit Scholarship finalist more often than the four other siblings combined.

- Page 79 (location ~ 1208-1219)

Children of parents with professional occupations hear nearly twice as many words per hour as children of parents with working class occupations, and more than three times as many words per hour as children in families on welfare.10 Moreover, the kinds of words are also different?overwhelmingly more positive and encouraging words than negative or discouraging words in families where the parents have professional occupations, and more negative and discouraging words than positive and encouraging words in families on welfare.11 Can anyone believe that such different treatment throughout children?s formative years makes no difference in how they develop?

- Page 81 (location ~ 1232-1238)

Fierce controversies as to whether differences in educational, economic and other outcomes are due to genetic differences or to social injustices often ignore the possibility that there are many other causes of disparate outcomes, including differences in what people want to do, and are prepared to invest their time and efforts in trying to do. If Asian Americans are greatly under-represented in professional basketball, for example, that is not necessarily because they are innately incapable of playing the game or because there are evil people determined to keep them out. We should at least not dismiss the possibility that many Asian Americans may be culturally oriented toward putting their aspirations and efforts in other directions?where they tend to be quite successful. Other groups as well have particular endeavors in which they excel and other endeavors where they are either unsuccessful or virtually non-existent. Even groups whose educational or socioeconomic outcomes in general are substandard tend nevertheless to have some particular endeavors in which they not only hold their own but excel.

- Page 82 (location ~ 1247-1254)

Differences in capabilities and outcomes are not automatically anybody?s fault. Whose fault is it that someone was the last child born in a family, rather than the first? That their parents had little education, while other parents had much education? Or that they were raised in a culture that exalts other things more so than education? These are facts of life, and they cannot all be dealt with by social crusades against villains. Nor can these problems be solved by the make-believe equality of ?inclusion? rather than by the harder task of creating genuine equality of educational achievement.

- Page 83 (location ~ 1262-1266)

In his deeply perceptive book Life at the Bottom, Theodore Dalrymple reported on his first-hand experiences as a physician in a hospital located in a low-income, predominantly white underclass neighborhood in England?where many students had negative attitudes toward school and hostile attitudes toward those of their classmates who wanted to learn: If you don?t mend your ways and join us, they were saying, we?ll beat you up. This was no idle threat: I often meet people in their twenties and thirties in my hospital practice who gave up at school under such duress and subsequently realize that they have missed an opportunity which, had it been taken, would have changed the whole course of their lives much for the better.15 The beatings meted out have included some that required medical attention in a hospital emergency room, where the victims were treated by Dr. Dalrymple. Others have ended up in the emergency room after having deliberately taken overdoses to avoid the prospect of such beatings.16 In England, as in the United States, there have long been people promoting the idea that low incomes are automatically due to social injustices?class injustices there to a predominantly white underclass?and that class solidarity in opposition to the larger society is the remedy. Some young people in low-income communities take this to mean opposition to the school system, and resent students in their community who strive for success within that system. Even aside from such incidents of violence, the whole atmosphere in schools in such neighborhoods is often antithetical to education. In Life at the Bottom, Dr. Dalrymple said, ?I cannot recall meeting a sixteen-year-old white from the public housing estates that are near my hospital who could multiply nine by seven (I do not exaggerate). Even three by seven often defeats them.?17 The distinguished British magazine The Economist reported that white 16-year-olds in the borough of Knowsley had worse test results ?than do black 16-year-olds in any London borough.?

- Page 83 (location ~ 1270-1288)

Hispanic students with a grade point average of 4.0 were found to average three fewer fellow Hispanic friends, unlike white students with the same grade point average, who suffered no such loss of fellow white friends.27 Reduced numbers of friends of the same ethnicity by black students with high grade-point averages has likewise been part of a pattern of negative responses by their peers to black students perceived as ?acting white.? An empirical study of the ?acting white? phenomenon by Professor Roland G. Fryer of Harvard concluded that this pattern ?is most prevalent in racially integrated public schools? and is ?less of a problem in the private sector and in predominantly black public schools.?28 In other words, what critics call ?segregated? charter schools are schools in predominantly minority communities, where motivated minority students are educated among other motivated minority students. In these settings, such students can freely pursue academic achievement without the negative social pressures that can be acute in some racially integrated schools where minority students with behavior patterns and academic achievements similar to those of white students in those schools can be seen as traitors to their race who are ?acting white.? In England, the parallel phrase is ?class treachery.?

- Page 86 (location ~ 1314-1325)

- Page 88 (location ~ 1336-1347)

The historic 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education repudiated the ?separate but equal? doctrine, with Chief Justice Earl Warren declaring that separate schools were ?inherently unequal.? In the atmosphere of acclaim for this overdue landmark decision, few questioned the implications of the rationale that schools whose students were all black were inherently unequal. Nevertheless, only about a mile from the Supreme Court building where this pronouncement was made, was an all-black school?Dunbar High School?which sent a higher percentage of its graduates off to college than any white public high school in Washington.30 As far back as 1899, when there were four academic public high schools in Washington, students from this all-black public high school scored higher on tests than two of the three white public high schools.31 Over the next half-century, alumni of this all-black high school went to some of the most elite colleges in the country, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, Yale, Amherst and other top-tier academic institutions.32 The first three black women to receive a Ph.D. in America were all from this high school?two as students and one as a teacher.33 Other alumni of this school included the first black federal judge,34 the first black general,35 the first black Cabinet member36 and the first black tenured professor at a major national university37?as well as Dr. Charles Drew, who became internationally recognized for his pioneering work on the use of blood plasma.38 Separate schools were not ?inherently unequal.? As happens all too often in the history of ideas, even the correction of a demonstrably false idea can go too far in the other direction, and introduce another false idea.*

- Page 88 (location ~ 1336-1354)

To Professor Diane Ravitch, for example, substandard educational levels in traditional public schools in such communities are not the problem, and charter schools are not the answer, because ?charters will not end the poverty at the root of low academic performance.?41 Instead, what she sees as needed are broader social policies: We should set national goals to reduce segregation and poverty. In combination, these are the root causes of the achievement gaps between economic and racial groups.42 In short, Professor Ravitch sees the problem as not being in the educational system, but in a failure of the larger society to deal with poverty and a lack of racial integration. But, in terms of hard evidence, New York City charter schools that have had no capacity to end either poverty or racial concentrations of minority students have nevertheless closed the racial achievement gap in education.

- Page 90 (location ~ 1368-1377)

What seems truly questionable is the use of words like ?segregation? and ?apartheid? to describe statistics. A dictionary definition of the verb ?segregate? reads: ?to separate or set apart from others.?48 It is something imposed by someone on someone else. That is why racial segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa were abhorred. But is opening a school in a community whose population is already heavily of one racial or ethnic background segregating that population? In most cases, whatever caused that racial or ethnic concentration existed before the first charter school existed. If a charter school opens in New York City?s Chinatown, and all the children who enroll are Chinese, is that segregation? Should we have expected Irish or Jewish children in Chinatown? Neither racial segregation in the United States nor apartheid in South Africa were just statistical conditions. Nor would people have fought, and even put their lives on the line, if segregation and apartheid were just statistical conditions. Even using the redefined definition of ?segregation,? a nationwide empirical study of 4,574 school districts found very little difference in the proportion of racial minority students in charter schools, compared to traditional public schools in the same districts. For example, ?if the average district in the sample shut down all of its charter schools, we would expect its overall segregation of black and Hispanic students to decline from 15.0 to 14.2 percent.?49 Is this what all the sound and fury is about?a difference of less than one percentage point? The use of the words ?segregation? and ?apartheid? in situations where there are racial concentrations not imposed by a particular institution, in charter schools or elsewhere, is by no means confined to Gary Orfield. The same ambiguous words have been used by Jonathan Kozol, Diane Ravitch and others.

- Page 92 (location ~ 1410-1425)

Scholars who have studied the facts about social differences in many countries have often reached conclusions similar to that of eminent French historian Fernand Braudel: ?In no society have all regions and all parts of the population developed equally.?55 By contrast, the proportional representation?used as a norm by social theorists who regard disproportionalities as automatically evidence of discrimination?has not been shown by those theorists to have existed in any nation, anywhere in the world, or any time over thousands of years of recorded history. It is a painful irony that people who are promoting the make-believe equality of ?inclusion? and ?diversity? in schools are attacking charter schools that are producing the real equality of educational achievement.

- Page 94 (location ~ 1439-1445)

The importance of self-motivation, by both parents and students, in the educational process has been used by critics of charter schools, and defenders of traditional public schools, as an ?unfair? advantage that charter schools have, because traditional public schools have to accept all students, motivated or not. As Diane Ravitch put it: ?Our schools cannot improve if charter schools siphon away the most motivated students and their families in the poorest communities from the regular public schools.?58 But the issue is not so simple as that. While those parents who enter their children?s names in the lotteries for admission to charter schools may well be more motivated to promote their children?s education, and to cooperate with schools in doing so, those who win in these lotteries are greatly outnumbered by those who do not win? as in other lotteries in general. In 2017, for example, there were 17,000 applicants for 3,000 places available in the Success Academy charter schools.59 When charter schools take a fraction of the children from motivated families, why does that prevent the traditional public schools from comparably educating the remaining majority of children from those motivated families? A survey of empirical studies in various cities indicates that students who were motivated to enter lotteries for admission to charter schools? but who did not win in these lotteries? did not subsequently do as well in the traditional public schools as those who happened to be lucky enough to win and enter charter schools.

- Page 95 (location ~ 1455-1468)

A study published in a scholarly journal at the University of Chicago in 2015 found that, among students who entered a lottery for admission to a charter school in Harlem, those who were admitted subsequently scored ?higher on academic achievement outcomes? than those who did not win admission. Moreover, the proportion of girls who subsequently became pregnant was less among the girls admitted to the charter school, and the boys were ?less likely to be incarcerated.?61 Apparently charter schools do make a difference, and it is not just a matter of who was motivated to enter the lottery. The often-repeated argument that traditional public schools must take all the students who show up does not mean that they must lump them all together when teaching them. If some successful charter schools today benefit from having many highly-motivated students, as critics claim, there is nothing to prevent traditional public schools from having the same beneficial effects from the even larger number of highly-motivated students who entered the lottery for a charter school but did not win. If officials who decide policies for traditional public schools prefer instead policies based on such concepts as ?inclusion? or ?diversity,? then responsibility for the educational consequences that follow is theirs, and are not the fault of charter schools.

- Page 97 (location ~ 1478-1488)

A nationwide study comparing the proportion of students with disabilities in both charter schools and traditional public schools, found that the average difference between the proportion of students with disabilities in traditional public schools was higher by about two percentage points.64 Statistics cited by Professor Ravitch herself, in her book Reign of Error, showed that ?while 11 percent of students in the nation have disabilities, charter schools enroll only 8 percent.?65 In 2019, the New York Post reported that ?20,847 students with disabilities make up 18.5 percent of total charter enrollment, vs. 19.4 percent in the rest of the public system.?66 In other words, the difference was just under one percentage point. Are differences of these magnitudes? from one to three percentage points? supposed to explain away charter school students? better educational outcomes than the outcomes in traditional public schools in the same communities? Such differences may provide talking points, but are such talking points the way to evaluate the education of children for whom education is one of their few hopes for a better life?

- Page 98 (location ~ 1502-1512)

The illogic of this was pointed out, years ago, in a landmark study titled No Excuses by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom. They cited data showing that black students ?are two-and-half times as likely to be disciplined as whites and five times as likely as Asians.? But, as they also pointed out, from the same data, whites were disciplined at a rate twice that of Asians. Was that racism against whites? If not, then why was it automatically racism when blacks were disciplined two and a half times as often as whites?67 The Thernstroms also showed that the differing rates of school discipline were highly correlated with differing proportions of children raised in single-parent homes in these three groups. But the rate of disciplining of black students was not correlated with whether their teachers were predominantly white or included a substantial proportion of teachers who were black. In fact, one study indicated that, when teachers were asked to characterize which of their students were disruptive, black teachers named black students more often than did white teachers.

- Page 99 (location ~ 1516-1524)

David Levin, a co-founder of the KIPP schools, was a beginning teacher in a traditional public school in Houston, under the Teach for America program: One of the older children walked across the room during class, zipped down his fly, pulled out his penis, and asked a girl for oral sex. Levin sent him to the principal. He was sent back in thirty minutes. Another student threw a book at Levin?s head. The office kept him an hour before sending him back, sucking on a Tootsie Pop.69 The point here is not to claim that these are typical offenses, but to demonstrate how egregious student behavior can become and still be tolerated under existing policies and practices in some traditional public schools. Later, when Levin and Michael Feinberg founded the first KIPP school, their policy was ?instant and overwhelming response to any violation of the rules.?70 This is what led some critics of KIPP school discipline to give the schools? initials the meaning ?Kids In Prison Program.?71 The analogy fails, however, because students in KIPP charter schools?as in other charter schools?are there by choice and are free to leave. Instead, KIPP charter schools have grown over the years, to become the nation?s largest non-profit charter school network. An observer of a KIPP charter school in the Bronx, where its students were housed in the same building with a traditional public school, found this scene at lunchtime: At lunch on any given day, children from the same neighborhood, eating the same food, at the same time, in the same room are a portrait in contrast. On one side of the room the KIPP students, all but two in attendance, are seated in order and eat while they talk in quiet, conversational tones. On the other side of the room, chaos is breaking out. Although a full third of the local school students are missing, lunch monitors scream at the children through bull horns, desperately trying to maintain control.72 An account by another observer of a Success Academy class of second-graders, riding the subway on a field trip to the Brooklyn Bridge, seems similar to the account of KIPP school students: Few things will empty a subway car of cranky commuters more quickly than rambunctious school groups. But their fellow riders seem either indifferent or charmed by the well-behaved second graders.

- Page 101 (location ~ 1535-1558)

Reports of disruptions and violence?against both fellow students and teachers?have become common around the country.The Minneapolis Star Tribune, for example, reported that a St. Paul high school teacher was ?choked and body-slammed by a student and hospitalized with a traumatic brain injury.? It added: Though many?including St. Paul school officials?seem reluctant to acknowledge it, the escalating violence and disorder follow a major change in school disciplinary policies. In recent years, district leaders have increasingly removed consequences for misbehavior, and led kids to believe they can wreak havoc with impunity.75 According to Education Week, when a New Jersey teacher leaned over to talk to a disruptive student, ?the student struck her in the face, causing Andrews? neck to snap backwards.? This ?caused permanent nerve damage.? The result: The student was suspended for a week for disrespect toward a teacher?not for assault?and then returned to Andrews? classroom in Bridgeton, N.J. When Andrews asked her principal to permanently remove the student from her classroom, she says the principal told her to ?put on her big girl panties and deal with it.?

- Page 103 (location ~ 1566-1579)

Statistical disparities were now being equated with discrimination, with the full power of the federal government behind that interpretation. Although this policy was presented as an effort to prevent discrimination, the lower standards of discipline it promoted would in practice apply to students in general, since other students could hardly be punished for things for which students from racial or ethnic minorities were not being punished. A later study in the wake of the 2014 ?Dear Colleague? letter found that the percentage of public school teachers who reported that they had been attacked by a student from their school in school year 2015?2016 was ?higher than in all previous survey years.?79 In St. Paul, Minnesota, ?the number of assaults against teachers doubled from 2014 to 2015.?80 In Indianapolis, a teacher told the school board: ?At the beginning of the year, a student assaulted a teacher in broad daylight in a hallway of our school.? He was back the next day.?81 One of the painful problems in disciplinary policies is that this issue has gotten tangled up with racial issues. But the very same kinds of policies produce the same kinds of results in England, where the underclass is predominantly white. British victims of violent students include a pregnant teacher who had a miscarriage after being physically attacked by a student,82 and another teacher who was stabbed to death in the classroom, in front of her other students.83 It has long been recognized that teenagers especially tend to test the limits of what they can get away with. The question for adults is not simply where to draw the line but whether to draw the line.

- Page 104 (location ~ 1591-1606)

Too often, hazy and lofty rhetoric??restorative justice? being a phrase and a process currently in vogue?uses talk as a substitute for drawing a line with consequences. Incidentally, the student attack on a pregnant teacher in England had its counterpart in New York City: At Norman Thomas High School, a student had punched a pregnant teacher in the stomach and said, ?I?m going to kick the baby out of you. I?m going to make you have that baby.? Instead of immediately suspending the student, DOE84 had allowed him to return to school until his suspension hearing took place.85 Many people with a particular social vision regard punishment as something that can be replaced by other ways of changing people?s conduct. In other words, they are ideologically opposed to punishment in general. Others have reasons to be opposed to punishment for reasons of their own self-interest. In the United States, teachers unions have supported policies reducing student suspensions and expulsions, despite the fact that teachers have often been targets of student violence.86 The cost to other students of having their education?and their chances in life as adults?ruined by chronic troublemakers in the schools is seldom even considered in such arguments. Keeping the troublemakers in school may not mean that they are actually learning anything, except how to be troublemakers. But some people may think that, if troublemakers are no longer in school, they are likely to drift into a life of crime on the streets. However, if instead of stealing from stores or homes when they are out of school, the troublemakers ruin the education?and the futures?of the students around them, the damage may be far worse. Even if lax discipline policies produce no real benefits in the long run to either troublemakers or other students, there are benefits for adults who run the schools. From the standpoint of officials in the public school system, and officials in the teachers unions, the worst hoodlum in a school and the most conscientious and intelligent student in that same school bring exactly the same amount of taxpayer money into the system. There is the same financial incentive to keep hoodlums in the system as there is to prevent conscientious and successful students from transferring to charter schools.

- Page 105 (location ~ 1606-1626)

People who are opposed to firm discipline, whether for ideological or financial reasons, often criticize charter schools, whose discipline policies and practices tend to be stricter than in traditional public schools. But charter schools face an inherently different set of incentives and constraints. Unlike traditional public schools, which automatically receive students, due to compulsory attendance laws, charter schools receive only those students whose parents voluntarily choose to apply for their admission. Letting some disruptive and violent students ruin the education of a much larger number of other students who are in school to learn would be counterproductive for the charter schools themselves. Parents seek admission of their children to charter schools not only for a better education but also for better safety than in schools where disruptive and violent students are allowed far more latitude. Therefore charter schools would lose more than they would gain by following the same lax discipline policies as traditional public schools. Moreover, anti-charter-school ?reforms? that force the charter schools to accept more disruptive and violent student behavior reduce the charter schools? attraction for parents seeking both safety and better education for their children. Like most such ?reforms,? the real beneficiaries are adults with vested interests in traditional unionized public schools, when the competitive attractions of charter schools are reduced.

- Page 107 (location ~ 1631-1641)

- Page 108 (location ~ 1650-1658)

Against a background of decades of widespread angst about how, when or whether non-white youngsters could close the test score gap between themselves and their white counterparts, the fact that this gap has already been closed by non-white youngsters in New York City charter schools as a whole2 is a landmark achievement. It is also an achievement that has received relatively little public recognition, in proportion to the magnitude of that achievement and in proportion to the number of educational doctrines which that achievement has exposed as fallacies. The educational success of these charter schools undermines theories of genetic determinism, claims of cultural bias in the tests, assertions that racial ?integration? is necessary for blacks to reach educational parity and presumptions that income differences are among the ?root causes? of educational differences.3 This last claim has been used for decades to absolve traditional public schools of any responsibility for educational failures in low-income minority communities. The supposed imperative for smaller class sizes is also called into question when the most successful of the charter school networks?the Success Academy charter schools?have average class sizes of thirty or more students.4 What happened in New York City?s charter schools is no guarantee of the same things happening in other communities, though in fact somewhat similar results have been found elsewhere.5 Nor are outstanding charter school results a guarantee that charter schools are categorically superior to all traditional public schools, even in New York City, or that the methods used by many charter schools are best for children from all socioeconomic backgrounds. But, whatever the limitations of the social range of what charter schools have achieved thus far, the implications of their existing achievements can nevertheless be a game-changer in the field of education?to the extent that facts are known and heeded.

- Page 108 (location ~ 1650-1666)

External Restrictions Existing examples of external restrictions include laws specifying in advance a numerical limit on the number of charter schools allowed in a given jurisdiction? independently of whether the quality of education in those charter schools is good, bad, or indifferent. These numbers are also independent of whether the quality of the education in the traditional public schools in the same communities is good, bad or indifferent. Whatever the rhetoric that may be deployed to justify such laws, these laws are not about improving the quality of education in either charter schools or traditional public schools. They are about limiting an exodus of students from traditional public schools to public charter schools.

- Page 111 (location ~ 1690-1695)

New laws passed in California in 2019 empower local education officials to deny applications for establishing a charter school if the charter school ?is demonstrably unlikely to serve the interests of the entire community in which the school is proposing to locate,? or if the ?school district is not positioned to absorb the fiscal impact of the proposed charter school.?7 In short, incumbents are empowered to determine if ?the entire community? really needs their potential competitors, or if the competition of newcomers would inconvenience existing institutions. Absurd as it might seem to let incumbents decide whether new competitors are needed, doing so has a long history of political success in many other fields?holding back progress in those fields, sometimes for years and sometimes for decades.

- Page 111 (location ~ 1701-1707)

For a very long time after railroads were established, they were the dominant way of transporting freight long distances over land. Eventually, however, the rising automobile industry began creating trucks that could also carry freight long distances over land, in competition with railroads?and, in particular cases, do so better and cheaper than railroads. Here, as well, government regulators, concerned for the economic survival of railroad incumbents, required interstate trucking companies to get federal authorization, based on showing a public ?necessity? and ?convenience? for authorization to carry freight between particular points only, leaving other places for the railroads.10 Decades later, after this industry was deregulated, freer competition both enabled and required greater efficiency. The price of shipping freight by truck fell, and customers reported that the service also improved as well.

- Page 112 (location ~ 1717-1724)

Internal Restrictions External institutional restrictions on charter schools, such as numerical limits on the number of charter schools permitted or restrictions on their use of existing public school buildings, have been supplemented in the new anti-charter-school agenda by internal restrictions on charter schools? autonomy in making decisions about standards for student behavior and choices in the courses they teach. One of the few things on which both critics and supporters of charter schools agree is that the level of discipline in the charter schools is significantly more strict than in traditional public schools. In general, students can be far more readily punished, suspended or expelled from charter schools. With recent political trends favoring opponents of charter schools, there have been calls for restricting charter schools? ability to impose what critics call ?harsh? discipline. In 2019, the California Education Code was amended by Section 48901.1: (a) A pupil enrolled in a charter school in kindergarten or any of grades 1 to 5, inclusive, shall not be suspended on the basis of having disrupted school activities or otherwise willfully defied the valid authority of supervisors, teachers, administrators, school officials, or other school personnel engaged in the performance of their duties, and those acts shall not constitute grounds for a pupil enrolled in a charter school in kindergarten or any of grades 1 to 12, inclusive, to be recommended for expulsion. (b) a pupil enrolled in a charter school in any of grades 6 to 8, inclusive, shall not be suspended on the basis of having disrupted school activities or otherwise willfully defied the valid authority of supervisors, teachers, administrators, school officials, or other school personnel engaged in the performance of their duties.14 These restrictions are not peculiar to charter schools. They are lax discipline policies already imposed on traditional public schools that are now being imposed on charter schools.

- Page 113 (location ~ 1732-1749)

Propagandists in the classroom are a luxury that the poor can afford least of all. While a mastery of mathematics and English can be a ticket out of poverty, a highly cultivated sense of grievance and resentment is not. The merits or demerits of a particular ideology are irrelevant to the urgent task of educating young people in the skills that will determine what kind of future they will have available as adults. Replacing the beliefs of the political left by the beliefs of the political right would make no difference whatever in the tragedy of wasting opportunities for preparing the young for a better life as adults?opportunities they will get just one time in their lives, and whose good or bad consequences can dominate the rest of their lives as adults. The process of forcing indoctrination courses into charter schools has already begun in California. Legislation forcing charter schools to teach what is called ?sex education? has already been passed, and proposed legislation would also force them to teach what is called ?ethnic studies.? Similar ideological indoctrination courses have long been promoted in traditional public schools across the country.

- Page 116 (location ~ 1772-1780)

Another ?reform? that the teachers unions and their allies want imposed on charter schools is legislation requiring them to hold their meetings in public and open their internal records to public scrutiny. In 2019, California?s incoming Governor Gavin Newsom signed such legislation?Senate Bill 126?into law, in the name of ?transparency.? According to one of the proponents of this legislation: ?Charter schools receive quite a few taxpayer dollars. There needs to be sunshine in all public schools and their governing bodies, and this is what this bill stands for.?19 The most important information about a charter school was already available?how well its students are educated. Here, yet again, ?transparency? has nothing to do with the quality of education. Open meetings and publicizing personal information about people who run a charter school, or who serve on its governing boards, are an open invitation for reprisals, threats or worse. During the mid-twentieth century struggles for civil rights in the South, a number of Southern states passed similar laws, requiring the NAACP to release such information about its members and donors. In striking down such laws, the Supreme Court of the United States said: Petitioner has made an uncontroverted showing that on past occasions revelation of the identity of its rank-and-file members has exposed these members to economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility. Under these circumstances, we think it apparent that compelled disclosure of petitioner?s Alabama membership is likely to affect adversely the ability of petitioner and its members to pursue their collective effort to foster beliefs which they admittedly have the right to advocate, in that it may induce members to withdraw from the Association and dissuade others from joining it because of fear of exposure of their beliefs shown through their associations and of the consequences of this exposure.20 Given the manifest hostility to charter schools in various quarters today, the same grounds cited by the Supreme Court apply.

- Page 117 (location ~ 1785-1803)

But a district court, back in 1958, saw through this theoretical equality to the real world differences: Registration of persons engaged in a popular cause imposes no hardship while, as the evidence in this case shows, registration of names of persons who resist the popular will would lead not only to expressions of ill will and hostility but to the loss of members by the plaintiff Association.23 In California, a group called the Charter Task Force was formed?and, ironically, held private meetings in a public institution, with neither ?sunshine? nor ?transparency??to determine the fate of California?s charter schools. A local newspaper reported: Each Thursday, a group of educators and representatives of labor unions meets?out of the public eye?for several hours at the California Department of Education building in Sacramento to take on arguably the most contentious current issue on California?s education reform landscape: charter school reform.24 However inconsistent this may be as a matter of principle, it is not at all hard to understand as a matter of politics. As a matter of principle, one might ask what possible benefit to the education of children could be expected from insistence on ?transparency.? But no such question is necessary, unless one takes seriously the often-repeated claims of teachers unions and politicians that what they are doing is ?for the sake of the children.?

- Page 119 (location ~ 1817-1832)

Mayor de Blasio proclaimed his own feelings toward charter school founders and supporters, whom he called ?the privatizers?: ?I hate the privatizers and I want to stop them.? He added: ?Get away from high-stakes testing, get away from charter schools. No federal funding for charter schools.? He told the NEA gathering that no political candidate should ask for their support ?unless they?re willing to stand up to Wall Street and the rich people behind the charter school movement once and for all.?28 That Mayor de Blasio?s former Deputy Mayor is now an official inside the KIPP charter school network in New York City is one sign of the times. Some charter schools, and some organizations representing charter schools, seem reluctant to sound a general alarm about what is being done by anti-charter-school officials. After all, these government officials have the power to retaliate in various ways against charter schools that fight back. But Eva Moskowitz, who had political experience before becoming head of Success Academy charter schools, has followed opposite policies of public protests, and has in some cases forced Mayor Bill de Blasio to back down. Nevertheless, the anti-charter-school forces have also had their victories against Success Academy schools.

- Page 122 (location ~ 1859-1869)

The fate of Dunbar High School in Washington, with its impressive record of educational achievements for black youngsters over an 85-year period, is a case in point. As of 1953, 81 percent of Dunbar High School graduates went on to college.34 But, after a reorganization of Washington public schools, following the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation, the city?s public schools were made neighborhood schools. Dunbar could no longer accept black students from all over Washington, as before, but only students from its own local ghetto neighborhood district. By 1960, only 20 percent of Dunbar students went on to college. The trigonometry and three-dimensional geometry previously taught at Dunbar were replaced by arithmetic.35 In 2014, Dunbar was one of the lowest scoring high schools in Washington?s Ward 5, on the mathematics test. A KIPP charter high school in that ward had three times as high a proportion of its students passing the mathematics test as did the students in Dunbar High School.36 More than a century earlier, in 1903, a French educator visiting what was then called the ?M Street School? described its students as ?pursuing the same studies as our average college students.?37 A student from this high school in that era took the entrance examination for Amherst College?and, as a result of his performance on that exam, he was given credit for first year college mathematics, on the basis of what he had learned in the high school that was later named Dunbar.38 He graduated from Amherst in three years, class of 1905, Phi Beta Kappa.

- Page 125 (location ~ 1904-1918)

- Page 128 (location ~ 1957-1966)

As Edmund Burke warned, more than two centuries ago, ?we are too exquisite in our conjectures of the future.?44 We cannot simply compile a wish list of things we would like to see happen in the future. Trying to micromanage the future has a very poor track record?and so does simply letting things drift. What we can do is consider in advance what kind of general principles and specific institutions seem promising. Perhaps the most important of these general principles is that schools exist for the education of children. Schools do not exist to provide iron-clad jobs for teachers, billions of dollars in union dues for teachers unions, monopolies for educational bureaucracies, a guaranteed market for teachers college degrees or a captive audience for indoctrinators. Those who want to see quality education remain available to youngsters in low-income minority neighborhoods must raise the question, again and again, when various policies and practices are proposed: ?How is this going to affect the education of children?? A surprisingly large proportion of policies and practices cannot answer that question. Institutional arrangements are especially in need of careful scrutiny, because so much of what institutions do is little known to the general public, despite having major effects on educational outcomes. How many members of the general public know that there are a million students on charter school waiting lists, while local district officials prevent charter schools from acquiring vacant school buildings in which to educate them? Given the small likelihood of a general public that can stay abreast of on-going institutional decisions, there is a special need for scrutiny of what particular institutions are being empowered to do, and what that is likely to lead to.

- Page 128 (location ~ 1957-1971)

Possible ways of having charter schools independently overseen could include a separate chain of command for charter schools and/or an ombudsman?appointed not by politicians dependent on teachers union money, but by some independent authority, such as a court. A court of law could have a major deterrent effect on the widespread practice of traditional education officials pretending that there are no empty classrooms available in existing school buildings, and no vacant school buildings available, that could be used by charter schools with long waiting lists of applicants. Perjury laws and laws against violating fiduciary responsibilities have teeth. Important as it is to try to get rid of institutionalized practices that cannot even plausibly claim to be about improving educational quality, at the present juncture it may be an even more urgent priority to prevent still more such institutionalized handicaps to educating children from being imposed in the future. Amid a swirl of slippery words such as ?transparency,? ?accountability,? and ?due process,? the plain and direct question that must be asked, again and again, is: ?How, specifically, is this going to make the education of children better??

- Page 130 (location ~ 1981-1990)

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