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Chances are, you are right. The question on charter caps should not be whether they are good or bad. The better question would be the capacity of states to grant and monitor charters. And if we really want to help kids, the capacity of unions to organize charters should be considered.

If we really want competion, we need regulators, unions, and innovators to all have a fair chance to make their cases and the let people decide.

Let's be real. The charter schools that are working do so because of small class sizes and enough support and funding. In the state of Texas, elementary class sizes cannot exceed 21 students. There are NO STATE REQUIREMENTS for class sizes in middle and high schools. As a result...we have class sizes in excess of 30 students or more. I don't care what kind of teachers you have, with those numbers, it is challenging to be personal and hands on with 150-175 students rolling through your door each day.

I love my job, and I work very hard at it, and it is offensive to me and my professions to say that charters work better than public schools. Ask a charter school administration to do the same work under the same conditions, and nothing would be different. The issue isn't about opening more charters, it's about putting regulations in place and funding what research says works. Small class sizes, teacher autnomy, training, and mentoring, and an end to the obsession with standardized testing. Public schools can do this!

One statistic I'd really like clarified is how many philanthropic dollars per pupil the average successful charter gets. My guess is its high, and that its particularly high in NYC, where, according to the NY Times, charter schools are the new "cause" of young Wall St. types.

It would be ironic if at the end of the day the message of charters is that well-targeted money works.

John--I think you're right. It's the wise regulation of charters--and all schools--that can determine their quality. The charter debate opens a wider issue: the balance between wise regulation and necessary autonomy. The reality for some of the best charters is that they have central Charter Management Organizations that regulate them. As Tom Toch's original version of the Education Sector report suggests, these CMO's are coming to resemble central offices, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Keishla--It sounds to me like we agree on the importance of supporting what works and creating the conditions for success in all public schools. Many successful charter schools place restrictions on class sizes, even though some in the reform community sneer at arguments about class size. Many successful charters have a lot of extra philanthropic money, even though some reformers roll their eyes when school advocates say they need extra resources. There's evidence that charter schools tend to teach fewer special education students and English Language Learners than traditional public schools do, and few reform advocates do enough to improve schools' capacity to serve these students well. So a big lesson we can draw from the charter school movement is that we have to create the conditions for success in all schools, but that lesson often gets lost when people begin to think that the charter-ness of these schools is enough to guarantee success.

Rachel, I'm not sure that such a statistic is available, but Tom Toch's draft of the Education Sector report describes at some length the extra money many of the best charters receive. According to Toch, CMO leaders admit that they need more money to do their work well, that educating disadvantaged children costs much more. The message really is that well-targeted money is critical. ("Well targeted" is, of course, the operative term.)

Charter-ness. I like that word. Repeating--whether charters are "good" or "bad" turns on one question: compared to what?

Thinking here about Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone, which was an experiment in creating those conditions for success in all schools. All of the success triggers mentioned above were activated: required parent commitment, supplemental health and social services, longer day, significant private funding, high expectations and accountability, dedication to children's needs and willingness to dump adults who didn't meet that standard--and a different, boutique governance model. Plus spotlighted leadership. Then, of course, when the kids made strong gains but didn't appear (presto!) to be Harvard-ready, there was acrimonious commentary. Interesting.

Which makes me think that removing layers of scholarly data and analysis reveals deeper, core questions and beliefs, around "deservingness" (a bad, made-up word, but I can't find a good synonym): race, poverty, equity, democracy, economic power, social class--and so on. The conversation about charter schools lies comfortably on the surface, something we can talk about that shields us from the ugly and dangerous gap between "us" and "them."

Hi, Nancy!

I agree that the conversation about charters often masks, rather than illuminating, the deep, deep divisions in opportunity between the "haves" and "have nots," "us" and "them." And the impatience with comprehensive HCZ-like programs that don't immediately close gaps can also be disturbing. Impatience has to be balanced against perseverance on the part of reformers and their audience. 

Still, I find the broader debate about charters useful, because it illuminates challenges faced by most schools, charter or traditional, in troubled neighborhoods. Ultimately, charter communities and traditional public school communities will have to clear the same hurdles. While the "charter-ness" of the best charter schools may illuminate strategies all schools can adopt--and policies we need--it is far, far from a magic pill.

Charter proponents and traditional public school advocates have a powerful shared interest in pushing back the forces--and I believe they've gathered strength in recent years--of Charles Murray and his crowd.

NYC Charter Finances

Rachel and Claus,

Over at Gotham Schools Ken Hess has been trying to capture consistent data on how much money charter schools in NYC get above state funding.

http://gothamschools.org/2010/01/11/charter-school-philanthropy-2009/

Also important to keep in mind that in many states - I forget about NY - charters are funded at a lower % per capita than traditional public schools. So if we want apples-to-apples, we have to adjust for that.

If we agree that good schools with strong leaders, held accountable for their programs and results are desirable, then the question for me as a parent and taxpayer is how do we build that kind of culture? Whether it's a CMO or the Central Office running it, I could care less.

The urge to link everything to test scores is a bit simplistic admittedly. But Paul Hoss recently pointed out over at the Core Knowledge Blog it was liberal democrat Robert Kennedy who alone raised the issue of accountability for the funds being put into the ESEA back in the late 1960s. According to a story in EW, Kennedy even used 'colorful' language to help Commissioner Francis Keppel understand how important this was to him as a NY senator responsible for spending NY taxpayers money.

This debate over how to identify talented teachers and good schools makes me think of Lake Wowebegone. Can we as policy wonks, parents, administrators, educators not accept that at least 50% of our schools have to be below average? That does not mean they should be fired, or shuttered tomorrow. But it does mean that we accept they have to try to improve, no? And someone eventually has to judge that effort

Thanks for your message, Matthew. The data from Gotham Schools are interesting, and your point about charters getting less in per-pupil expenditures is well taken. The EdSector report on charter schools (http://www.educationsector.org/usr_doc/Growing_Pains.pdf) argues that CMO-led charters can be expensive--Not because they're wasteful or inefficient, but because their most successful strategies are "resource intensive." There is a lesson there for all schools.

I agree with your characterization that, "If we agree that good schools with strong leaders, held accountable for their programs and results are desirable, then the question for me as a parent and taxpayer is how do we build that kind of culture?" That culture can exist in charters or traditional public schools--we can produce examples of both that have lessons to share. Charters, after all, are supposed to be laboratories for innovation. If they have strategies traditional public schools can adopt, then they're spreading the wealth even more quickly than a CMO can. All of us have to spend much more time figuring out how to transfer these practice between public schools, charter or traditional.

As for tests, I'm with you. We need standard measures so that we can know how students across subgroups are doing. This is critical if we're serious about equity. It's also fair to to point, as you do, to tests as tools to ensure that resources are being well spent. It makes no sense to rail against standardized measures for their own sakes.

But if the stakes of measurement are so high--and they're very high--then we have to go full steam ahead in developing much better measures. Let's take a cue from some of the countries that are the top of international comparisons and really figure out how to improve our assessments. That would be a critical engine of reform, and it would require some big changes throughout the system.