Comments on: Charter Schools and Cheap Failures

By: Timothy B Lee

Timothy B Lee — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:03:05 +0000

Pete, point taken!

By: Pete

Pete — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:00:25 +0000

I like the argument, but you can see cryptozoologist’s point here. An education strategy based on the idea that some students are going to be collateral damage is not an easy sell, no matter how messed up the reality of the current system. If your idea is that this is a system that can more quickly respond where kids are being failed, you should emphasise that. I don’t know what the right phrase would be, but I’m pretty sure “cheap failures” ain’t it.

By: Rhayader

Rhayader — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:55:14 +0000

Right, “cheap” is a relative term here. It could be argued that few things have been as expensive to our society as the continued failure of so many public schools for so many years. As Yglesias said, letting “a thousand flowers bloom” and weeding out the bad ones is certainly preferable to maintaining the status quo, which in some areas of the country has a stunningly high failure rate, however you choose to measure it.

By: Timothy B Lee

Timothy B Lee — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:22:36 +0000

cryptozoologist, I agree that it’s not cheap in an absolute sense, but the question is what’s the alternative? Many traditional public schools have been failing their students for decades, and have proved impervious to top-down reform efforts. A charter school that’s closed down after 5 years of poor performance is cheap relative to a traditional public school that’s allowed to continue failing kids for decades.

Obviously, it would be great if we could find an education reform agenda that would guarantee that every school is successful. But at some point, we have to recognize that not every school is going to succeed, and come up with a system to deal with that reality. In my view, that system has to include a process for shutting down the worst-performing schools and transferring their kids to better schools. In this respect, charter schools are an improvement over the top-down system it has partially replaced.

By: cryptozoologist

cryptozoologist — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:54:19 +0000

it is NOT cheap for a charter school to fail! if a charter school fails, it has failed the majority of its students. i submit that that is a high price indeed.

By: Rhayader

Rhayader — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:40:30 +0000

Yglesias is sometimes depicted as a staunch Democratic statist, but when I actually read what he says he comes up with great stuff like this all the time. I saw a “debate” between him and Radley Balko in which they essentially agreed throughout the entire conversation. Last time I checked Balko is not exactly a tool of the Democratic machine.

Anyway, he’s obviously right here; even the crippled, half-assed chartering experiments in DC improved life for thousands of children — before they canceled it anyway. Just like with the Wikipedia / Open Source software dynamic, despite all of the empirical evidence people are still deeply suspicious of bottom-up processes. We need to get over that and look at the facts.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:03:08 +0000

So my point was (before my computer crashed and lost the rest of that comment) that closing bad charters is built into the bottom-up charter school process. It doesn’t have to come in the form of a “Close thou evil charter school!!!” order from above that some charter critics envision.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:43:46 +0000

Bad charters don’t stay open indefinitely because no one has to enroll. Not everyone will necessarily pull kids out of a bad charter, but new people will be less interested and will go other places.

Most bad charters see they’re starting to lose people and then imitate the more successful charters, and improve. It’s a really small percentage (I believe Caroline Hoxby says ~5 percent) that never get with the program.