Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and charter school operators have denounced the NAACP’s opposition to charter school expansion, arguing that charters provide the best path to improve educational opportunities for African Americans. Charter operators cite what they claim are charters’ higher test scores, graduation rates, and college admissions.
But charters (a.k.a. “school choice”) hurt African American children by draining critical funds from public education. Charters’ “success,” limited and questionable though it is, is due to two factors.
First, they enjoy a self-selected and sometimes hand-selected cohort of students. Second, they employ a young, underpaid, overworked workforce that allows them to save money on salaries, healthcare, and pensions: money they can use to have smaller class sizes and fund extracurricular programs that traditional public schools can’t afford.
Even if these practices were ethical, they could not be replicated on a large scale.
University of Colorado education professor Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center, explains that “the greatest determinants of [a school’s] success are the raw materials — the students who enroll.” Welner has identified a dozen methods charters use to get the “raw material” they want and avoid or discard what they don’t.
Charters’ harsh discipline policies help in this sifting process. One recent study found Los Angeles Unified School District charters suspend students at twice the rate (and black students at almost three times the rate) that traditional schools do. Suspensions often lead parents to withdraw their struggling children from charters.
It’s easier, however, just never to enroll such students in the first place. According to journalist Stephanie Simon, a Reuters study found charters avoid lower performing students by “aggressively screen[ing] student applicants, assessing their academic records, parental support, disciplinary history, motivation, special needs and even their citizenship.”
Moreover, the pursuit of a charter school (and the willingness to jump through some of the hoops Reuters and Welner outline) is powerful evidence of a student’s and family’s commitment to education. This commitment is strongly correlated with academic success.
Charter skimming is apparent in the public school classroom. During each school year, I’ve generally lost a few students because they had been accepted to a charter, almost always top-tier students. At the same time, we receive students mid-year who struggled in charters and ended up back in public schools.
Charters also gain by taking advantage of young teachers’ idealism and willingness to sacrifice. According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, nationwide only 11% of charters are unionized. Unlike union teachers, most charter-school teachers work on one-year contracts with little or no job protection.
According to a new study, turnover at charter schools is significantly higher than in traditional schools. The study, conducted by University of California, Berkeley researchers, examined the turnover rates among 13,000 LAUSD elementary and secondary teachers. The study’s authors explain: “[R]esearch shows that charter school teaching context is demanding (e.g., longer hours, more responsibilities, fewer resources, and more administrative chores) … evidence suggests that most teachers in charter schools leave because of a lack of satisfaction with certain aspects of the teaching conditions … It is well documented in the literature that charter schools have higher teacher turnover.”
UC Berkeley Professor Bruce Fuller, co-author of the LA study, recently told City Watch LA: “The conventional wisdom, which our study backs up, is that charters recruit very young teachers … [charter managers] will say this in small groups but not to reporters — that they want younger teachers because it saves on wages and benefits.”
Rather than promoting charters or other educational fads, teachers unions consistently advocate the one thing that state and federal governments are the least willing to try: properly funding and staffing all schools.
Proper funding would allow students of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds to enjoy small class sizes and access to individual help. It would provide students the opportunity to interact and bond with teachers and counselors who actually have time to help them. Such funding would also include creating or extending extracurricular activities and special programs that would make students want to come to school.
Charter advocates boast that nearly 7 in 10 African Americans polled support “school choice.” But I’d bet 100% would be in favor of proper funding for public schools.
Glenn Sacks teaches at LAUSD’s James Monroe High School and is co-chair of United Teachers Los Angeles at Monroe High.
