Another paper is Ruminations on Reinventing an R&D Capacity for Educational Improvement, Anthony Bryk, Stanford.

First and most obviously, eduacation is poorly funded. In fields such as medicine and engineering, spending for reseach amounts to about 5 to 15% of total expenditures, with about 20% of R&D expenditures going to basic research and abut 80% to design and systematic development. In contrast, even though education is a $450 billion dollar a year enterprise, we spend well less than a billion dollars a year on educational R&D, or less than one quarter of one percent of the overall budget.*

Charters as a group should be evaluated against their intended role, experiment outside the normal educrat pyramid. (While many recoil in horror at the use of the word experiment in the same sentence with the word children, when the status quo is educating perhaps 20% of its victims – I mean clients – its hard to see any other experiment doing too much worse.) That said, there are some remarkable successes, and I’ll try to line some up here later.

But let me work backward through your questions.

Press: I live in the Akron press area, home of David Brennen of Whitehat Management, Hope Academies, ODEHLA, etc. Last week the Beacon Journal ran this headline: Charter schools across Ohio face closing. Thats literally true enough, but the impression is that some huge number of schools are being forced to close. In reality its 23 of 328, or 7%. For an experimental program widely open to all comers, that’s not a bad failure rate. Edison would be ecstatic. More to the point, the control schools (public) are equally failing or worse.

My issue is that since the idea of charters was broached, all press coverage I’ve seen outside the WSJ has run this way. Never a positive story, always a negative one. Guys like my Dad (strong republican), who read the BJ faithfully but never other sources, are turned against charters and think Brennan downright evil.

This gives the educrat lobby more power to hamstring the charters in ways that were not intended when we sought to have schools outside the thumb of the Union/bureaucrat oppression.

More later…you might check the bias against scale and profit in education entrepreneurship, by John Chubb. Alas, they took the pdf off the web. There is still conference video, mp3 and transcripts and of course the book.

The politics around charter schools are so vexed; they displace lots of cherished conceptions of who should believe in what.

That said, Ed, do you have specific examples of where quality schooling is being done in urban areas?

Also, I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around your “fair shake” point. If economies of scale can’t be applied, doesn’t that just argue against charter schools? Also, “unfavorable press” and “public abuse” are normative statements (which may be what you meant). But, what’s the point there? And, I would argue that there’s been plenty of pro-charter advocacy out there (not from teachers, though).

For example, I think that the Great Schools or the Great City schools organizations were responses to this. Also, in Akron, and other places I believe, teachers unions decided to start their own charters. Curricula were given a second look. Other things?

First point: it is not required for charter schools to be internally “effective” for them to have the desired effect. The purpose of charter schools was primarily twofold: a, to allow for experimentation in ways that the hidebound public schools could not or would not attempt; b, to place pressure on the public schools to accelerate change. In states where schools receive part of their funding based on enrollment, the flight of students to other schools puts pressure on the public schools to reexamine their methods and try to do things better.

There is also a perhaps intended result, which is that charter schools have proved in various inner cities that quality schooling can be done in neighborhoods where it was written off. For too long, educrats made excuse after excuse (they still do) for why it was impossible to educate kids in these circumstances. Today we know it isn’t. In many places, charters have replaced failing schools and turned things around. Granted, in theory, the public school could have brought in new leaders and new curricula and done the same. Yet they didn’t. Charters became the solution to a political problem that blocked local school improvement.

Second point: The research shows charter schools have not at all been given a fair shake. First, in many states they were hamstringed by many factors, including
i. reduced funding far below the public schools, ii limited enrollments (effect: can’t apply economies of scale),
iii.limited # of schools (effect: can’t apply economies of scale),
iv. unfavorable press from the start,
v. public abuse by teachers unions, etc.

Finally, charters have had another role, which is to help develop new, non big-box-publisher curricula. Often this is richer and deeper than what has come out of the state committees.

Which of these should be examined in most depth is hard to say. As one who started in science, and came through engineering, I personally have to place some emphasis on the value of experimentation, and the expectation that when you are making changes, many attempts will fail.

On the other hand, as one who is deeply troubled by the education of inner city kids these past decades, I place high value on the role charters have played in showing what can be done in the worst neighborhoods.