[simon_]

If we stipulate that the charter schools in question have strong selection biases in their student bodies and better resources relative to public schools, then:

a) It's true that statistics are frequently misused by journalists and advocates, BUT:

b) It hardly impugns the schools themselves. Taking a subset of more promising students without behavioral issues out of failing public schools and giving them better resources at charters is not necessarily a bad idea.

[mazelife]

The article directly addresses why it's a bad idea: "it makes little sense for the district to heavily subsidize schools [i.e. charters] serving less needy children that already have access to more adequate resources. It makes even less sense to make these transfers of facilities space (or the value associated with that space) as city class sizes mushroom and as the state indicates the likelihood that its contributions will continue falling well short of past promises."

Also, the article mentions that many of the charters have suspension rates between 20 and 50%, which suggests that either a.) the students at these schools do have behavioral issues and/or b.) the charters use aggressive suspension policies to get students to leave.

[jack-r-abbit]

Heavily subsidize? Last year, the charter school my kids attend got $1300 less per student than the non-charters in the district. The school has roughly 1200 students. That means we probably saved someone (district? state? not exactly sure the break down of funding sources) roughly $1,560,000 that year over having all those students in the non-charter schools. At the very least, the other non-charter schools got more (per student) than they would have (assuming there isn't a magical $1.56M sitting around, the schools would have received somewhere in between the two numbers for ALL students).

Transfers of facilities space? The school recently took out a loan and bought an empty business complex to renovate as our new campus because the campus we were using was an old run down school that the district had already closed several years prior to us moving in. They closed it (and two others in the district) due to budget cuts. Closing these schools caused teachers to lose their jobs & class sizes at the remaining schools to increase.

[humanrebar]

Or c.) some public schools don't have high enough behavioral standards for their students for whatever reason and some students have problems adjusting to the new expectations.

If journalists are concerned about the quality of reporting around this issue, explaining the suspension rate seems like a great story. It would be hard work, though, since schools rightly don't talk to strangers about specific disciplinary incidents.

[carlob]

I remember reading something that disproved your point b): mixing students from different socioeconomic background (which in general is a very good proxy for academic performance) benefited the poorer students a lot and hardly had any impact on the richer ones. So in short taking out the best students of a diverse class only negatively impacts the ones who stay.

I can try and find the exact reference, but a quick google search brings up a ton of articles on socioeconomic mixing.

[scott_s]

Point b) is a problem if charter schools are held up as a general solution to the problems with our schools - because the solution obviously doesn't scale. (The hard-to-teach students need to go somewhere.)

Independent of that, it's also problematic because you're essentially giving up on the "failing schools public schools", by taking resources away from them.

[humanrebar]

Call me crazy, but I have no emotional attachment to buildings and organizations (whichever you mean by schools). As long as the students in failing public schools have at least replacement-level alternatives, there won't be a net negative here.

> The hard-to-teach students need to go somewhere.

That's obvious. The criticism is that, in the current system, laws and tradition have dictated that "somewhere" is Oswald Cobblepot High School down the street, and if that school is a hole, sucks to be you. Blame the voters that didn't pass the bond issue five years ago. Or get rich and move to a nicer neighborhood.

And that last point is especially important. The rich have places to send their problem students. And they can afford to move to overpriced neighborhoods that effectively weed out at-risk students from the student body. The current system (unintentionally) creates public schools full of hard-to-teach students.

[scott_s]

The point made in this piece is that such students do not have alternatives other than public schools, since the charter school policies are explicitly designed to weed them out. The end result of such policies is that "good" students who have the means to do well in school end up in charter schools, and "bad" students who do not have the means to do well in schools end up in the public schools. But, the public schools will have less overall money than before, since some of their funding has been siphoned off to the charter schools.

As I see it, this exacerbates the problems of rich schools and poor schools.

[humanrebar]

My point is that the system is already stacked against students, even if every school were a traditional public school. There are always expensive neighborhoods, private schools, tutors, etc.

And one of the side effects of the current system is that rich parents and poor parents don't even live in the same school district anymore. And housing prices are both inflated and tied to the quality of the local schools, which is insane if you think about it.

[scott_s]

Yes, I agree. It is an enormous problem. My preferred solution is to increase the total amount of money in education, and distribute it more evenly.

[crusso]

But we already know that raw education spending is not the problem.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/25/oecd-education-repo...

[vonmoltke]

A potential solution, if the district is large enough, to that is to create an open enrollment district. Stop forcing kids to go to a specific school just because they happen to live at a certain address, or change schools because they need to move.

[clavalle]

>The hard-to-teach students need to go somewhere

Why not a school with behavior experts? Wouldn't a concentration of students with specific needs make it easier to address those needs because you can concentrate those specific resources there? To take an extreme example, look at the success of schools for the deaf or schools for the blind.

[scott_s]

Public schools have special education teachers, and sub-schools within existing schools for special education teachers. In other words, we already do that. We just don't fund it very well.

[phkahler]

Use of bad statistics and refusal to answer specific questions that show the badness is usually reason enough to discredit someone or something. Also, in a) those stats are used by the companies (schools) themselves - that's where the journalists and advocates got their data. If you have good solid data, you lead with that.

[skybrian]

Regardless of the original reason for it, this policy makes most statistics about the school suspicious. What would you think of a study where the researcher deletes all the data points they don't like? The school is doing the same thing except that instead of deleting data points, they are expelling students.

It is a similar problem to survivor bias when researching financial fund performance.

The incentives to improve performance on statistical measures like test scores will tend to cause overly strict schools to survive whether or not the administrators started out as true believers in strict discipline or just figured out along the way its effect on test scores. Once the relationship is understood, administrators who are watching performance will be reluctant to move towards lenient policies that bring test scores down.

[VLM]

WRT point B, the "better resources" are the kids, providing better numerical metric results to the teachers and operators of the charter schools. It would help your argument to expand on "not necessarily a bad idea". I don't see any particular advantage in rewarding a subset of educational professionals for doing little more than gaming the system.