Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Waiting for Superman

Has anyone seen this movie? I think everyone should. It speaks about problems in education and how some Charter schools have overcome this. (It is not about gifted education.)

DS10 seems to appreciate that his new school is better. He is still underchallenged and that may be part of his underachievement. I was thinking how lucky my kids got into a gifted school, with a free education. When is it a child can watch a movie like "Waiting for Superman" and get how luck they are? I wish he could see how blessed he is. Any thoughts?

I have not seen the movie but have read about it. Research has not found that charter schools on average outperform public schools, as discussed at http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/13/understanding-charter-schools.html . KIPP charter schools have a good reputation, but I think much (but probably not all) of their success is due to the attrition of weaker students http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/charter-schools/myths-and-realities-about-kipp.html . The movie's famous lottery scene is wrong to suggest that the losers are doomed to get a much worse education in a conventional public school than they would get in a charter.

I support charters and especially vouchers, which let parents spend the educational funds largely as they see fit, but the claims made for these reforms are exaggerated. The differences in average academic achievement across various schools largely reflect the differences in average intelligence across schools, but no politician or educational policymaker wants to acknowledge that.

The problem with comparing public schools to private/charter schools is that they are not working under the same set of conditions. Private and charter schools do not have to continue to provide services to every student regardless of the student's behavior, and cannot mandate/enforce involvement or follow through by parents. No amount of internal reform in the world can overcome that reality. Of COURSE schools with involved parents and enforceable behavior codes are going to look better than schools without. But how do you transfer that to the public school system? If public schools were able to kick out kids who consistently misbehave or whose parents did not play their role in the educational process, those children would go....where? Compulsory education in this country began in part to keep kids out of the workplace (where they would work for cheaper than adults) and off of the streets (where they could get into/cause trouble).

Given the sifting and winnowing that comes with parents being involved/invested enough to seek out alternate educational settings, these institutions would be FAR outperforming their demographically equivalent public counterparts if their methods were actually as superior as some would like to suggest.

As to KIPP schools....extended day, extended week, extended school year=extra money. On a relatively small scale, it is possible to fundraise to supplement what is available through public school funding, but there is ample evidence that most American tax payers are unwilling to support the school system as a whole at that level, and unrealistic to think that fundraising could make up the difference if there were multiple schools in the same city competing for those dollars. I also found it interesting that according to one of KIPPS Q&A sites, they only report acheivement scores for students who are in a "matched cohort". They don't promote students to the next grade who have not met the grade level requirements:

"When we calculate achievement gains at KIPP schools in our annual Report Card, we only track gains of those students who are part of a �matched cohort' of students. For example, in the 2008 KIPP Report Card, we reported the gains of students who started KIPP in fifth grade and finished KIPP in eighth grade."
http://www.kipp.org/faq

Isn't that sort of like only reporting the test scores of proficient students?

I think that KIPP is doing great things for a lot of students and I hope they will continue to do so--however, I think it is unfair to use their successes as a way to denigrate public schools (as is often done in the press) when public schools are unlikely ever to be afforded the conditions or funding that allow KIPP and other successful charters to operate as they do.

Charter schools work well for well-matched students. I think the problem is that many parents see "charter" and think "yes! I found my son/daughter's perfect school!"

I have worked in two charters over the past 12 years. One has been open for 18 years and is hugely successful. We have a 1% revocation rate (which means we kick out 1% of the students that are originally accepted). This rate is significantly lower(5-20% lower depending on which school) than the two high schools in our area- either their dropout or expulsion rate. Most people do not realize that traditional public schools CAN and DO kick out kids with continuous behavior problems.

We do service special ed students who can function with a push in model or a one to two hour a week pull-out model. We do not service students who need special day class or full-time emotional and behavioral support outside a mainstream class. This is a conscious decision on our part. It's not good education to service these students on our campus simply to have them around but not for them to have access to the programs we provide. We do have several students with full-time aides that are mainstreamed.

We also have FIVE separate programs and more than 1200 students, two of which are high schools. But each student is matched to a program that is designed to meet his/her needs. We have a high school arts academy that is all college prep, but arts classes are taught by professionals. The kids can take dance, drama, visual art or music at any level and up to 4 classes a day by end of high school.

Our other high school program is an independent study program where students meet with a teacher once a week, turn in work, collect new work and have a "check up". There is a huge variety of students in this program from pregnant teens and credit recovery students to professional actors and athletes who need time to travel without losing credit at school.

Previous posters are right- on average charter schools do no better than traditional schools. But this is really regionally dependent. It's like saying that overall, all school districts are the same. We know that on a case by case basis, that's simply not true.

My school receives close to 1,000 applications for incoming spots of 180 in two different programs that start in 6th grade.

My point in a nutshell: There are many, many success stories skewed by the charter school nationwide data.

Dottie- you are correct that charter schools split the traditional pool of money for public schools. However, in my district, the school district is about to be taken over by the state, due to extreme mismanagement of funds, corruption by politicians and board members who are trying to get elected to higher office but know nothing about education. The charters are doing just fine- because they have complete local control over their funds. In a year, the charter schools will be the only ones left standing.

In many cases, you cannot assume that the ADA of the public school would go up if the charter did not exist. Many parents would still chose other options for their students, particularly in very low performing districts. There's no way my son would attend the regular public school. The district GATE people have repeatedly told us that they have nothing for him and cannot accommodate him in a regular class. They've basically pulled the reverse of some charters and special ed students- "you can send him but we won't teach him." Too bad for them- they could use his standardized test scores :-)

In addition, most charters in CA do not have teacher's unions. While there are certain protections teachers' unions provide, most of my teachers are delighted that they work with colleagues who are well-trained, well-paid and if someone is slacking they get an improvement plan. If they don't improve, they are at-will and leave. It's that simple. Our district is currently paying 40 teachers to not teach because they have too much seniority to fire.

In an ideal world, with schools run by well trained educators, not politicians, I would love for every school to be run like a well-oiled machine. Students needs are met, teachers have additional training beyond the one year credential program and parents are welcomed into the classroom as advocates, mentors and volunteers.

I hear ya! I wish we only had 4 years... DS is only 8. We're homeschooling the next two years and watching it all burn around us. It's not pretty.

Around here, the top 15% of students either go private, Catholic or get interdistrict transfers to other districts for IB programs.

CAMom,

Do you think that what your charter is doing can be exported? Originally the idea was for charter schools to experiment and come up with effective models of instruction that could be brought into the other public schools. It sounds like you have a great program, but it already can't serve the number of students who would like to participate. Is there some reason your local school district isn't spreading what you're doing to other schools?

I am not at all opposed to public charters if they are funded through the same formula as the other local schools, but I am deeply concerned about public money being spent on private charters/private schools. Don't get me wrong, many public schools need a lot of work learning to effectively serve the full range of students who attend them. My main concern is that solutions which can only serve a few kids (not because only a few kids fit, as would be the case with services designed for children at "the tails", but because there isn't enough resource to go around)are problematic. A free appropriate public education can't be available only through lottery and I don't see any evidence that private schools can do better on a grand scale, so I don't want public money flowing out of the public schools and into the private (and sometimes for profit) education system.


Re: public schools expelling students for behavior. I would point out a) that students are not permanently expelled from public schools; b) the bar for expulsion is typically for much more extreme behaviors than those that can lead to the removal of a student from a charter program.

No easy answers, that's for sure!

Our model is actually exported from a school in Minnesota that is running very similarly. It would be easy to export each program individually but the school as a whole would be more complex. We have a huge facility paid for by bonds that allows us to do what we do. Because our school district is crumbling, we have many students who are not interested in our particular programs but want to come because it's a safe school with a decent education. It's a hard sell when you have an 8th grade boy who has to take ballet... but it happens to us every year.

I agree with you- but in CA nearly all charters are public schools, funded the same way as any other public school. The only difference in funding is complete local control over the money- as opposed to district decision makers deciding how to spend it. My principal makes all the financial decisions for us based on a teacher committee and recommendations of our local school board, not the district school board. This allows a direct control over contracts and vendors, negotiation at a level of minutiae that would bore me to tears and a focus on every penny being in the classroom.

Neither do we- any contract revocation is for one year and a student can reapply. We revoke contracts for behavior issues that are the same issues that a student would be suspended and then expelled for at any public school. We have to follow the disciplinary section of Ed.Code. We expel a student for drugs, violence, weapons on campus, sexual harassment, repeated fighting. We rarely have to do this because most of our students want to be at our school and work very hard to stay! Those that don't receive serious counseling (we're the only non-emotionally disturbed school in a 40 mile radius with a full time counselor), tutoring, home visits or whatever else it takes to turn them around.

I'm not saying that what we do is "normal" compared to other charters. But it just gets me all growly when I see charter schools getting the blame for all that might be wrong with public ed!

It depends on how a school is chartered here Dottie. You can get a charter directly from the state, which means that you are paid 100% of the regular funding that any school would receive and you're directly accountable to the state. It's more like you're a district of one school.

Most charters are district-chartered. The public school district has to review and approve of the original charter and renew the approval every 2-5 years (depending on the paperwork). The district keeps a certain percentage of funds for management. In our case, it's 3% of ADA that the district keeps. For that 3%, we use their internet servers, have access to make reservations with transportation (which we pay for) and have access to their liability insurance (which we pay for.) Some charters use their district's business office or HR. Ours does not- we have our own HR, business office, purchasing etc.

Now, the district does not have specific say in the programming but they do have complete access to the results. We have to provide an accountability report, just like any school does, to the district, who in turn provides it to the state. If we are not meeting our accountability requirements, we could be shut down by the district, have the charter not renewed or other measure. I briefly worked for a charter that was closed by the district because we did not have enough cash flow to make payroll and did not have enough assets to get a loan while waiting for the next state payment.

The other benefit funding wise, is that we have complete control over any donations or grants that we receive. The district, in most cases, gets to take donations made to a public school and pool them. So if Parent A loves Fred Elementary and donates $1,000, the district can take it and distribute it, give it back to Fred Elementary or heck even use it to pay a bonus to the Superintendent.

We have an elected board that serves as advisors and the school district also appoints a member to sit on the board. It's very oversight heavy and there are reports upon reports everywhere!

If I'm understanding what you're saying, part of the difficulty of exporting your program would be that it would require a substantial investment in new or dramatically renovated buildings in order to run in other schools. Is that accurate? Are you arts/production focused?

If I can ask another question: how do kids get to your school? Do parents have to do anything different in order to get kids there compared to what they would do to get their kids to the default school? In a lot of places I think that kids end up with uneven access due to issues like transportation, which is only within the capability of families where only one parent works, where the student is lucky enough to be in the neighborhood, or where the parent works in the neighborhood of the school; but it is out of reach for other families.

I'm all for (public) charters if access is truly equal and if they are not used as a way to slam other public schools that are not granted the same conditions (excluding kids with EBD, for instance) and which--unlike charters--often serve a portion of the population that is uninvested in being in school in the first place. Your observation that you lose few students because they want to be there is one of the embedded conditions that regular public schools can't match, and it is one that has a significant impact when it comes to looking at test scores and weighing a school's success or lack thereof.

You mentioned donations at one point in your post. Would you say that donations either in start up expenses, or on a yearly basis, are significant to allowing your program to operate as it does?

Thanks for all of your detailed responses--I am genuinely interested in how different schools are operating. Too bad you and Dottie and I are so geographically spread out--I imagine that we could happily sit together in a coffee shop discussing this for hours !