Take a look at some of these headlines:
“Charter Schools on Path of Subprime Mortgage Crisis.”
“Are charter schools the new subprime loans?”
“The sick new ‘bubble’ that could explode urban schools.”
With mainstream coverage like this, the four professors who recently published a paper comparing the boom in charter schools to the devastating subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 probably thought they cooked up a winning idea. The paper, titled “Are We Heading Toward a Charter School ‘Bubble’?: Lessons from the Subprime Mortgage Crisis,” has it all: a provocative headline, an argument that sounds novel, outside of the box thinking and guaranteed media coverage.
Concerned parents and students, however, need not worry too much about the sensationalistic title. If comparing charter schools to the 2008 financial crisis sounds like an apples to oranges fallacy, well, that’s because it is. The premise, as Karega Rausch, vice president of research and evaluation at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers points out, rests on a misconstruction of the dynamics for charter schools. “The method,” Rausch writes, “to address waiting lists is by expanding the number of quality schools available to children, families and communities — not to increase the number of authorizers.”
There’s also a different motivation in play between parents and potential homebuyers. Parents sending their kids to charter schools are all essentially in the same boat when it comes to their vested interest in their child’s education — they all start on a level playing field of education options. Home loans, by contrast, are contingent on whether someone can afford to pay a mortgage. Some people are more financially capable of affording a home than others. This disparity is irrelevant when it comes to charter schools and the question of whether they provide a quality education. The thousands of families who join waiting lists for charter schools aren’t necessarily more or less qualified to attend school than anyone else. They just want a good education. Parental demand is rising for charter schools, says Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, because they are delivering “more learning days, innovative classroom teaching, flexibility in building a curriculum, smaller classrooms and better results.”
A recent lawsuit involving charter schools in Pennsylvania further underscores the fact that school choice and the emergence of charter schools is fundamentally a local issue driven by parents trying to do the best thing for their children, not some sort of nationwide bubble. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ruling declared that Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission, which was granted special power to take over the city’s public school system to make it financially stable, does not have the authority to limit charter school growth with enrollment caps. Rather than opening the door to out-of-control charter school growth, as anti-school choice activists claim, the ruling simply returns power to the school district and to charter schools to negotiate to determine enrollment figures. It’s a blow against the very sort of top-down planning and groupthink that helped bring about the mortgage crisis.
Perhaps most significantly, these professors’ study misses the point that charter schools have never been sold as a one-size-fits-all education solution. The goal of the school choice movement is to provide education options so that families can give their children the best education possible. Again, this rationale for school choice represents a stark contrast to the subprime mortgages handed out recklessly and indiscriminately prior to the housing crisis. If some charter schools fail, educators and administrators should see it as an opportunity to learn about what doesn’t work and figure out how to do better next time, and lawmakers in charge of the purse strings should take care to evaluate charter schools by the sum of their parts, not one or two bad apples.
Taken as a whole, charter schools perform markedly better than their public counterparts, especially in urban areas, as a Stanford University report found last year. And some, such as those in the District of Columbia, Boston, Detroit and Newark, perform phenomenally better. These urban charter schools, the report found, are also producing gains for many notable subgroups like black and Hispanic students, as well as students below the poverty line and those enrolled in special education programs. Economist Adam Ozimek echoes this point in Forbes, where he challenges the conventional wisdom that “on average charters do no better and no worse than public schools.”
On the contrary, he says, charter schools stand out from their public counterparts in one very important way: on average they do better at teaching poor students and black students. The conclusions reached by the four professors, in contrast, suggest that black families are lining up to get into charter schools out of a “herd mentality.”
In reality, it’s more likely that those families are simply following the evidence showing that charter schools will give their children a better education than traditional public schools. It’s too bad these professors didn’t do the same.
Andrew Collins is digital media manager for the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, a nonprofit that publishes public-interest journalism at Watchdog.org. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
