Replicating failure – John Banks and charter schools

The following blog was originally posted at The Daily Blog, and was written by John Minto.

“charter schools are not about raising student achievement but are a political response to a corporate problem – how can we get into public education and make private profit from government spending?”

Friday’s announcement by Act leader and Associate Education Minister John Banks of the Board which will select successful charter school applicants raises two important issues.

Firstly the appointment of the board and its announcement was premature – a slap in the face for parliament which has not yet even heard from the select committee considering the proposal, let alone passed legislation enabling these schools to be established. Fellow Act Party member and chair of the Charter School Working Group Catherine Isaacs did something similar late last year when she used her position to call for expressions of interest in running charter schools despite the select committee having not heard even the first submission.

The second issue relates to the makeup of this John Banks Board. There is not a single person on this group who has a track record of improving educational achievement for children from low-income communities despite the fact this is the very group the government says it wants to target with charter schools.

This is not surprising because charter schools are not about raising student achievement but are a political response to a corporate problem – how can we get into public education and make private profit from government spending?

But before we condemn charter schools out of hand we must ask the key question – do they raise education achievement? The answer is a resounding NO. Every country which has gone down the charter school path – the US, UK and Sweden were held up as examples by Act – has seen its education system go backwards in international comparisons such as through PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment).

In the last PISA tests in 2009 New Zealand was 7th in reading, 13th in maths and 7th in science – well ahead of any of the charter school countries. The US was 17th, 31st and 33rd, the UK 26th, 28th and 16th and Sweden 20th, 26th and 29th respectively of the 65 countries who took part – including all OECD countries.

These charter school countries have slipped in the rankings despite two decades of letting the private sector into their education systems. “Epic fail” would not be too strong to describe their educational performance. Charter schools have led these education systems to become fragmented and incoherent and the horror stories are thick on the ground.

Mismanagement, lack of accountability, poorly resourced classrooms, untrained, unqualified teachers on low pay and poor educational achievement are the norm.

After 20 years of charter schools in the US the most comprehensive study showed just 17% of charter schools outperforming public schools, 37% performed worse than public schools and the rest showed no difference. The high achievers either had selected intakes or sophisticated ways of expelling less academically able students. In KIPP school for example – another example paraded by ACT – 40% of African American boys “drop out” before they reach 8th grade (Year 9 in NZ)

John Banks wants the worst features of charter schools here. Untrained and unqualified teachers are essential to the private sector because they are cheaper and this allows for greater profits to be stripped from the schools. Being exempt from the Official Information Act and Ombudsman as Banks wants also means we will never know the true extent to which we and our kids are being ripped off.

Instead of mimicking failure we should emulate successful countries like Finland whose PISA results were 3rd, 6th and 2nd respectively. No charter schools in Finland – just a heavily resourced and very high quality public education system. That’s what we need here.

The government has made much of the “long tail of underachievement’ in New Zealand’s education system where children from low-income families (including disproportionate numbers of Maori and Pacifika children) achieve poorly at school. We do have a longer tail than some countries but our poorest performers still do much better than the poorest performers in most surveyed countries.

More importantly though our long tail of underachievement is in fact our long tail of poverty and inequality – a situation created by the neo-liberal free market policies which ACT, National and Labour foisted upon the country from 1984.

Reversing these policies will be an important part of raising student achievement for the children of the poor.

Does increasing school autonomy lead to more equitable educational options?

“Autonomy” has become kind of a buzzword in recent years.  It’s treated with reverence by charter school advocates… almost as a panacea that will fix nearly any problems facing public schools.  The belief is that, given greater autonomy, schools are better able to sense and respond to families’ preferences for schooling, and to the competitive incentives of the emerging education market.

This all sounds quite appealing, and makes sense in a lot of ways.  After all, school leaders are indeed better positioned than are bureaucrats in faraway offices to understand the needs of the local families they serve in areas such as curriculum, hours, or allocating resources to various programs.  Especially in a choice system such as with charter schools, autonomy allows school leaders to compete in shaping their services in ways that will attract and retain students.  And this is particularly important if we want to provide an increased number of high quality options for disadvantaged students trapped in failing public schools.  But, in responding to increasing competition for students, do they use this autonomy to advance their school at the expense of other important societal goals for public education?

Many school choice systems have been associated with inequitable access, and segregative patterns in many cases (also look here, here, here, and here).  Much of the research on these patterns has focused on self-sorting — such as “white flight” — by families as parents make school choices based on social characteristics of students at a given school.  Little attention has been paid to the role of schools in shaping those patterns, even though, with the increasing importance of choice and competition, many schools often have the autonomy to improve equitable access for disadvantaged students.

To study this issue, we looked to the choice system in New Zealand, where policymakers have been encouraging family choice of schools, and school autonomy, since the “Tomorrow’s Schools” reforms over two decades ago.  By essentially eradicating local education authorities, policymakers devolved power to schools as autonomous, “self-managing” entities.  This has led to a system of comprehensive choice for families, and considerable competition between schools for students, particularly in urban areas.  In Auckland, the largest city in the country, upwards of one-third of traffic congestion is due to parents shuffling their kids to the schools of their choice.

But, of course, schools have a finite amount of space.  So, when a school has more applicants than seats, it can implement an “enrolment scheme” to manage the demand, through measures such as randomized “ballots” (lotteries), and/or specifying their own zones in which residents have priority access to the school. 

Previous research has shown that schools in more affluent areas are more likely to be in greater demand, and thus more likely to have enrolment schemes.  The question we asked was whether these self-managing schools were using their autonomy to draw their zones in order to improve or restrict access for disadvantaged students.  To do this, we simply compared the level of affluence in a walkable radius around each school to the level of affluence in the boundaries that the schools themselves had drawn.  Certainly, school zones are not perfects circles, as their creators have to consider traffic patterns, geographic barriers, and the boundaries of competitors.  But, all things being equal, we could expect that deviations in those boundaries from a geometric radius around a school would be more or less equally likely to include or exclude more affluent neighborhoods. 

But that is not what we found.  Instead, there is evidence of rampant gerrymandering to exclude children from more disadvantaged neighborhoods.  In the cases where there is a statistically significant difference in the “deprivation level” of the population in a school’s drawn zone compared to its immediate area, over three-quarters of these self-managing school had drawn a zone that was significantly more affluent than their immediate vicinity.

Moreover, as if to add insult to injury, more affluent schools are not only drawing boundaries to keep poor kids out, but in their promotional materials are bragging about their success in doing this.  A review of school websites shows that more affluent schools are much more likely to include official information about the number of disadvantaged students they serve.  In the US, this would be akin to school leaders boasting about how few of their students are eligible for free-reduced lunch.

While we might find these types of practices to be distasteful for public schools that are funded by taxpayers to serve all students, in some ways, such actions are predictable (if indefensible).  After all, policymakers are creating education markets where schools recognize competitive incentives to shape their enrollments.  It should be no surprise that, given such autonomy and such incentives, they find creative ways to do just that.

The full paper is available at the Forum on the Future of Public Education.

By: Chris Lubienski