According to this fine post on Diane Ravitch’s blog, what we suspected about the charter school movement has been true all along: you can’t compare country clubs with the county park, even when the country club claims that it does not discriminate.
Many charter schools make the false claim that they do not to discriminate by pointing out that they choose students through “lotteries.” A lottery is not a “random sampling,” a concept which is so basic that it even appears in the Common Core State Standards for 7th grade. A lottery is a “skewed sample” of families that have an enhanced interest in their child’s education, are willing to fill out the necessary forms to take part in the process, and agree to follow the rules and regulations that the charter school demands (which might include extended school days, uniforms, prison style conduct codes, and “zero tolerance” discipline policies.)
I might have some sympathy for charter schools if they practiced the same kind of enrollment policies as their public school counterparts: that is, they would put out an “all welcome” sign and pledge to keep the child with the exact same policies as a comparable public school. I would even be willing to entertain the idea that they might be doing something better in the classroom if it could be proven that this was actually true.
But it can’t and it never will.
It seems to me that if you’re running a school that intentionally creams off the better students from the better families, there’s no way you cannot underperform a public school. Add to that that you’re enrolling ESL kids and those with moderate to severe learning disabilities in disproportionately lower percentages, well, aren’t you just stacking the deck a little too much in your favor? After all this screening, all this attrition (typically over 50% Success Academy Schools), all this focus on test prep, it would seem to me that posting high test scores would be a slam dunk. Yet the latest findings show equal results on ELA and a modest edge on math test scores. Yeeeeeesh, all this money, time and de facto segregation, and you can’t get this right? What gives?
Get the facts right: here’s Diane Ravitch to set you straight!
