Tough on Charters in the New York Times

In the New York Times today, we hear the story of Matthew Sprowal, a Harlem eight-year-old who “is bright but can be disruptive and easily distracted.” Through the city’s lottery system, Matthew won placement in a much-lauded charter school, only to be (apparently) forced out after his behavior problems came to light. Today, the boy’s mother says, he is thriving in a regular district school.

Matthews story illustrates a concern of many who follow education. Do charter schools owe their high test scores, graduation rates and other indicators to selectivity? While legally charters must accept any student, are they finding ways to avoid educating the most challenging children?

Meanwhile, over at the Times magazine, Paul Tough takes on the backlash against Diane Ravitch, who recently questioned the results that high-profile charters trumpet. Her op-ed in the Times  drew scathing replies from many in the education reform movement, including Arne Duncan and the founder of Chicago’s Urban Prep, Tim King.

King acknowledged that just 17 percent of his 11th-grade students passed the statewide achievement test last year, while in the Chicago public schools as a whole, the comparable figure was 29 percent. … [He] wrote that Ravitch was comparing “apples to grapefruits” by holding the students at Urban Prep, who are almost all black males from low-income families, to the standards of “children from all across Chicago.”

Tough notes “the obvious: These are excuses. In fact, they are the very same excuses for failure that the education-reform movement was founded to oppose.”

Many of the schools that Ravitch and Tough mention are doing poorly, despite their high profiles. But instead of discussing how they can do better, their leaders lash out at critics. Tough responds:

To acknowledge this fact is not to say that reform is doomed; it is not blaming students or insulting teachers. It is merely reminding ourselves that the 83 percent of 11th-grade students at Urban Prep who didn’t pass the state exam, and the 85 percent of 9th-grade students at Bruce Randolph who didn’t pass the state writing test, deserve better.

This debate playing out in the pages of the Times and the Huffington Post may be the result of the rancorous climate in education today. With nearly every state struggling to dig itself out of a budget crisis, education funding is in short supply. (Free market philosophers might believe that competition for scarce resources is good for schools, but evidence points to the contrary.) School districts do not have the funds they need to succeed, and from this embattled position they see charter schools and education reformers as the enemy.

As they fight off attacks from traditional public schools, some charters find themselves struggling to live up to the promises the movement made in the beginning. By shedding problem students, by presenting their numbers in misleading ways, they hope to dodge criticism that could lead to the loss of their own precious funding. Rather than acknowledging where they need to improve, they, like many districts, crouch defensively.

I think Jim Manley, the superintendent of the struggling Sto-Rox School District, just outside Pittsburgh, put it well when he told me recently that he would like for his district to learn from charter schools, rather than fighting them.

“It’s hard to open up your arms to charter schools when we’re in competition,” he said. But, “I respect what they’re doing…. Let’s buddy up and see if we can learn together.”

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Book Report: “Whatever It Takes”

When I was living in Harlem last year, I used to see flyers for something called Baby College in the lobby of my building. Occasionally I would take the bus along 125th Street and notice the brightly-colored Harlem Children’s Zone building, right near Bill Clinton’s office. But, gentrifier that I was, I never realized I lived in the middle of a bold experiment to break Harlem’s children out of the cycle of urban poverty.

Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes follows Geoffrey Canada, C.E.O. of the Harlem Children’s Zone, and his Promise Academy charter school through a rocky first three years. Canada, both visionary and quixotic, started with the idea, instead of “helping some kids beat the odds…why don’t we just change the odds?” To that end the Harlem Children’s Zone has set up what Canada refers to as a “conveyor belt,” a series of programs that support poor children from infancy to grade school, with the goal of getting them all to college.

The book is an in-depth study of an effort to reverse poverty’s effects on children, but it offers some interesting insights into more general dilemmas in contemporary education. Prime among them is the effect of high-stakes testing on high-risk students. At what point does accountability become a ridiculous obsession?

In New York City, every school must administer a city-wide test. For a school that is new and privately funded, the stakes are high, and the Promise Academy’s preoccupation with test prep is understandable–Canada is essentially trapped.

After terrible results the first year, in the second year, test prep begins in September:

There were morning test-prep sessions, a test-prep block during the school day, test prep in the afterschool program, and test prep on Saturdays. Students went over the basics again and again: grammar, spelling, punctuation, how to write a coherent essay, as well as multiplication, fractions, and geometry…. As the year went on, the time dedicated to test prep only grew, and the time dedicated to everything else was forced to shrink further. (165)

The focus on the test eventually leads to the ouster of middle school principal Terri Grey, who was more concerned with “educating the whole child” and raising achievement gradually. Grey had feared that her students would burn out under a regime of all-day test prep.

While there is an argument to be made that the fundamentals, which the test measures, must come before niceties like music, art and project-based learning, this is a test where the school itself is at stake, and the children themselves begin to seem secondary. Moreover, the test prep eventually focuses on test-taking tricks and strategies rather than knowledge—it’s about playing a game.

There is also strategizing at the macro level. On the citywide test, children can get a 4, above grade level; a 3, at grade level; a 2, below grade level; and a 1, way below grade level. The numbers of 4s and 3s are publicly reported, and the numbers of 1s and 2s are lumped together.

This means that if you are a New York City principal, there is a big incentive to get your high-scoring 2s to level 3 and no incentive at all to get your 1s to 2. (144)

While Canada worries that abandoning the 1s is abandoning his mission to save the most disadvantaged kids, what choice does he have? While bringing every one of the 1s to a 2 would be an achievement in line with the goals of the Harlem Children’s Zone, that won’t help anyone if the Promise Academy loses its funding or its charter. With the very fate of the school at stake, education becomes less about the children as individuals, and more about moving numbers, as, in Canada’s metaphor, a Wal-Mart meeting the bottom line.

At the climax of the book, Canada takes a realist stance and gives up on the first class of middle-schoolers, “graduating” them from the eighth grade rather than creating a new ninth grade for them, as he had planned. Judging by later results, starting over seems to have been for the best—for the Promise Academy, if not for the eight grade. And in fact, the test-focused strategy seems to have paid off as well, since students’ scores do go up.

Unfortunately for Paul Tough, his deadline prevented him from following the Promise Academy past its unsteady beginning. Today, the Harlem Children’s Zone proudly announces that nearly 100 percent of Promise Academy third graders were at or above grade level last year. More surprising, given the sorry state of middle school test scores during the period the book covered, nearly 100 percent of 8th graders were at or above grade level in math. But without Tough there to observe the achievments, we’re left to wonder whether it’s the test strategy at work, or whether the Promise Academy has found a better way.

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