CHARTER SCHOOLS -- A RESPONSE TO ANDREW BLAIS

Andrew Blais [an old friend and former student, whose fine doctoral dissertation I directed], nudges me to post something about charter schools. My familiarity with the subject, which is shallow and quite recent, comes from a session of my doctoral seminar on "Normative Dimensions of Public Policy," which I am teaching this semester in the graduate program of the Public Policy Department at UNC Chapel Hill. The first of what will be six two-hour seminar presentations by pairs of students in the seminar was devoted to the subject of charter schools, and in preparation for the session all of us in the seminar read several essays and chapters from books set us by the two students presenting.

The charter school movement, which now enrolls more than a million students in almost five thousand schools nation-wide, grew out of critiques mounted both from the left and from the right of the traditional public schools in which America's children have been educated for several centuries now. From the left came a demand for community control of what were until then centrally run city school systems, as well as a call from Albert Shanker, the progressive head of the New York City teachers' union, for small-scale experimentation. From the right came calls for privatization, the introduction of market mechanisms via a voucher system, and the breaking of the teachers' unions, as well as for an assortment of religiously based revisions to the curriculum [such as the excision of any mention of evolution, the blanchissement of American history, the enshrining of the Christian God in a position of prominence, and so forth.]

A variety of reforms or experiments have been proposed and tried, among them making classes smaller, making schools smaller, lengthening the school day, and lengthening the school year. The principal impetus for all this churning about is the comparative standing of American school children in international measures of competency in math, science, and language arts. One response to all of this by the federal government has been to mandate testing of school children repeatedly, roughly on the theory that if a patient has a fever, the best medicine is to take the temperature repeatedly. The subject of testing is too large to be discussed here, and is obviously worth a full-scale post of its own.

A large amount of foundation money has been poured into the charter school experiment, including some very large donations by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and several others. I think it is fair to say that driving the movement is a deep-seated hostility to traditional schools and teachers, coupled with the conviction that smart, innovative businessmen and women ought to be able to run schools better than moss-backed career educationists comfortably nestled in tenured sinecures. [Am I too blatantly revealing my sympathies here?]

Charter Schools are privately run schools, "chartered" by the state and supported by funds that would otherwise be spent on educating the same children in public schools. The charter schools are liberated from the supposed tyranny of the teachers' unions, and are free to adopt innovative curricula and teaching methods and any other ideas that the traditional schools are thought to be too hidebound and encrusted with bureaucratic barnacles to try.

The charter schools have certain obvious advantages, the most important of which is that they are not required by law to accept every child in a neighborhood. Nor are charter school entrepreneurs required to maintain schools in every neighborhood in a city. In addition, the children enrolled in charter schools are there because their parents chose to put them there, and that implies a level of concern for education that would, one might suppose, constitute a sort of positive self-selection process resulting in better outcomes for the children.

One of the readings set by Casey Megan and Lisa Spees, the two students responsible for the presentation, was a report by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes [CREDO] located at Stanford University of a 2009 study called "Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States." The structure of the study strikes me as really quite brilliant, and I want to take a little time to explain it as well as I can.

There are two points that we must begin with. First, what really matters is what is called the "value added" effect of charter schools, which is to say how much improvement in student learning they accomplish, as measured by standard state-wide tests, compared to what students would have learned in the traditional public schools, had they stayed there rather than transferring to the charter schools. Now, this is asking a counterfactual question: What would the students have learned if, contrary to fact, they had stayed in the traditional schools. Since it is impossible to rewind history so as to run the students through both kinds of schools, the challenge is to come up with some way of answering the question.

What the CREDO study did was to create a huge number of "virtual twins," by pairing each charter school student whose performance was being monitored with a traditional public school student who matched the charter school student in a number of ways thought to be significant. The match factors included grade-level, gender, race/ethnicity, free or reduced price lunch status [an indicator of family income level], English language learner status, special education status, and prior test score on state achievement tests.

Each pair of students thus consisted of a charter school student and a public school student who with respect to all of these factors were identical. The report says that 1.7 million records were analyzed, but I do not think that means 1.7 million students [although it may have.] The study then took a look at the performance of these pairs on the next year's state achievement tests [can you imagine the computer program required to do this?] Some standard statistical number crunching then ascertained both what the average differences were, state by state, between the charter school students and their paired traditional public school matches, and what statistical significance, if any, the data exhibited. I may just be new to this sort of experimental investigation, but I think this is an extraordinarily imaginative way to try to get at the effect of charter schools on the education of their pupils.

I confess that as I began to read this report, I assumed it would reveal important relative gains by the charter school students. How could it be otherwise? The effect of the self-selection process alone, I thought, was sure to produce some important relative gains, and I was all prepared [given my preliminary bias] to conjure up arguments about equity and the hidden injuries of class [to steal Richard Sennett's fine phrase]. But the results astonished me.

To put it as simply as I can, the study showed that by and large transfer to charter schools made little or no difference at all in the gains of educational gains of students, and where there was a difference, it was a small but statistically significant edge for the traditional public schools! I was astonished by these results.

In the class discussion, which was very interesting and informed by a good deal of hands-on experience and knowledge among the students [not me!], one point was made that merits repeating. Because the study amalgamated such large swaths of data, it was unable to disambiguate the performances of especially successful charter schools. Several students spoke about the Knowledge is Power Program [KIPP] charter schools, which apparently have quite dramatic successes to their credit. The KIPP schools combine a longer school day and school year with heavy homework assignments and a strong emphasis on team performance, all of which seem to be very effective in improving student performance. That sounds right to me, intuitively.

I would be very interested in anecdotal or other reactions from the readers of this blog.

A GRUMPY OLD GUY GETS HIS COMEUPPANCE

Like many other senior citizens with a conservative literary streak [whatever my politics may be], I have become dyspeptic about what I see as the descent of the young into virtual incoherence. But now comes that wonderful NEW YORKER writer, Adam Gopnik, to put me in my place. The occasion is his review article in the latest issue of several books about machine translation, artificial intelligence, and the like. Gopnik makes the familar point that even computers capable of unimaginable zillions of computations a second have difficulty with the subtleties of natural languages. All of this is pretty familiar stuff, and my mind was on automatic pilot as my eyes scanned the review, until I came to this passage, which is, I dare say, one of the most brilliant bits of literary interpretation to come down the pike in quite some time: "Kid-speak, again, is an ideal instance of compression in balance with concision. What sounds to an outsider limited and repetitive is to the knowing listener as nuanced as Henry James. When one eleven-year-old girl says to another eleven-year-old girl, "So, then, like, the teacher got all, like, all of you, I guess, are, like, going to have to do a, like, I don't know, a makeup test. So! Like, yeah ," she means: "The teacher, becoming heated" -- that's why she "got, like" rather than "said, like" -- "announced , in effect, that many of us (I suppose, as a first apprioximation, all) will, at some point in, as it were, the near future, have to take what actually amounts to, when all, is said and done, a secondary makeup test. I have indignant feelings about this -- as who among us would not? -- but I recognize their essential futility." All of this is completely clear to the knowing listener, but it's been impossible, so far, to teach a machine to, you know, like, really, like, get it." I rest my case.

OBAMA IN 2012

Obama has formally announced his intention to run for re-election [no surprise there], and I have signed up to do what I can here in North Carolina. I have no doubt that I will now get a good deal of grief in the comments to this blog. So be it. I believe this is a moment of existential peril in America for what remains of democracy and simple decency. Feel free to tell me that Obama has gone over to the dark side [or, indeed, that he has never left it], but what I see is Republican efforts in Maine to roll back child labor laws that have stood for one hundred seventy years, efforts across America to destroy the last vestiges of a labor movement, assaults on the bodies of women, attacks on the voting rights of college students, a renewed attack on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which have softened the mortal blows of capitalism for hundreds of millions of Americans over the decades. I will die without seeing the fulfillment of my grandfather's dream of a socialist America. Selah, as the Good Book says. I invite all who will to join me. I shall not engage in arguments with those who decline.

A GUEST POST BY MY SON, PROFESSOR TOBIAS BARRINGTON WOLFF

The following essay was written by my son and posted on The Huffington Post, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tobias-barrington-wolff/labor-and-the-lgbt-commun_b_844111.html [copy it and paste it into your command line.] This is not his first essay on HuffPost. With this essay, I issue a challenge to LGBT Americans across the country regarding one of the most important priorities for our community at this moment: the urgent need to contribute our voices, our efforts and our resources to the existential struggle that the labor movement is currently waging against the Republican forces seeking to cripple the right of workers to collectively bargain and roll back workplace protections. I believe that our national organizations need to be putting feet on the streets and money on the table to support labor. I believe that we, as individuals, need to show up to support and defend workers. I do not suggest that this work should happen to the exclusion of our continued advocacy on traditional LGBT issues, but I do suggest that it should be a major commitment of the LGBT community right now, not just a symbolic statement of support. I urge this course of action for three basic reasons. First, labor rights is an LGBT issue. As Gary Gates and others have long since demonstrated, LGBT Americans come from the same economic and demographic origins as all Americans. That means that 65-70% of LGBT Americans have no college degree. The median household income for LGBT Americans ranges from about $35,000 per year in the poorest states to about $65,000 in the richest. Huge numbers of LGBT Americans have either no health insurance or inadequate health insurance. If anything, these economic challenges are even more acute for LGBT workers, who enjoy no federal protection from workplace discrimination and no protection under the laws of many states, no access to equal health benefits in most companies, no access to equal treatment for their families under the laws of most states, and unequal treatment for their relationships under federal law. Working-class LGBT people tend to be less socially visible in our civil rights efforts, just as working-class people tend to be less socially visible in American public life as a general matter, but a large majority of LGBT people are directly at risk from the Republican assault upon workers. Second, labor unions have been showing up for years on the issue of LGBT equality. As one illustration among many, look through the "AFSCME Pride" section of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees website, which reiterates AFSCME's commitment to LGBT equality and offers a clearinghouse of online resources and a link to a sign-up sheet for the AFSCME Pride network. Showing up to help labor in their current struggle is not an act of altruism, it is the satisfaction of a reciprocal obligation. Third, this urgent fight over the future of labor and workers' rights is where the energy in American politics is today. The attempt by the Republican party to overreach following last November's elections and cripple the ability of workers to organize -- and, incredibly, to roll back protections like child labor laws, as in Maine, where Republicans are seeking to create a rotating, vulnerable and underpaid workforce that will further disempower low-wage household earners -- has generated a backlash unlike anything we have seen in half a century. Liberal and progressive forces have an opportunity to use this fight to reclaim the political agenda in America and to reframe the political narrative. LGBT advocates and the LGBT community need to be a part of this urgently important moment. We need to be visibly showing up and contributing our efforts, so that our allies in labor, in state legislatures, and in political parties and organizing committees around the country will know that we were there when it mattered. And, in putting skin in the game, we will be able to play a part in defining the agenda and narrative that will emerge from this reawakening of the American worker. Pushing back against the current assault on American workers should be one of the highest priorities of the LGBT community today -- fully on a par with the effort to secure employment discrimination protections or relationship rights. And all of us as individuals should start looking actively and creatively at how we can contribute to this fight. I, for one, am setting myself that task starting right now.

IDLE MAUNDERINGS ON A SUNDAY MORNING

Being a man of the left in America has condemned me to a lifetime of disappointments, so I think I know something of what it is like to have one's hopes dashed. Still and all, through imperial adventures and reactionary assaults on working men and women and outright bigotry, I am proud to say that I have never descended to the embarrassment of magical thinking. This small self-congratulation is prompted by the latest bizarrerie of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives. As some of you may have noted, on Friday [April Fool's Day, but I am pretty sure they did not mean it as a joke], the House, driven by its Tea Party fanatics, passed a budget cutting bill in which it states, in the body of the legislation, that if the Senate does not reply to this bill by a date mentioned, the bill will, despite not having been passed by the Senate or signed by the President, automatically become law. Democratic Representative Anthony Wiener responded brilliantly to this bit of fantasy thinking by reading on the floor of the House a little book sold in the House gift shop called SENATE MOUSE AND HOUSE MOUSE, a rhymed explanation for little children of how a bill becomes law in the American system of government. Clearly the correct way to respond to this act of the House is clinically, not politically. We need to use the tools of modern psychiatry to try to understand what derangement of normal thought processes has occurred in the two hundred and eleven men and women who engaged in this folie a tous. Here is my best effort. The true believers who were elected to the House in a wave of right wing ressentiment last November do not really have a serious interest in governing, nor do they have a deep-rooted appreciation of the complex reality of the American political system. They are not stupid [for the most part], and if given a spot quiz on the basic rules for the enactment of legislation, they would, I am sure, all select in a multiple choice the answer that specifies the necessity for securing Senate votes and Presidential signature. But they are consumed with a deep hatred of the way things have been going in America in the last generation or more -- roughly since they were children -- what with Blacks and women and Gays and Hispanics and now Muslims crowding into the public square and even hi-jacking the White House, and their complete inability to stem what they see as a slide into damnation [or "socialism," as they like to call it] has made them frantic. They could have come to Washington eager to cut deals that moved the federal government closer to what they believe is true and right and good, but that would have involved actually taking seriously the process of governing. Instead, they launched into a series of symbolic acts [reading the Constitution on the floor of the House, for example] and fruitless legislating that has no hope of becoming law, only to see their very own leader, John Boehner, cutting backroom deals with his Democratic counterparts in the Senate. This sequence of events has driven them wild with despair, and in a desperate effort to maintain their sanity, they have wrapped themselves in magical thinking -- in the obsessive fantasy that if they only say something uncompromisingly and repeatedly and loudly, surrounding it with all the trappings of faux reality, it will somehow come true. Magical thinking is not confined to the halls of Congress. Bills have been introduced in a number of state legislatures to put the state finances on the gold standard [with state obligations payable only in gold -- or, for the bimetallists among you, in gold and silver.] There are secessionist stirrings in Tennessee. [If you try for a moment to imagine landlocked Tennessee seceding from the Union, you will get some sense of the extent to which thinking on the extreme right has become unhinged from reality.] I view all of this rather hopefully, I must rather shamefacedly confess. To be sure, there are dangers associated with having a sizable minority of the population go bonkers, especially since they are probably all in possession of multiple firearms. Nevertheless, my heart quickens just a bit at the thought that they might be driven by their frustration and hysteria into forming a third party, which would ease the way for the election of a more progressive Congress. But mostly, this is for me a happy visit to the land of schadenfreude. Unlike television commentators, I am not compelled to pretend that I view this development with dismay. So, in a life that has seen its fair share of bitter disappointments, I propose to enjoy the moment.

A PICTURE FROM SOUTH AFRICA

This is the first picture from our South African trip. The people you see here are the staff of the HIV-AIDS awareness and prevention programme at UWC -- the folks who choose the recipients of the USSAS bursaries and look after them. The director is Dr. Tania Vergnani, who is standing just to Susie's left in the last row. Her assistant is Joachim Jacobs, the kneeling man in the white shirt. If I suceed in posting this, I shall post more pictures of the trip as they arrive.

IT HAS TO GET WORSE BEFORE IT GETS BETTER

We are a very long way from the ebullient youthful confidence of the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. A large part of the irresistible attraction of Marx's anatomy of capitalism was his claim that the "laws of motion" of capitalist economy would lead inexorably -- and very soon -- to a socialist revolution. As the decades passed without the promised revolution, true believers took to interpreting each bubble or crash as a sign that the end of capitalism was nigh. Like the early Christians who began by believing that Jesus would come again in their own lifetimes, early Marxists fully expected that they themselves would see the Great Crash out of whose ashes a socialist world would rise. Eventually, socialist theorists took to referring optimistically to the development of international corporate capitalism as "late capitalism," in much the way that Evangelicals refer to our present condition as the "End Times." As each promise has gone unfulfilled, it has become harder and harder to keep the faith. We are allotted only a brief portion of time on this earth, and it takes more courage and faith than most of us can manage to sustain a belief in a better future as the months turn into years, the years into decades, and youth becomes old age. The hope for a socialist America that lives only in my fantasies sustained my grandfather a century ago. Must I bequeath that hope, as a relic from the past, to my grandson who is now only five? Desperation tries to breathe a glow into the dying embers of hope with the pathetic thought that perhaps things must get much worse before they can get any better. But this is cold comfort for atheists like me who have not the consolation of another life. These dark thoughts are inspired by the news that in the great state of Maine, a Republican Governor and legislature are proposing to roll back the child labor laws, which for more than one hundred and sixty years have stood as monument to the very earliest victories of American progressive politics. There is, it seems, no depth of iniquity to which Republicans will not sink, no assault on working men and women that shame will not stay their hand from attempting to carry out. Some of you, in your comments on a previous post, have assured me that the American people are far more progressive than their Representatives, who are bought and paid for by the monied interests. How bad does it have to get before the people rise up? We shall see.