Charter Schools
The Case for Charters, Part 4: Disruptive Innovation: Why Traditional Ed Is Ill-Suited For Change
Published May 08, 2009 @ 06:00PM PT
In 2003, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen published a book called The Innovator's Dilema that eloquently explains how many good companies that produce good products fail. Christensen outlines two different types of innovation that have an effect on any industry: sustaining innovations and disruptive innovations.
Sustaining innovations are improvements in technology that enhance the quality of the product being offered. Disruptive innovations are innovations that result in alternative products that at first are inferior to the mainstream product but that, over time, and with the application of their own sustaining innovations, can develop into a better choice for the majority of customers.
Christensen gives the example of how discount retail stores such as Target, K-Mart, and Wal-Mart grew to overtake the department store. Before discount retail stores, most Americans shopped at such stores as Bloomingdales, Macy's, Marshal Fields, Yonkers, Dayton's. Today we see these companies dwindle, while we see the discount retailers thrive. The only company mentioned here that has survived in any appreciable way is Dayton's. Dayton's, at the early onset of discount retail, started Target as a subsidiary company. Target was allowed to run as its own separate company and in time grew to "eat the parent." In 2005 Dayton's was sold to Marshal Fields as a shell of a business leaving the Target Corporation effectively having "eaten the parent."
We see this scenario play out throughout nearly all industries. Today's newspapers are going through the same problem as they are losing subscribers to online news sources. The cell phone is making a significant dent in the telephone business as more and more customers find they don't really need their land lines. This saga goes on and on. In this vicious cycle, the only companies that survive are those who embrace change and allow the disruptive force to take over the company. Those who fight against it always fail or are marginalized. Christensen goes on to explain how large organizations are incapable of monumental change. That is why the only department store company to survive was Dayton's. Dayton's did not actually survive; its subsidiary did.
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In 2007 Christensen applied this theory to education in his book, Disrupting Class. In that book, he identifies individualized learning plans and student-centered learning as the disruptive force on our horizon. He also speculates that online learning is one of the major vehicles that allow this to happen. However, there are other vehicles that carry this innovation. Homeschooling is by nature individualized and has always captured a small percentage of our population. Some private schools, such as the Sudbury schools, can be included in this category. Unschooling captures a fair share of this market. Finally, charter schools by nature are disruptive innovations (at least those that take a student-centered and customized approach to curriculum).
The question is, "Do we want our traditional school systems to be more like Macy's, Dayton's, or Wal-Mart?" If we don't embrace school choice options (including district-sponsored charter schools), we will see our traditional public schools dwindle the same way Macy's and company have seen systematic closures of their department stores. In their place will likely be "big box" charters like KIPP and Green Dot that have a similar effect in public education as Wal-Mart has in business. If our public school districts sponsor their own charter schools and allow them enough autonomy to be independent, we have a much better chance of weathering this storm and coming out relatively unscathed.
The changes that a charter school can make cannot be practically implemented in a traditional school system. These changes are systemic and massive. Large systems are designed to resist change. In many ways this is good, it prevents wild bad ideas from wreaking havoc on the system; but it also breeds complacency and reinforces the status quo. Yes, unions are part of this problem but so are school boards, taxpayers, and administrators. At a certain point we need to start building a new house. That doesn't mean we have to move into it right away.
Why Wal-Mart Schools are a Frightening Idea
Published May 07, 2009 @ 05:48AM PT
[The possible passing of the Employee Free Choice Act] is the demise of a civilization. This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I'm watching this happen and I don't believe it....As a shareholder, if I knew the CEO of the company wasn't doing anything on [EFCA]... I would sue the son of a bitch... I'm so angry at some of these CEOs, I can't even believe the stupidity that is involved here....If a retailer has not gotten involved in this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to [former Sen.] Norm Coleman and all these other guys, they should be shot. They should be thrown out their goddamn jobs.
--Bernie Marcus, Co-Founder of Home Depot (source)
Robert L. Borosage, Co-Director of the Campaign for America's Future, writes a column in the May 5 Huffington Post that touches slantwise on the current drive to weaken teachers' unions. In "Corruption is Dangerous to Your Health," Borosage writes about the banking lobby's successful blocking of a reform that would have allowed judges to modify mortgages in bankruptcy court, and thus save many homeowners from foreclosures:
This isn't about America being a "center-right country," the myth that pundits still peddle about the American people. This is about Congress being bought and sold, pure and simple...
[...]For example, with the swine flu alert sweeping the country, President Obama and the Centers for Disease Control urge people with flu symptoms to stay home. This is a common sense measure to limit the spread of what might be a dangerous virus.
Only one problem, as the New York Times reminds us in an editorial this morning. About 60 million Americans don't have paid sick leave. Many can be fired if they stay home. And if not fired, many simply can't afford to lose the hours.
43% of private sector American workers have no paid sick days at all. And needless to say the most vulnerable have the least protection. A 2007 EPI study showed that workers at the bottom of the wage scale, those making less than $7.38 an hour, are five times less likely to have sick days than workers at the top of the scale, those making greater than $29.47 an hour. Only 16% of low-wage workers have access to paid sick days.
[...] More than 160 countries, the Times tells us, have laws that ensure all their citizens receive paid sick leave and more than 110 of them guarantee paid leave from the first day of illness. The US does not. The reason goes no further than the influence of money on politics.
We once provided much of our social contract through the corporation rather than the Congress. Strong unions could negotiate a family wage, health care, overtime pay, paid sick leave, paid vacations, and pensions. Many non-union employers offered benefits similar to those provided by union companies. But over the last decades of this conservative era, as unions grew weaker under attack, more and more corporations simply shredded those agreements. (Read the rest.)
So what's the "slantwise" connection? Simply this: The biggest players in the charter school movement - the Walton Family of Wal-Mart fame, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, New York City Mayor Bloomberg and his appointed school chancellor Joel Klein - are all on record as being anti-union. The Walton family's hiring practices at Wal-Mart are infamous for creating precisely the class of working poor that Borosage discusses above:
The Walton Family Foundation of Wal-Mart is the single biggest investor in charter schools in the United States, giving $50 million a year to support them. The Waltons specialize in giving money to opponents of public education. “Empowering parents to choose among competing schools,” said John Walton, son of Wal-Mart’s founder, “will catalyze improvement across the entire K–12 education system.” According to a National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) report, “Some critics argue that it is the beginning of the ‘Wal-Martization’ of education, and a move to for-profit schooling, from which the family could potentially financially benefit. John Walton owned 240,000 shares of Tesseract Group Inc. (formerly known as Education Alternatives Inc.), which is a for-profit company that develops/manages charter and private schools as well as public schools.” Wal-Mart is a notorious union-busting firm, famous for keeping its health-care costs down by discouraging unhealthy people from working at its stores, paying extremely low wages with poor benefits, and violating child labor laws. The company has reportedly looted more than $1 billion in economic development subsidies from state and local governments. Its so-called philanthropy seems also to be geared to the looting of public treasuries. (source)
I could go on (and if I did, I would go to this 2004 feature on Wal-Mart's regressive employment practices, and their $2.5 billion annual cost to taxpayers having to foot the emergency room bills of Wal-Mart's un- or under-insured employees, in the New York Review of Books).
But instead I'll close with these questions: In these economic times, when fewer and fewer have living wages and benefits, and labor is a shell of its former self due to three decades of anti-union legislation, why should we be sanguine about trusting the Waltons, Bill Gates, and company with the fate of the teaching profession? Do we really expect them not to do their best to add America's 4,000,000 teachers to the already swollen rolls of America's under-paid and under-insured former middle class? Will worsened working conditions and Wal-Mart-low morale among teachers result in better student achievement?
In short, do we really want schools on the Wal-Mart model?
--image source
Memo to press: Think before you buy into the teachers' union bashing
Published April 28, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT
I’ve been musing a lot on the extent to which the U.S. mainstream press bashes, blames and demonizes teachers’ unions, while so often writing admiringly and unquestioningly about charter schools.
(Back to charter schools later.)
There’s a notion that it’s impossible to “get rid of” bad teachers. The pro-privatization, anti-union right wingers like to raise an outcry about “the dance of the lemons” –- situations in which problem teachers get shuffled from school to school. And the mainstream press -– even liberals -– joins in.
Those voices constantly cite teacher “tenure” as the evil to end all evils. Here’s how Merriam-Webster defines tenure:
“…a status granted after a trial period to a teacher that gives protection from summary dismissal.”
It seems to me that anyone who has ever worked for an employer would view “protection from summary dismissal” as a reasonable right for workers. That would include most every employee of the mainstream media corporations –- who I have a feeling haven’t thought this through when they do all that bashing, blaming and demonizing of teachers.
I've seen situations in which it was indeed difficult to “get rid of” a problem employee. I’ve seen them both with teachers, in my life as a public school parent and advocate, and also with union newspaper employees, in my previous career as a daily-newspaper copy editor.
In my observation -- while union contracts did indeed help protect those problem employees’ jobs and make it impossible to “summarily” fire them -- in every case I’ve seen, it was poor management judgment that led to the situation. I recall several cases in which my newsroom colleagues, including union activists, were voicing serious and legitimate concerns to management about new employees still in their probationary periods -- and went ignored. Then when the problems blow up later, “the union” gets the blame.
Of course, that said, it’s still a terrible situation when poor management decisions result in problem teachers in the classroom. It’s a challenge balancing protecting employees against arbitrary or retaliatory management actions with the ability to terminate a problem employee. But my newsroom colleagues need to remember that they want and feel they deserve legitimate job protections too -– if teachers are the goose, newspaper journalists are the gander.
To switch animal metaphors, the elephant in the room regarding teachers’ union contracts is seniority rights. My experience (again, as a parent and advocate, not truly an insider) is with a large urban school district, so I can’t really say how this translates to a different type of district. But in our district, in general, when there’s an opening for whatever reason, a teacher with seniority may choose to step into it, generally coming from another school. That frustrates school administrators and school communities, because they may have little to no say in who winds up in the front of the classroom.
The fact that charter schools don’t have to abide by such protections gives them the advantage of truly getting to choose their teachers. One could argue that that’s a short-term advantage with a long-term downside, since in the big picture, that means charter school teachers lack a significant employee benefit -- job security. That lack is likely to lead to high turnover (a significant problem in charter schools nationwide) and less job satisfaction, meaning that charter schools will in the long run be less desirable employers and are likely to have trouble attracting and keeping the best teachers.
If that lack of seniority protection were extended to every school, it would make teaching -– already hardly a cushy job -– an even less attractive calling. That would be bad for schools, kids and public education
Meanwhile, back in the news business, seniority rights are currently a huge issue, with newspapers around the nation teetering on the brink of collapse and implementing or threatening mass layoffs. My own family’s life and financial security was hugely and directly impacted when the union that represents San Francisco Chronicle newsroom employees voted a few weeks ago to give up seniority protection, in the face of imminent threat of the collapse of the company.
This is not just a San Francisco Chronicle issue, needless to say. Newsroom employees everywhere have lost, are losing or are likely to lose their seniority protection, with as devastating an impact on them as this has had on my family.
Mainstream journalists and commentators might really want to think about that a bit more when they praise charter schools because of their lack of job protection for teachers, and when they bash teachers’ unions over the same issues. When you create a general perception that job security is a frivolous and burdensome employee perk, you may wind up weakening your own job security still more.
I’m pretty convinced that those of my journalistic colleagues who buy into the union-bashing and charter-hyping are generally not callous or hypocritical but rather than they haven’t given this enough thought. It's time to do that thinking, though.
Core Knowledge and Class Size
Published April 28, 2009 @ 03:14AM PT
I've been meaning to point this out ever since reading the Core Knowledge blog announce that the Carl C. Icahn Charter School is NYC's "toughest charter to get into."
Robert at the Core Knowledge blog points out:
The school had spots for less than 3% of its 868 applicants, the Daily News reports. On last year’s state ELA test, 85.1% of students were proficient, more than double the rate of the surrounding district–as good an argument for the efficacy of a content-rich curriculum on reading achievement as one could want. Math proficiency is even higher–over 97%.
Robert also points out that the school uses the Core Knowledge curriculum, and implies that curriculum is a factor in much of the school's success at those test scores (and has the school taken the more respected NAEP tests, instead of the easier NY state tests?).
I'm not going to dispute that possibility. I can get behind Core Knowledge in this respect, at least: if I understand it correctly, it pushes content-rich reading in a coherent, historically-grounded framework, instead of pushing scripted lessons and test-prep "reading" instruction. (I've already written about what I can't so easily get behind with CK.)
But there's another factor of Icahn charter that separates it from NYC public schools: class size.
From the NYC Public School Parents blog:
All classes at the school are capped at 18, according to its website and an article in the NY Sun. Classes run to 4 PM, with Saturday help for any child who needs it.
And yet this administration, which promotes charter schools at every opportunity, allowed class size to rise in our regular public schools in all grades this year but 4th – despite $150 million in state aid that was targeted specifically to reducing class size. More than 66,000 students-- or about one quarter of all NYC public school children in grades K-3 are now in classes of 25 or more– an increase of more than 11, 000 students compared to last year. There are nearly 14,000 students in grades 1-3 in classes over 28 – a 36% jump.
The size of Kindergarten classes increased so much that average class size is now as large as in 2002 – when the mayor was first elected. Next year will likely be worse – with hundreds of parents on waiting lists for their zoned neighborhood schools. See articles about waiting lists in Chelsea, Upper East side, and Greenwich village – even after increasing class size to 25 – the union contractual maximum -- in all these neighborhood schools.
The administration says it will provide 100,000 seats for charter school students by 2012 – though there are only 25,000 new seats in the entire proposed five year capital plan. This means that they are planning to take at least 75,000 seats from our already overcrowded regular public schools – with more closing of neighborhood schools to make way for charters, and higher class sizes for those kids sent elsewhere.
Everything's complicated.
Update: This blog has an interesting comparison/contrast of the Icahn school and other big-brand charters like KIPP and Green Dot. Especially noteworthy is that the teachers at Icahn aren't Teach For America naifs - and don't seem worked to the bone like KIPP's TFA-ers - but instead are professional teachers from NYC schools. Also noteworthy: the school days, weeks, and year aren't radically longer, as Arne Duncan is convinced they should be (and as they are with KIPP):
a) Nearly every charter school I've seen has a young leader (usually a TFA alum), whereas Litt is a grizzled veteran.
b) There's only a slightly extended school day -- 8:30-4 -- and no Saturdays or summer school (though maybe school started a week early in August?).
c) There are no TFA teachers on staff -- most of the teachers appear to have been recruiting from the NYC public schools (see below for one teacher's story).
d) There were few posters with slogans on the wall ("Work Hard. Be Nice.", "Climbing the Mountain to College", etc.).
e) I didn't observe any of the teaching techniques that involved all the students chanting vocabulary words, doing multiplication with "oom-pop-drop" and the like.
I wonder how the compensation and benefits work here, compared to traditional public schools?
A Case for Charter Schools?
Published April 20, 2009 @ 11:15AM PT
[Jessica Shiller is an assistant professor of education and coordinator of the master’s program in teaching social studies at Lehman College, City University of New York.]
Charter schools, one of the most hotly-debated policy issues in education policy today, has divided proponents who see charters as an innovative way to improve student achievement and the opponents who see charters as death sentences for teacher unions and community voice in schools. Raise the topic in any gathering and you will find people fiercely arguing both sides. Yet, the debate as it has currently been framed misses the boat almost entirely. Whether you're for or against charters, the question to ask about charters is: Who benefits?
The data shows mixed results on charter performance with some showing incredible achievement gains, and others not showing any. In the end, there is no clear evidence that charters on the whole are better than a well-performing public school. That is why charter schools are mainly absent from suburban communities where well-performing schools are easy to find. It is not that suburbs are resistant to charters, but like any community with well-performing schools, they are content with what they do have. Why shouldn't they be? By and large, in middle class suburbs across the nation, schools are performing well. So well, in fact, that urban parents will risk getting arrested to get their children into those schools.
As a result, charter school advocates have carved out a niche in the under-served urban communities across the country. In cities, where schools and neighborhoods have been under-resourced for some time, residents cannot claim that their schools are doing so well they do not need charters. Just the opposite is true, which makes the charter school movement hard to resist. Consequently, charter schools have proliferated in cities. And why not invite charter schools in, many might ask, since public schools were not performing so well there anyway? With urban parents literally "crossing the border" for better schools, it is clear that they want better performing schools too.
But are charters the answer to a better education? Proponents say that charters can provide a 21st century education, one that allows teachers to engage in innovative practices, use technology effectively, and manage without bureaucratic red tape. These are not radical innovations, and already have been implemented in regular public schools in New York, where I am from, but also in other cities. So, again why are charter schools being pushed so hard as the silver bullet?
The answer lies in our initial question - who benefits? Obviously some families have benefited from charter schools, but the venture philanthropists who start charters have benefited too. In New York, many of them have received millions of dollars through no-bid contracts from the city, and stand to get millions more in stimulus package funding promised by Obama and Duncan.
With clear evidence that charter schools' so-called innovations can be implemented in regular public schools, we need to ask why charters are necessary. It would be naive to think that charter proponents are only motivated by a desire for a 21st century education for all children. There is a lot of money in it for the charter founders. Just like with many education reforms that preceded charters, a trend is set, dollars flow, and reformers come from all around to exclaim its virtues.
