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On the other hand, as unions, they want to protect their members from accountability. No junior teacher, however competent, should ever be paid more than someone who has been on the job for more years. No tenured teacher, however incompetent, should ever be fired.
As one union leader put it, teachers unions will start representing children as soon as kids pay union dues.
Unfortunately, the tendency of teachers unions to put union dues ahead of children comes through in the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) just issued “research report”---hatchet job is more like it---titled Do Charter Schools Measure Up?
In fairness, the AFT cites some good research, sometimes accurately. For example, the AFT acknowledges, after much hemming and hawing, that most charter schools spend less money than most district schools. The AFT also admits that charter schools are generally not “creaming” the more capable students. On the negative side, AFT is right that charters are no panacea, as some supporters predicted. Further, the AFT paper rightly points out that not enough has been done to measure how much learning goes on in charter schools, and for that matter, in district schools. Of course, the lack of good measures is partly because AFT affiliated unions have fought efforts to measure student achievement: the unions fear that with good measures, some teachers will look bad and might be held accountable.
Unfortunately, Do Charter Schools Measure Up? falls down in five key areas, either by failing to cite relevant research or by misstating that research.
First, the AFT report fails in what it does not look at: parent and student satisfaction. Numerous studies summarized in the RPP International report conducted for President Clinton’s U.S. Department of Education and in Chester Finn’s Charter Schools in Action (published by Princeton University Press in 2000) find that students and parents who went from district schools to charter schools found the charters safer, friendlier, and more effective academically, often by margins or more than 50%! For example, a 1997 survey of charter school students who used to attend traditional public schools found that 65.2% rated the charter school teachers better while only 5.5% rated charter teachers worse! Apparently AFT thinks that parents and students are just too dumb to judge their own schools. Similarly, my research team found that charter school teachers have more job satisfaction and more power over their schools than do their peers in district schools, often by 30% margins! Oddly, the AFT report cites parts of our book, but not this chapter.
Second, the AFT claim that charter schools are not innovative is amazingly misleading. The AFT chooses to define innovation in a unique way, as inventing something never before seen anywhere on the planet since the beginning of time. By this peculiar definition, Apple Computer in 1980 was not an innovative company since it did not invent computers; it only made computers small enough for people to use in their homes. Unlike the AFT, academic economists like Douglas Greer (author of Industrial Organization and Public Policy) note three different types of innovation: inventing a new product, modifying it for public use, and disseminating it to the public. Charter schools have done a little of the first, and a whole lot of the second and third types of innovation. Indeed, I count 28 different forms of innovation found at charter schools. For example, University of Missouri Economist Michael Podgursky presents survey research finding that charter schools often use personnel policies practically unheard of in traditional public schools, such as merit pay and higher salaries for teachers with hard to find qualifications, and giving teachers roles in hiring their peers. The Charter School of Sedona actually has its master teachers set their own salaries and those of their assistants! Charter schools even fire teachers who don’t measure up, something that teachers unions have been able to keep traditional schools from doing. Notably few charter teachers are unionized, which really irks the AFT.
In curricula, some charter schools, such as Scottsdale’s Edupreneurship, have actually invented a whole new curricula. More typically, however, charter schools have refined and disseminated such teaching methods as Computer Assisted Instruction, which is especially useful for low income students who often work full-time while attending school and thus have irregular schedules. Further, charters have disseminated such curricula as Montessori education, which, even though it has been around for 100 years, is practically unheard of in traditional public schools. (Though some districts are now adopting it in reaction to charter competition.)
Third, the AFT report uses a funny definition of “accountability”: paperwork! On pages 64-65, the AFT report claims that charter schools are no more accountable that district schools since most states now have “accountability” plans in place. What the AFT fails to acknowledge, however, is that unlike district schools, charter schools are actually held accountable. When traditional public schools fail, so called “accountability plans” force them to do paperwork and develop multi-year improvement plans, most of which are never implemented because the political leadership changes before the plan comes due, as University of Virginia scholar Frederick Hess shows in his award winning Spinning Wheels: the Politics of Urban Education (Brookings Institution, 1999). It’s also hard to hold anyone accountable when practically everyone has tenure! In contrast, when charter schools screw up, they close down and people lose their jobs: 5% in Arizona and over 3% nationally. Which system would you rather have when your children are at stake? Further, charter schools face not only administrative accountability, but also market accountability. Parents who choose a school will go elsewhere on their own if that school doesn’t measure up. And since charters are funded based on enrollment, those parental choices hold charters accountable. If only district school parents had the power to hold their schools accountable!
Related to this, for the AFT to claim to support accountability reminds one of the old Yiddish definition of Chutzpah: a young man kills his parents and then asks the judge for leniency because he is an orphan! As numerous scholars have shown, one reason that conventional school accountability plans are toothless is that teachers unions have lobbied against accountability, especially when it might interfere with teacher pay and tenure.
Fourth, the AFT misstates findings about the impact of charter schools on district schools. In particular, the AFT fails to note that because teachers unions and school districts have powerful lobbies in most state legislatures, most states have highly restrictive charter school laws, thus limiting the beneficial impacts of competition.
Why should district schools compete with charter schools when in most states, charters exist only with the permission of those same school districts? Any charter that makes a district school look bad will simply be shut down on some pretext or another! On the other hand, where strong charter laws exist, as in Arizona and in a few cities, considerable peer-reviewed research (not cited by AFT) finds that districts do in fact respond to competition by working harder to please their parents with leadership changes, more program options, better customer service, and by empowering their teachers. Perhaps most important are the changes in leadership. As my team reported in “Small Districts in Big Trouble: How four school districts responded to charter competition” (Teachers College Record, December 2001), Arizona districts walloped by charter competition reacted with leadership changes. Similarly, in A Revolution at the Margins (Brookings Institution, 2002) University of Virginia Professor Frederick Hess finds that low levels of competition had no impact, but serious competition from charter schools and vouchers led big city school systems to sack less effective leaders and to “empower” their more innovative principals, who had previously been treated with contempt. Hess finds that in Milwaukee, a strong threat of charter and voucher competition even led the local teachers union to embrace school reform---at least until the threat went away!
Fifth, the AFT report is sometimes sloppy, presenting partial findings, misstating findings, and occasionally committing what most reasonable people would consider factual errors. For example, on p. 24 the AFT misstates a report by academic economists Michael Podgursky (University of Missouri) and Dale Ballou (University of Massachusetts). While the AFT claims that the authors find that charter schools determine pay “in a similar manner to most school districts,” the two economists in fact find just the opposite, that charter schools are several times more likely to innovate in matters of pay and retention!
In discussions of student racial characteristics in chapter 1, the AFT report makes much of very small differences (in most states under 10%) between charter and nearby district school student bodies. The AFT does not acknowledge, however, that charter schools are more likely to promote integration than district schools since in most charter schools white and minority kids take the same courses, while in most district schools minority kids are tracked into “non-academic” tracks.
In discussions of student achievement in chapter 4, the AFT correctly reports that most kids in charter schools seem to do about as well as in district schools. It fails to report, however, that most charters are very new schools and many are in their first year; thus studies compare charter schools in their first or second year to district schools with decades of experience and lots more money behind them. For the charters to be doing as well as traditional schools is nothing short of remarkable. Further, many parents choose charter schools because their students were failing in district schools, meaning that many charters have very challenging kids to teach. On p. 68, in attempting to refute claims that charter competition leads district schools to improve, the AFT authors claim that Humboldt State professor Eric Rofes found that only a quarter of district schools responded to competition from nearby charters. While technically correct, this fails to note Rofes’ finding that about half of school districts with high levels of charter competition responded to that competition. This is an argument for more charter schools, not less!
In some cases, AFT claims are wildly misleading. For example, on p. 100 the AFT reports that 35 charter schools in Arizona closed, failing to note that many of these “schools” never actually opened!
The list could go on…
With conflicting missions, AFT lobbyists took on a tough task: to both summarize the charter school research, and to prove that charter schools are not as good as conventional, unionized public schools. Unfortunately, the AFT’s role as an interest group overwhelmed its role as a research organization. Do Charter Schools Measure Up is a drive-by analysis. The authors are doing social science without a license. There is much we do and don’t know about charter schools. But don’t look for it there.
--by Dr. Robert Maranto
In concert with others, Robert Maranto (PhD Minnesota 1989)
(Robert.Maranto@villanova.edu)
has produced four scholarly books, more than 25 refereed scholarly works
and over 50 book chapters, reviews, magazine pieces, and newspaper op-eds, mainly
on civil service reform and education reform. He co-edited School Choice
in the Real World: Lessons from Arizona Charter Schools (Westview 2001).
Maranto teaches Political Science at Villanova University.