State Sen. Bill Perkins (D- Harlem) will chair a public hearing tomorrow to examine the future of charter schools in New York state — which makes about as much sense as the scene from “Take the Money and Run” where cello player Woody Allen joins a marching band.
Perkins’ stated concern for the state of New York City public schools is appropriate enough: High quality education is the gateway to success not only for students, but also for communities, states and nations. And the gateway for most New York City children is very shaky.
Only a quarter of the city’s fourth graders are proficient in reading on the National Assessment of Education Progress, a proportion that hasn’t changed in years. In mathematics, barely a third of students score proficient or better. Further, the difference between minority and white students stubbornly persists.
All these trends are equally troubling for eighth graders. And graduation rates, despite modest improvements in recent years, are still low overall. None of which paints a positive picture of New York City’s future.
But Perkins’ stated purpose for tomorrow is to see if the charter “industry” is “achieving the best educational outcomes for our children and revitalizing our public-school system.”
Terming the charter movement an “industry” may have been necessary for a hearing on the topic under the aegis of the Senate Committee on Corporations, Authorities and Commissions — but it also provides a glimpse of the slant that Sen. Perkins intends to take.
He gave more signs last week, suggesting that charter schools are damaging the city’s education system. Indeed, he accused charters of “skimming” the best students, of exacerbating racial segregation, of presenting parents with false hope, of ducking responsibility to serve difficult populations of English Learners or students with Individual Education Plans and of making the regular public schools look bad.
With that starting point, it’s hard to imagine that the hearing can allow a sophisticated and nuanced view of the role of charter schools in the city’s current education landscape.
Yet the record of charter-sector performance in New York City is too good to honestly ignore, as my research and that of my colleagues at Stanford and elsewhere have shown.
Student-learning results in these schools are among the best of any community in the nation. A typical student at one of the city’s charters learns significantly more in both reading and math than would have occurred in regular public schools.
At the end of three years of enrollment, charter students dramatically outpace their peers at traditional public schools — meaning that the charter students are compounding their gains in learning.
And these results hold for minority students in both reading and math. The outcomes in mathematics are especially strong and dramatically narrow the achievement gap between minority and white students.
At a school level, nearly a third of New York City charter schools outperform their local peer schools in reading and more than half do so in math. Equally important is the small fraction of schools that does worse.
The city should be proud: Only a small handful of communities can boast equivalent quality in their charter-school “portfolios.”
Indeed, the rest of the nation can learn from New York’s combination of careful school design, strong implementation and vigorous oversight — a balanced approach that has proven it can produce high-quality education options in any setting, even in Harlem. (Note, too, that none of these elements is exclusively available to charter schools.)
Charter schools are expected to fulfill many policy goals. Paramount is whether they can prepare students from any and every background academically for the futures they face. Most charters are delivering on that requirement.
In addition, New York City charters are also fulfilling a second goal: They provide ample proof that high-quality schools are possible anywhere in the city. This should be heartening to Sen. Perkins.
Indeed, the senator might take another look at his concern that charters are making the regular public schools look bad. Shouldn’t he be asking more difficult questions about why all public schools in his district aren’t performing as well as Harlem’s charters?
Why isn’t he seeking testimony on the corporations and other entities that have contractual relationships with regular public schools, to discover why they can’t produce equivalent results? That hearing would be far more informative and productive.
Margaret E. Raymond is the di rector of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University.