At the Education Writers Association national seminar earlier this month, the National Education Association tweeted what appeared to be an over-simplified talking point: The charter school sector is trending down.
ED TREND: Fewer #charters opening & more closures year after year, which reflects industry’s problems, says NEA’s David Welker #ewa16
— NEA Public Relations (@NEAMedia) May 2, 2016
Fewer charters are opening, and more are closing, every year.
As Mike Antonucci at the Education Intelligence Agency news site points out, that only sounds like a problem until you look at the numbers.
On net, the total number of charter schools has increased the past 15 school years in a row. So has the number of students enrolled in charter schools. And public charter schools are growing faster than traditional public schools: The portion of public school students in charters has risen every year since at least the 2005-2006 school year.
The NEA talking point is technically correct, but clearly charter schools are still thriving.
Furthermore, one of the features of public charter schools is that when they fail, they close. Too often that’s not the case in traditional public schools. Charter school advocates favor closing down low-performing charters, so it’s not obvious that more charters closing means all charter schools are getting worse. It may just mean policies are getting better at making sure low-performing charter schools close.
Antonucci also points out that teachers’ unions may be to blame for fewer charter school openings, since they advocate for restrictions against charters’ ability to operate, including caps on the number of charters in a given state. “To then argue that fewer [charters] are opening is akin to kicking someone in the face and then using the bruises as evidence of his poor health.”
This is all based on one tweet and one chart from the NEA. Hopefully, they provided more context about the charter school sector at the seminar, but their string of tweets from that day and history doesn’t inspire much confidence.
So by most measures the charter school sector is doing just fine, but how is the NEA doing? “I don’t know how many new members NEA recruited over the last five years and how many retired or quit, but I do know the union had a net loss of more than 278,000 members. Over the same period of time, charters had a net gain of 1.28 million students,” Antonucci said. “Which industry has more problems?”
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
