5 ms·

Charters have a lot of advantages (like they don't have to accept all students, can hire/fire more easily, can kick out bad students) but _still_ don't outperfo

Charters have a lot of advantages (like they don't have to accept all students, can hire/fire more easily, can kick out bad students) but _still_ don't outperform public schools as a class. I totally agree that there are some excellent charter schools — but there are excellent public schools too, and not only in extremely wealthy neighborhoods. Our challenge is finding the best model we can that can be replicated at scale; charter schools don't seem to be helping with that.

bsder 10y ago
> Charters have a lot of advantages (like they don't have to accept all students, can hire/fire more easily, can kick out bad students) but _still_ don't outperform public schools as a class. That's not entirely true. In urban areas, they do better than public schools. In suburban areas, they do almost exactly the same amount worse. http://credo.stanford.edu/documents/la_report_2013_7_26_2013_final.pdf http://credo.stanford.edu/documents/la_report_2013_7_26_2013... The problem is that tells you that the gain in charter schools is due to student selection bias rather than inherent educational advantage.
- tssva 10y ago
  The study you reference is only of charter schools in one state. Education policy is decided at the state and local level and varies greatly between states and sometimes even between localities within a state. There is no reason to believe the findings in Louisiana extend beyond it.
  - tbihl 10y ago
    The reason is that our similarities are huge, if not complete, throughout the country. Given an imperfect world, finite time, and people needing to do things other than observe themselves so we can play with more data, I think you're in the wrong here. We should assume similarity, try to learn something, and then temper our enthusiasm by recognizing how we may differ. Maybe you have some reason, after reading the study, why your state or region is utterly incompatible with the results?
    - tssva 10y ago
      Pig and humans share 98% of their DNA. We should just assume drugs will behave the same in both and get rid of those double blind human drug trials. After all there is finite time and people have other things to do.
  - bsder 10y ago
    > There is no reason to believe the findings in Louisiana extend beyond it. There is also no reason to disbelieve that the findings don't extend. You don't get to summarily reject presented evidence that doesn't match your agenda/opinion without evidence to the contrary. There are other studies that show similar results--urban charters are better than public, suburban charters are worse than public. Unfortunately, that demonstrates that the educational facets aren't the deciding factor in educational achievement. You will note that I said "unfortunately". I really wish charters were better than public schools from an educational standpoint so we would have something we could roll out in the public schools. Sadly, most of the "gains" from charters are from student selection. There have been lots of attempts to be better than the public school system. None of them have reliably worked, yet. The Gates foundation hasn't coughed up anything better, either, without expending vastly more money than we are willing to.
erichocean 10y ago
> Our challenge is finding the best model we can that can be replicated at scale Or we can recognize that each area is unique, and stop trying to force a specific approach on everyone "at scale"? Seriously, consider that there is no educational approach that works "at scale" across vastly different socio-economic, cultural, genetic, and other factors.

bsder 10y ago

> Charters have a lot of advantages (like they don't have to accept all students, can hire/fire more easily, can kick out bad students) but _still_ don't outperform public schools as a class. That's not entirely true. In urban areas, they do better than public schools. In suburban areas, they do almost exactly the same amount worse. http://credo.stanford.edu/documents/la_report_2013_7_26_2013_final.pdf http://credo.stanford.edu/documents/la_report_2013_7_26_2013... The problem is that tells you that the gain in charter schools is due to student selection bias rather than inherent educational advantage.

tssva 10y ago
The study you reference is only of charter schools in one state. Education policy is decided at the state and local level and varies greatly between states and sometimes even between localities within a state. There is no reason to believe the findings in Louisiana extend beyond it.
- tbihl 10y ago
  The reason is that our similarities are huge, if not complete, throughout the country. Given an imperfect world, finite time, and people needing to do things other than observe themselves so we can play with more data, I think you're in the wrong here. We should assume similarity, try to learn something, and then temper our enthusiasm by recognizing how we may differ. Maybe you have some reason, after reading the study, why your state or region is utterly incompatible with the results?
  - tssva 10y ago
    Pig and humans share 98% of their DNA. We should just assume drugs will behave the same in both and get rid of those double blind human drug trials. After all there is finite time and people have other things to do.
- bsder 10y ago
  > There is no reason to believe the findings in Louisiana extend beyond it. There is also no reason to disbelieve that the findings don't extend. You don't get to summarily reject presented evidence that doesn't match your agenda/opinion without evidence to the contrary. There are other studies that show similar results--urban charters are better than public, suburban charters are worse than public. Unfortunately, that demonstrates that the educational facets aren't the deciding factor in educational achievement. You will note that I said "unfortunately". I really wish charters were better than public schools from an educational standpoint so we would have something we could roll out in the public schools. Sadly, most of the "gains" from charters are from student selection. There have been lots of attempts to be better than the public school system. None of them have reliably worked, yet. The Gates foundation hasn't coughed up anything better, either, without expending vastly more money than we are willing to.

erichocean 10y ago

> Our challenge is finding the best model we can that can be replicated at scale Or we can recognize that each area is unique, and stop trying to force a specific approach on everyone "at scale"? Seriously, consider that there is no educational approach that works "at scale" across vastly different socio-economic, cultural, genetic, and other factors.