Educating Educators

The Times reports "Despite Push, Success at Charter Schools Is Mixed".

...one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”

Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools.

The Stanford conclusions, to me, betray a deep lack of understanding on two related fronts:

For one, quality of education is not sensibly understood -- as the Stanford researchers appear to -- as simply linear. The space, I would think, is more clearly a sort of s-curve: Children are either empowered and propelled by their education, or they are held back -- failed -- by it. We have a crisis because too many American children are in the latter category, the proper measure of success is, ultimately, whether or not charter schools are failing fewer students than traditional public schools.

Secondly, all but the most radical free market fundamentalist acknowledges that Government directed bureaucracies are generally better than free markets at meeting clear, static targets. Free markets naturally create volatility and waste along with innovation and adaptability. If there were easy or obvious answers to our educational crisis, there would be less momentum for free market solutions.

The true value of charter schools is as laboratories in which a variety of educational approaches can be tried, evaluated and the best ones propagated. For example: charter schools have finally (at least for the moment) mainstreamed the notion that educators fail children when they make excuses:

...Perry White, a former social worker who founded the Citizens’ Academy charter school... and has overseen its climb from an F on its state report card in 2003 to an A last year. “It took us a while to understand we needed a no-excuses culture,” he said, one of “really sweating the small stuff.”