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On July 17 and 18, 2003, the Progressive Policy Institute hosted a charter school conference, entitled “From Margins to Mainstream: Building a Stronger Charter School Movement,” to spark discussion among different segments of the charter school movement and hear what people in the field think about the various issues raised by presenters and moderators... Rather than presentations and speeches, all participants were asked to participate and engage as in a town hall meeting.
The following transcript is the first of three panels and has been abridged for conciseness and readability; it has not been edited for content. While panelists and moderators are identified in their remarks, other conference participants are not identified.
Moderator: Bryan Hassel, Co-Director, Public
Impact
Panelists: Michael Goldstein, Co-Founder/CEO,
MATCH Public Charter School
Ted Kolderie, Senior Fellow, Center for Policy Studies
Lawrence Patrick III, President and CEO, Black Alliance
for Educational Options (BAEO)
Hon. Eva Moskowitz, New York City Councilmember
Bryan Hassel began the panel by posing the following questions:
| Kolderie: | The Imperative for Change |
Ted Kolderie, an academic involved in the charter school movement and senior fellow with the Center for Policy Studies in Minnesota, began the discussion. He stated that it is no longer realisitic to expect the public school system to reform itself from within. He sees charters as a potential catalyst for larger, systematic change. To get the improvement we need in American public education, there is going to have to be a major program aimed at creating quality public schools.
Kolderie argued that this need is at the foundation of the charter school movement. He continued that as long as the public waited for the public school system to reform itself, the idea of creating new schools would remain at the margins:
So long as we maintain this assumption, why would anybody bother with all the hassle involved in creating new schools? The districts keep telling us they're going to do it, right? 'We believe we can do it, we believe we can do it,' over and over again endlessly.
He stressed that the idea of charters will move to the mainstream when people realize the districts are incapable of change, and public schools changing on their own becomes a matter of critical public interest.
Kolderie has spent the last couple of years asking chater advocates, "Why are we doing this? Who are we doing it for? Without exception, the answer has been, "We're doing it for the kids, for the people in the schools--kids, parents, teachers." While that is very important, it is a rationale limited to the benefit of the people in these schools, and not a powerful public interest rationale. But arguments about the limited nature of districts to change connect directly with the interest of state policy leadership that can make things happen:
They're dealing with an essentially economically unsustainable model of traditional education. They've got these commitments to performance and they can go only so long canceling tests that have been given and...postponing...the imposition of standards or consequences before the whole thing [will] crash. So they're really under pressure.
Kolderie acknowledged the political pressures policymakers are under not to support a major program of new school creation, but the existence of charter laws gives him some confidence policymakers will respond to the arguments that move away from the traditional public utility model:
When people recognize that we do not have to be trapped within the confines of the traditional arrangement, they become optimistic. The state makes the system, it can change the system, and if the districts are not giving you the performance you need, it is within your power to get somebody else who will. And that works...once people see that something is necessary, it tends to happen.
Moskowitz: The Challenges of Big City Change
More important, she pointed out the severity of the problem:
Sixty percent of our kids can't read. In science, 80 percent of our kids are failing the fourth grade science test. We have now 300,000 kids in NCLB, subject to No Child Left Behind provisions. Next year, it will probably be a half a million.
New York has an "educational disaster on our hands...one we've been tweaking for 30 years without much improvement." In order to improve public schools one must embrace competition.
Councilwoman Moskowitz went on to discuss some of the innovative things New York City has done for charter schools, particularly around facilities, "the Achilles heel of the charter school movement." In New York State, the 1998 charter school law does not provide any facility money, and real estate in New York City is a huge problem. In response, Chancellor Klein agreed to open up public schools to charter schools. The implications for this facilities solution are great because in New York, with a cap of one hundred new schools and without a conversion being an option due to union constraints, finding viable options for school start-up is crucial.
Three days prior to this conference, the city acted upon this strategy and KIPP STAR became the first charter school to move in to a public school space. This is critical because, while there is overcrowding in NYC, there are 73,000 underutilized seats:
We have the seats; what would be better than having the competition in the same building? I am very confident that when you have two schools, a traditional public school and a charter school, in the same building, the parents will begin seeing the obvious differences between the two and will push for their kids to go to the charter school.
Moskowitz felt less optimistic in terms of political leadership. "While the Democratic Party has been supportive, it hasn't yet been followed by real action." In fact, she argued that political longevity is antithetical to taking risks:
While perhaps the educational pressures will be so great that political leaders can't go another way, the power of incumbency is so overwhelming that leaders could get away with doing nothing for 30 years. I'm not sure I see that logic is going to necessarily persuade anyone.
Moskowitz echoed points made earlier in the morning about the need to better organize charter school supporters. More specifically, she cited a senator from Harlem, who is a charter schools supporter and has just assumed the position of senate minority leader. She added that the N.Y. courts have been going back and forth on a campaign for fiscal equity lawsuits, stating that it might lead to more money going to the public schools. She hopes that a deal can be struck to lift the cap because that is absolutely critical for the charter school movement to move from the margins to the mainstream.
| Goldstein: | A Tale of Two Summer Schools |
Michael Goldstein, founder of the MATCH (Media and Technology Charter High School) school in Boston, began with an anecdote describing two summer schools, one at his school, the other at a traditional public school in Boston, as a way to illustrate what charter schools are all about.
He said that MATCH, which serves mostly low-income kids from all over Boston who tend to be four or five years behind grade level, summer school is required for any student getting a D or lower in any subject. The summer school is held near Cambridge's public high school, Cambridge Rindge & Latin, which serves a similar population. Cambridge Rindge & Latin, while spending more per student than any other school in the state, is one of the lowest achieving schools:
A couple of years ago, a professor at Harvard who wanted to get involved in helping Cambridge Rindge & Latin said we could access 50 or 60 of their student teachers, to be extra people. Harvard underwrote the cost of paying them to help with the summer school. The school went with it, but one thing they had to do was pay dozens and dozens of teachers not to teach. They were entitled under contract to get paid, only to be bumped by the college students. Several teachers realized this and applied to teach summer school realizing that they were not needed and would get free money.
Our summer program is at MIT. The genesis of the setup came from a teacher who came to me and said, 'what if we scrapped normal summer school and made it all one-on-one tutoring using MIT work study students?' He pointed out a new federal law that says that seven percent of everything that a university spends on work-study needs to be for community service so kids who would normally spend their summer shelving books in the library could instead work one-on-one with kids. So our kids go for four hours a day, they work one-on-one with an MIT undergrad.
Goldstein explained that the MATCH program costs one-third of what Cambridge Rindge & Latin spends and the curriculum dovetails specifically to the needs of each student, whereas the other program simply repeats whatever students failed during the year. The traditional school kids travel about 15 minutes to get to summer school, yet their attendance is about 50 to 60 percent. The charter school students come from all over Boston, often traveling more than an hour, yet attendance is 95 percent. This kind of innovation is what attracts many people to charter schools.
In Boston, 6 percent of about 80,000 schoolage students are in charter schools, which will grow to 9 percent and then be capped from growing anymore. Goldstein added that in the papers written for this conference there was a lot of talk about "the tipping point," or how much total market share charters need to have, both in numbers of kids and number of schools, before "charter districts" begin to emerge where every school is autonomous, and parents are universally in the habit of shopping for schools. Getting to that tipping point, Goldstein added, is in large part what this conference could address"
Instead of only looking out of the lens of how do we double, triple and multiply by 10 the number of charter schools nationwide, in a more pragmatic way, maybe we should look at certain markets in which there are already a number of charter schools, and scale up there. If people say we have to become more mainstream in order to have system-wide impact, we should put our energy into tipping those cities into places where everybody is used to shopping for schools.
Patrick: Charters as Tool for Social Justice
Lawrence Patrick, president and CEO of the Black Alliance for Education Options, spoke to the issue of charters promoting social justice and giving parents, especially those with low incomes, a choice previously unavailable to them of what school would be best for their children. He argued that this might be a way to break new ground in the general public and to put pressure on all schools to improve.
Patrick added that the average person on the street is not necessarily focusing their energy on improving the quality of public schools. Therefore, part of the challenge that charter leaders face when advocating for scaling up is "tapping into that mindshare." How do charters become a topic of consideration as people are ranking what things need to change in our society?
He agreed with Ted Kolderie about the importance of defining the public interest aspect as the charter school movement tries to gain traction in places where there is less understanding about the benefits of charters. Patrick argued for this movement to hone its message to one central theme--social justice:
It's nice that we can rattle off our or five reasons why this is a good thing, but what we really need is the one big reason why this is a good thing. And I think the one good reason why this is a good thing is because it's the right thing.
Patrick added that many of the kids who are falling through the cracks are from communities that have not traditionally, been in positions of power to choose a quality learning environment for their children. This is wrong and needs to be amended. Patrick echoed earlier comments about the need to not rely on the system to fix itself, "We're putting all our chips on this one bet that the existing status quo system is going to fix itself if pressure is applied."
The real discussion, he argued, is centered on whether it is right to force parents to send their child to a school that does not work--the reality that exists in many places. Simply giving parents a choice can change that reality in communities all over the country.
Comments
From the Audience |
Quality counts
One participant offered that while growth is important, the quality of that growth is critical. Therefore, the respondent made an argument for increased investment in quality research:
In order to convince lawmakers and political leaders about the importance of this movement, we need to do a better job of collecting stroies like what's just been done by the Manhattan Institute, which seems to show a lot of very positive things that result from charter schools. If we are going to go to a governor or a city council member or mayor, we need to be able to say, we have some valid evidence that students will benefit in such and such a way.
Quality has to absolutely be at the center. As an example, he mentioned that the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) just had 20,000 people at their national conference, hundreds of whom are very interested in charters. Their primary focus was not on philosophical discussions about change, but instead, they were interested in dealing with the huge dropout rate of Latino kids and whether the charter movement would have a positive impact on that. Charter leaders at the conference were able to point out very clear examples of how charter schools were dealing with that issue. He said, "if we can marshal evidence, we're going to be much more able to get progress."
Mixed feelings on where we are as a movement
One participant argued that we might be painting an overly negative perception of the status of charter schools as a movement and disagreed with earlier comments that the charter movement has "crested." While there are not as many new schools being started as there were at certain points, many more people today are talking about charter schools. It is important to encourage progress while still being concerned about other issues:
I think if we don't also give ourselves credit for progress, we really risk getting disheartened. The number of charters continues to increase. We can do a better job of quality, we can do a better job with state laws, but I don't think this is a movement that's crested.
A principal from the District of Columbia was more discouraged about the pace of change:
In DC, although the number of people with degrees have increased, it is less likely for a Latino today to graduate from high school than 10 years ago. For me it's that perspective, that we are not doing much better today than we were years ago. When I hear people talk about how we've moved one-tenth of 1 percent, and they're really serious about those numbers, it boggles my mind.
Varying Rationales
New opportunities for educators
One participant spoke about the charter movement as a way
to retain strong educators in the public system where many strong educators
get frustrated and leave. He was encouraged to see some of the veteran educators
who have come into the movement--like the people who are running the Minnesota
New Country School--and young people who have become very excited about teaching,
many of whom did not go through traditional schools of education. Helping strengthen
the education profession will be a positive selling point in the charter school
movement for people throughout the country.
Improving neighborhoods--another important message
Another participant added that, from a community development perspective, charter
schools are cleaning up and completely turning neighborhoods around--a fact
that should be part of the marketing message. Looking at some individual schools
where they are located, charter schools are far less segregated than the surrounding
public schools. She said:
I think of the Lawrence charter school outside of Boston where it was completely run over by drug dealers and prostitutes, and that school came in and that principal asked every prostitute to leave the neighborhood, and they did. For those not buying the educational message alone, they might buy this one.
Social justice: An underutilized driver
Several respondents returned to the social justice theme raised by Lawrence
Patrick. A respondent from the NCLR explained that his organization was brought
into the charter movement as a result of a grassroots demand for better schools,
and the organization's need to respond as affiliates around the country were
developing charter schools and needed help with curriculum, funding, and facilities.
We don't go into a community because we think that we should just go in and create a school, or because the leadership--the established leadership thinks it's a good idea. We go in when our people ask us to come in or the community-based organizations ask us to come in.
In places, like Brooklyn, N.Y. where the public educational choices are not great, the charter movement is critical. Organizations like NCLR need knowledgeable people, like those in the room, to improve the charter movement and improve the opportunities for Latinos and others in similar communities.
Eva Moskowitz agreed that the issue of social justice brought her to the movement. She also acknowledged the fact that as a white woman, she does not have the same credibility in making the social justice argument as a person of color does, even though she believes that the charter movement is about civil rights. She added the opposite argument is being made on the other side--that charter schools are going to make things more unjust, via "creaming." Some opponents of the movement say that their understanding of charter schools is that they cater to elite white students. Yet, she argued, "data proves that this is completely inaccurate and we need to be able to make that argument in the face of racial politics."
Lawrence Patrick added that this is precisely why BAEO was created. Black people all over the country were fighting this social justice battle, and soon realized that they needed a formal structure to better make that point. He advocated reaching out and creating coalitions with other organizations that feel the same way.
Being direct about the civil rights issue
A participant from Ohio added, "our charter school association has decided to call this movement a civil rights issue more directly." But some charter school supporters prefer not to do that because there is a risk of alienating people:
In Ohio we have decided if we are to get masses of people of color involved in the school choice movement, we have to use the language of the civil rights movement. People of color and white people alike should use that language. The right to a quality education is the civil right of this century, and if we don't start using that language, we're going to let them keep the high ground from us for the next two, three generations of school kids. American kids cannot afford that.
Lawrence Patrick added two points regarding calling this a civil rights movement. First, because to some extent this is a generational issue, some believe that leaders today need to decide for themselves whether or not this is an issue of civil rights:
Second, defining the charter movement as a 1960s-style civil rights movement empowers the organizations created in the 60s, many of whom are not supportive of charter schools. It sets them up to be the valid leadership or valid determiners of what are civil rights. If today's leaders want to call this a civil rights movement and then the civil rights organizations disagree, then you've suddenly created dissonance, which is counterproductive to the overall message you're trying to get out.
Sending a clear message
Patrick also spoke of marketing the movement:
You look around the room and the makeup of this audience is a lot different than the makeup of a typical charter school. And we've got to be realistic and committed to the idea that we are going to build into the leadership, bringing black people and Latinos into the fold. When we have these kinds of discussions, we need to bend over backwards, to make sure that we've got the people in the room we need to have in the room.
He asked whether the civil rights movement of the 1960s could have been as effective if white people were given a bigger leadership role. He said it was not just happenstance that the engineers behind the civil rights movement had a very specific role and function for how they worked with white organizations in an effort to win the battle at the end of the day. "We have to do the same thing. How do we form the team that wins us the goal? Who is the best messenger for this specific message? And are we sending the best message?
The Progressive Policy Institute is a catalyst for political change. Its mission is to modernize progressive politics and government for the Information Age. Leaving behind the stale left-right debates of the industrial era, PPI is a prolific source of "Third Way" thinking that is shaping the emerging politics of the 21st century. Essays submitted to this conference and transcripts of the panel discussions are available online.
