Markers Called In

Minnesota has a few rituals that we locals rely on to see in the changes in the seasons. The Vikings choking (sometimes in the playoffs, sometimes in pre-season); farmers bitching about there not being enough rain (or, otherwise, too much rain); the DFL trying to put lipstick on the pig of “huge confiscatory tax hikes”…

…and, every fall or winter, the DFL/Strib (pardon the redundancy) taking another hit piece at charter schools.

Charter schools – essentially “districts within districts”, schools calved off from regular school districts which elect their own board, hire their own teachers and, most importantly, develop or adopt their own curriculum – started in Minnesota, and have been a huge success. So huge, in fact, that the DFL/teacher’s union (pardon the redundancy) has tried to strangle the phenomenon from the cradle all the way into the movement’s twenties.

And the effort continues:

When charter schools started in Minnesota in the early 1990s, they were touted as a higher-quality alternative for parents, particularly poor and minority families, looking to escape underperforming district schools.   

But a study released today by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Race and Poverty finds that most charter schools have fallen short of that promise and perform worse than comparable district schools on state tests.

The reason for this, of course, is that charter schools are atomic units; the buck stops in the building. If a kid “underperforms”, a public school has the option of shunting the kid off to Special Ed, or in bigger districts to an “Alternative Learning Center”, where they’re “off the books” for purposes of “No Child Left Behind” accounting. In a charter school, all the kids in the building get counted toward the same average; the charter school has noplace to hide the kids who are dragging the school’s average down.  

And the biggest growth vector among the charters? Inner-city schools chartered by black and Asian parents who are dissatisfied with the public district. And what do you think is going to happen – at least in the short term – when a population that’s been woefully underserved by the public schools gets its own school, and congregates as a big group?

Their “test scores”, in the short term, might suffer. Presuming you pay attention to test scores. More on this below.
Make no mistake – there are charter schools that don’t pass muster, that do a poor job of teaching kids. Is the percentage as high as that of our failing inner-city school districts?

I don’t know, but I strongly doubt it.

But at least the claim above is based on some numbers. The next bit?

Well…:

In the process, it said, charters also intensify racial and economic segregation and compound the problem by encouraging districts to compete by creating ethnic niche programs.

I’m tempted to ask – do the Strib’s Patrice Relerford and Emily Johns know that charter enrollment is voluntary? And that the big driving force behind urban charter schools is the flood of disaffected African-American parents who believe – with complete statistical accuracy – that Minneapolis and Saint Paul’s districts serve them incredibly badly? And that given the motivation, not only is “segregation” voluntary, benign and (given the proportion of black families making up the charter school market in the city) inevitable, but fussing about “integration” is a fussy manifestation of white liberal guilt.

And when in Minnesota, whenever white liberals are guilty, Myron Orfield can’t be far behind:

“So many people are seeing charter schools as a solution to poor, segregated neighborhoods,” said Myron Orfield, the institute’s executive director. “The sad part is, they’re getting these kids to switch schools and then they’re doing worse” than district schools.

Rubbish.

The “studies” on which this “report” is based don’t measure individual achievement; indeed, no studies of relative performance of charter and public schools ever do. Whether a school does “better or worse” than another school is utterly meaningless; the only issue that matters is how do individual kids do?

And the only way to cut through the misleading spin on the poorly-chosen test parameters is to find parameters that matter. In this case, the only meaningful measure is “how many individual students‘ performances improve versus decline?”

If you believe in the free market, you pay some homage to the “wisdom of crowds”. And there is a crowd effect here:

Minneapolis and St. Paul charter enrollment has grown by 21 and 11 percent, respectively, over the past school year, according to the Center for School Change. Last year, more than 28,000 Minnesota students enrolled in charters.

That doesn’t begin to tell the story, of course. Saint Paul’s school population has dropped by 12% – about an eighth – as parents yank their kids from the district to go into charters and open enrollment. Minneapolis is faring even “worse”. In the meantime, the number of charter schools – and the number of kids in them – booms.

Just saying – when the Strib starts writing about charter schools, look for Education Minnesota’s fingerprints.

They’re all over Orfield…