4 ms·

Do you have any sources to back this up? My understanding is that non-unionized groups like charter schools do not outperform public schools. Many charter schoo

Do you have any sources to back this up? My understanding is that non-unionized groups like charter schools do not outperform public schools. Many charter schools appear to outperform but once you account for the fact that they can choose their students, removing all of the low performers and putting them in the public system, they no longer show a benefit.

darawk 6y ago
This is a super politicized issue, but my understanding is that the evidence that they're better is actually pretty good. Here's a fairly comprehensive set of studies by Stanford: https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies You do want to read carefully, because Charter schools are often mixed by 'online' and 'brick and mortar'. When you aggregate these two, Charter schools as a group tend to match or underperform traditional public schools. But this is primarily because online charter schools do substantially worse. When you disaggregate the brick-and-mortar charters, they usually overperform traditional public schools, though not totally uniformly. And these studies do try to do matched control of students, to account for that selection effect.
- gbrown 6y ago
  Can you point to anything specific that addresses the objection raised? Nobody contests that brick and mortar charter schools have higher performance - the issues come down to the resources they receive and the fact that they have unique abilities to shape their admission.
  - darawk 6y ago
    It's in the studies, but the gist is that they try to compare 'matched students'. So, they try to remove the selection effects by comparing comaprable pupils in each school type. I'm sure it's possible to quibble with exactly how they do this, of course.
- fredophile 6y ago
  Thank you for the link. I agree that this is a very politicized issue and that can make finding objective info tricky. I checked out the first case study and it looks like you are correct that the brick and mortar charter schools significantly outperform the online ones. However, at least in that study, the brick and mortar charters slightly outperformed public schools in reading but underperformed in math. However, I don't believe these differences were statistically significant. While there probably are some states where charter schools outperform they seem to only perform the same as public schools in South Carolina. To me this doesn't add much weight to the argument that unions lead to worse teaching outcomes. I will also say that I'm not an expert, my cursory reading of one report doesn't change that fact, and I'm definitely open to changing my opinion on this in the future but I don't have the time or interest to read all of the reports in the link.
  - darawk 6y ago
    So, it's certainly not the case that charters are uniformly better in every case. There's quite a bit of variation. The basic idea behind charter schools is that they eliminate the union (that's almost literally their entire purpose). But what that does is it allows them the freedom to experiment with new styles of education, without filtering it through the bureaucracy of the union. In effect, that means there's going to be a lot more variation in outcomes amongst charters, particularly at first. Over time, as people figure out what works and what doesn't, I would expect to see them continue to widen the gap between themselves and traditional public schools. On the surface it's not obvious that this is attributable to the union. But if you dig in a little bit to what actually differentiates charter schools, the main thing is the absence of the teacher's union. At least, to my understanding, from operating in the space a little bit, and from people I know that operate more deeply in it than I did.
    - rat87 6y ago
      > There's quite a bit of variation. The basic idea behind charter schools is that they eliminate the union (that's almost literally their entire purpose). That's not the public position of charter schools. Charter schools are based on the idea that more flexibility will give better results, that has nothing to do with unions. The flexibility comes largely from not being pushed around by the school board and subject to testing and limits. Unions are willing to be flexible with education structure The fact that most charter schools insist on no unions is what drives much of the opposition which sees them as a bad faith stalking horses for people who want to destroy union power. If charter schools were universally unionized there would be much less opposition! Compare with magnet schools which are unionized. (But still have to deal with school board oversight) > Over time, as people figure out what works and what doesn't, I would expect to see them continue to widen the gap between themselves and traditional public schools. I don't see the evidence for this. Studies show Charter schools perform no better then regular public schools. Some places that have really crappy public schools may try to turn to more charter schools on the chance that on average they might be better but I'd say reforming the regular school system would work better (even though it might be harder)

darawk 6y ago

This is a super politicized issue, but my understanding is that the evidence that they're better is actually pretty good. Here's a fairly comprehensive set of studies by Stanford: https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies You do want to read carefully, because Charter schools are often mixed by 'online' and 'brick and mortar'. When you aggregate these two, Charter schools as a group tend to match or underperform traditional public schools. But this is primarily because online charter schools do substantially worse. When you disaggregate the brick-and-mortar charters, they usually overperform traditional public schools, though not totally uniformly. And these studies do try to do matched control of students, to account for that selection effect.

gbrown 6y ago
Can you point to anything specific that addresses the objection raised? Nobody contests that brick and mortar charter schools have higher performance - the issues come down to the resources they receive and the fact that they have unique abilities to shape their admission.
- darawk 6y ago
  It's in the studies, but the gist is that they try to compare 'matched students'. So, they try to remove the selection effects by comparing comaprable pupils in each school type. I'm sure it's possible to quibble with exactly how they do this, of course.
fredophile 6y ago
Thank you for the link. I agree that this is a very politicized issue and that can make finding objective info tricky. I checked out the first case study and it looks like you are correct that the brick and mortar charter schools significantly outperform the online ones. However, at least in that study, the brick and mortar charters slightly outperformed public schools in reading but underperformed in math. However, I don't believe these differences were statistically significant. While there probably are some states where charter schools outperform they seem to only perform the same as public schools in South Carolina. To me this doesn't add much weight to the argument that unions lead to worse teaching outcomes. I will also say that I'm not an expert, my cursory reading of one report doesn't change that fact, and I'm definitely open to changing my opinion on this in the future but I don't have the time or interest to read all of the reports in the link.
- darawk 6y ago
  So, it's certainly not the case that charters are uniformly better in every case. There's quite a bit of variation. The basic idea behind charter schools is that they eliminate the union (that's almost literally their entire purpose). But what that does is it allows them the freedom to experiment with new styles of education, without filtering it through the bureaucracy of the union. In effect, that means there's going to be a lot more variation in outcomes amongst charters, particularly at first. Over time, as people figure out what works and what doesn't, I would expect to see them continue to widen the gap between themselves and traditional public schools. On the surface it's not obvious that this is attributable to the union. But if you dig in a little bit to what actually differentiates charter schools, the main thing is the absence of the teacher's union. At least, to my understanding, from operating in the space a little bit, and from people I know that operate more deeply in it than I did.
  - rat87 6y ago
    > There's quite a bit of variation. The basic idea behind charter schools is that they eliminate the union (that's almost literally their entire purpose). That's not the public position of charter schools. Charter schools are based on the idea that more flexibility will give better results, that has nothing to do with unions. The flexibility comes largely from not being pushed around by the school board and subject to testing and limits. Unions are willing to be flexible with education structure The fact that most charter schools insist on no unions is what drives much of the opposition which sees them as a bad faith stalking horses for people who want to destroy union power. If charter schools were universally unionized there would be much less opposition! Compare with magnet schools which are unionized. (But still have to deal with school board oversight) > Over time, as people figure out what works and what doesn't, I would expect to see them continue to widen the gap between themselves and traditional public schools. I don't see the evidence for this. Studies show Charter schools perform no better then regular public schools. Some places that have really crappy public schools may try to turn to more charter schools on the chance that on average they might be better but I'd say reforming the regular school system would work better (even though it might be harder)