What you need to do is identify schools that consistently perform poorly and shut them down. Then you create space for more effective models to replicate themselves and also for new ideas to be tried out. The promise of charter schools is that by allowing more experimentation we’ll find some good models. But it’s not as if public education in the United States currently achieves some theoretical maximum of badness—with experimentation we’re also discovering bad models. You’ve got to shut those models down, while at the same time curbing state legislators’ tendency to impose arbitrary numerical caps on the total quantity of charter schools. We should let a thousand flowers bloom and then kill 20-30 percent of them if they turn out to look ugly.
Except that the data doesn't show that 70-80% of Charter Schools flourish - quite the opposite. As for experimentation to find good models that's just the problem - with very few exceptions the successes in one school are not repeatable in other schools. Much less other school districts or other states. Yglesias talks as though we were building a truely scientific experiment, one in which the results are verifiable and repeatable. We're not.
Instead we are trying to replicate successes without the ability to control or even the willingness to acknowledge the key variable - socio-economic status. Poverty.
Without trying to address poverty in a real and substantive way (and yes, education is one tool to address poverty in the long term) we're just going to continue spinning our wheels trying to "overhaul" our education system when what needs fixing is our economic system.
And as Matt's commenters have pointed out to him - you don't just open and close schools like the branch office of a national bank.
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One of the best steps that Colorado has taken recently is its move from looking at absolute CSAP results to evaluate schools to a growth model that looks at value added in particular schools. This, at least, begins to evaluate schools with something that approaches the right measure.
Shutting down the worst of the worst schools, as DPS has done, also isn't a horrible approach. Most of the schools at the very bottom on the heap were doing poorly not just on absolute measures, but on student growth measures as well, and the students who used to be at those schools are doing better elsewhere. But, this approach only works because there are enough marginally better performing schools that have overwhelming poor students, that poverty is effectively factored out of the equation.
The Bell has done a study using local data that show that income integration of schools has a decided benefit to the poor students, while not being a drag on the better off students.
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