This means all children in public schools.
Our children are educated in classrooms that are paid for with public money. It covers the cost of the teacher, the administrators, the support staff, and some desks and other equipment.
During the past six years -- three in district schools, three in charter schools -- I observed that my students and their families were highly concerned about the quality of education I offered in my classroom. Was it a high performing classroom or a low performing one?
They could've cared less about the mechanism that funded it.
***
I frequently hear concerns about charter schools. At the crux of many questions is that the questioner treats charter schools versus public schools as if it were a zero-sum game.
A zero-sum game is at work in education, but it's not between dollars that flow to charters versus those that fund district schools.
It's between public money that funds effective classrooms* versus ineffective ones.
We have 85,000 children to educate in Nashville. We currently don't have enough high-performing classrooms to have seats for all of those children. A scan of the growth scores** around the district show that many of those children will probably spend the next year in a poor-performing classroom.
That means that many children will have their skill growth stalled or reversed.
This isn't just about kids in poverty, either, though they tend to be the ones disproportionately affected. Here are growth scores from elementary schools in West Nashville -- a mostly affluent part of town.
What we're seeing is that many classrooms filled with students from affluent families aren't achieving an acceptable performance. While a typical student at these schools is probably scoring higher on an absolute scale than those in other parts of Nashville, these children aren't advancing their skill levels at a grade-level rate.
This results in things like having only five out of 4,000 graduates of MNPS achieving a National Merit Scholarship -- and none of those Merit Scholars came from a zoned high school. Or having only three high schools*** -- and none of them zoned schools -- achieving an average ACT score of 21, considered the minimum necessary for college readiness.
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The theory supporting charter schools is that they will add high-performing classrooms faster than the district can turn around poor performers. Moreover, if a charter schools doesn't perform, then the school could have its charter revoked. The district's money could then be redirected toward investing in classrooms that are showing results, whether that's expanding a successful district school or approving a different charter operator.
I'll discuss the state of Nashville's charter schools in a future post. (Short version: most are outperforming district schools in both growth and absolute scores. Many have waiting lists. Some schools are underperforming. For those, MNPS charter czar Alan Coverstone has recommended that the board should revoke these schools' respective charters.)
The point is not to be pro-charter school or anti-charter school. We should be pro-high performing classroom and anti-low performing classroom.
We, in both district and charter schools, have about 85,000 children to educate starting August 1.
How many high performing classrooms are we going to offer them?
And for those children who have to suffer through a year in a low-performing classroom, what's going to be our explanation to that child and his or her family as to why he or she couldn't be in a better one?
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*I'm thinking in terms of classrooms because 1) even within low-performing schools, several pockets of excellence 2)I want to keep the language student-centered and 3) the term "classroom" accounts for not only the teacher, but the structure supporting the teacher -- instructional coaches, administrators, etc.
** I focus on growth scores because they are the heart of what a school is supposed to do: take children at whatever level they come in on and move them up to the next level. Even if a child comes it performing on a high level, that child should experience at least a grade-level growth.
*** Hume-Fogg, MLK, and Middle College
Disclosure: Both my wife and I currently teach in charter schools. Both of us have also taught in district schools here.
4 comments:
I agree, it shouldn't be a "competition." But there are some things to consider. Good teachers, good classrooms, and good schools, even, are good in a context. Unfortunately, one of the contexts of charter schools (nationally) is that they are linked to an effort in this country to privatize public services (in particular, education and prisons) and to destroy public service workers' unions (having done in the private workers' unions, almost). If it's cheaper to privatize the workers, for example, in charters (or even in public schools), let's not forget that those workers, who will now make less, are part of the community of people who are sending their children to public and charter schools. And, thus, their standard of living will be lower and their children will suffer. I say this to indicate that that good classrooms do not exist in a vacuum, but in a context, locally and nationally. Just something to chew on...
Perhaps another "context" is the increasing cuts in funding for public schools. None of this is to say that there aren't wonderful and excellent charter schools and classrooms, which there are. It is only to say that they don't exist "outside" of the political and economic contexts of the current rush to keep wealth in the hands of the wealthy and cut back on the public support for poor people and their schools.
Thanks for the comments Dina! This is something that I want to address in a future post. Namely, there's a problem with poor public oversight and, separately, some terrible operators.
As always, yours is an opinion I deeply respect.
Hope all is well in Philly!
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