As the current school year comes to an end, we face many challenges moving forward to make education in Arizona work. There are many different views on what can help pull our state from its current national ranking, which falls in the bottom half, while keeping our ongoing budget crisis from getting out of control. Most are focused on funding allocations and the never ending fight between public vs. charter/private school structures.
Craig R. Barrett, retired CEO/Chairman of Intel and current president and chairman of BASIS School Inc., a system of charter schools, wrote an op-ed in the Arizona Republic on May 21 titled "5 Vital Ways to Reform K-12 Education" in which he promotes the use of free market tactics in order to foster academic success in our schools. Though Mr. Barrett makes the case for our failures as a state, his solution misses the point, fabricating cause and effect relationships that the data simply don't support.
The simplified interpretation is that you need high expectations, great teachers who know their subject material, and some tension or feedback loops in the system to help struggling students, teachers and administrators.The simplified interpretation addresses a few key areas in which education is falling behind. We have grown to accept adequate performance from our children rather than expecting excellence; many teachers have developed a frustration with the system and some of the bureaucracy driving it and as a result focus less on the success of their students; we do not have the infrastructure in place to identify problem areas in a child's education and too many children slip through the cracks. It's only when Mr. Barrett dives into his 5 point solution that he begins to lose me.
First, Barrett attributes the problems we face in K-12 education to the political structure supporting the "system we put in place 100 years ago." In other words, publicly administered schools are "totally resistant to change" and the performance in our schools must be directly linked to this resistance. Now, first of all, I believe that attributing the performance of students on standardized tests to the political structure under which their schools are formed is short sighted and gives far too much credit/blame to factors not directly related to curriculum and students' ability to learn relevant and useful skills. A student isn't more likely to develop skills or perform well on tests simply because their school administrator is privately employed, but we'll get to that a little later on. Barrett outlines his "five general areas that we need to address to move forward," beginning with Competition.
The public K-12 system has proved itself resilient to change and improvement. Like any other system, it needs competition if it is to change. Competition can come in many forms, but for public schools, the key competition (choice) is the charter school, where the education process is not held captive to the existing bureaucracy. Private schools also offer choice, but their cost is prohibitive to most families.This all sounds well and good in theory. If you accept the premise that charter schools academically outperform non-charter schools. This is a premise that is far too widely accepted but that is not actually supported by state performance measures. In order to prove this point, let's begin by looking at the overall distribution of charter schools vs. non-charter schools in our public education system. The Arizona Department of Education (ADE) compiles achievement profiles (based on results of AIMS testing) and lists them online for the past eight years, going back to the 2002-2003 school year. The profiles can be found by clicking here. In the 2009-2010 school year, ADE lists a total of 1,943 public schools, including both charter and non-charter.
Arizona has excellent charter-school laws, and over 10 percent of our kids have already taken this choice. But we need more. The fastest way to get more (and better) charter schools is to minimize the funding differentials between charter and normal public schools. Assign each child the same amount of annual funding and let him or her spend it where their family wants. Charter schools are succeeding because they are output-oriented and generally adhere to the principles necessary for education excellence.
Source: Arizona Department of Education
As you can see, about 25% (492) of public schools are charter schools, while the remaining 75% (1451) are non-charter schools. ADE classifies each school's performance as Excelling, Highly Performing, Performing Plus, Performing, Under-performing or Failing to Meet Academic Standards. Of the 1,943 public schools, 1,221 or 63% achieved marks of Performing Plus, Highly Performing or Excelling. Those 1,221 schools achieving above average results are broken down by charter vs. non-charter below.
Source: Arizona Department of Education
Of all public schools achieving marks of Performing Plus, Highly Performing or Excelling, 82% were non-charter schools while only 18% were charter schools.
A breakdown of the remaining 772 schools achieving marks of Performing, Under-performing or Failing to Meet Academic Standards is below.
Source: Arizona Department of Education
Of all public schools achieving marks of Performing, Under-performing or Failing to Meet Academic Standards, only 62.5% were non-charter schools while 37.5% were charter schools.
The distributions of the number of charter schools and non-charter schools under each academic performance profile is below.
Source: Arizona Department of Education
As you can see, the percentage of all non-charter schools achieving marks of Performing Plus, Highly Performing or Excelling far exceeds the percentage of charter schools achieving the same marks. Non-charter schools at that level make up 69% of all non-charter schools. Comparatively, charter schools at that level only make up 45% of all charter schools. In other words, over two thirds of non-charter schools are performing at above average levels while less than half of charter schools achieved similar results.
Now, it should be noted that the AIMS test is only one measure of pupil achievement and it would be misguided to jump to the conclusion that charter schools aren't as successful as non-charter schools in overall achievement. However, it certainly would not be misguided to question the widely accepted belief that charter schools outperform non-charter schools. Simply food for thought.
