by I subscribe to Education Week’s online daily report, and two articles in yesterday’s issue provided an intriguing juxtaposition. The lead story, “Civil Rights Groups Call for New Federal Education Agenda,” reported that “seven leading civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the National Urban League, called on U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today to dismantle core pieces of his education agenda, arguing that his emphases on expanding charter schools, closing low-performing schools, and using competitive rather than formula funding are detrimental to low-income and minority children.”
Scrolling down to the bottom of the daily report, I came to “Making Sense of the Research on Charter Schools.” The article, which summarized and analyzed the conflicting research results on charter schools, made a couple of very interesting points. One was that charter schools seemed to have a more positive impact on disadvantaged urban students than on middle-class suburban students. (Elsewhere researchers have speculated that this is because many suburban charter schools are “progressive” schools that emphasize learning by doing and deemphasize test-taking. Hmm. My Catholic high school teacher instincts wonder if this will turn out to be replay of new math, whole language reading instruction and other educational train wrecks.) The article also pointed out that “the recent final results from the District of Columbia voucher program suggest a case in point: Students in those schools didn’t experience any dramatic gains in test scores, but college-going rates saw a big jump.”
As the article goes on to acknowledge, there is still limited research on “oversubscribed charters, or “schools that people are banging on the door to get into.” We do know that some of these charters, such as the KIPP schools, are producing remarkable results. And, surprise, these are the schools where parents – and especially poor, urban, African American parents – are lining up to enroll their kids.
So what’s going on with the civil rights groups? I pulled up the full report, and was discouraged to read the very first recommendation: “we believe that the age of establishing outcome standards without making input investments to achieve these outcomes must end.” In other words, let’s measure how much money is going in up front, and not how much education is coming out the other end. The civil rights groups go on to condemn “competitive” Race to the Top education grants (states must demonstrate a commitment to educational reform to win money); to avoid school closures except as “a last resort”; to express “reservations” about charter schools; to drop the “persistently dangerous school” label (which alerts parents to the likelihood their kid will be knifed in the hallway); and to repudiate “exclusionary discipline practices” (that remove disruptive children from classrooms). There are more recommendations in the report, many of which seem less questionable: greater access to preschool, more accountability, better data, etc., but the bottom line is that the document combines a defense of the status quo, a complete avoidance of the discouraging data that show very little correlation between per pupil spending and performance, and a frontal assault on efforts to address rising school violence.
The NAACP’s attack on the tea party movement is getting a lot of attention. I think this deserves more. Are these groups really representing the interests, or for that matter the opinions, of minority parents?
“[C]ombines a defense of the status quo, a complete avoidance of the discouraging data that show very little correlation between per pupil spending and performance, and a frontal assault on efforts to address rising school violence.”
The NAACP has been all too willing, it seems to me, to attach voucher programs and charter schools in defense of some sort of status quo or another. (Interestingly, there is a blog post on the NAACP blog by Randi Weingarten, the President of the American Federation of Teachers, wherein she states that “The NAACP and the AFT are formidable organizations, each in our own right, but throughout our long, proud association with each other, our capabilities have been magnified when we have united in solidarity.”)
Nicole Garnett wrote here – http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/9408/NAACP_Lawsuit_Challenges_Vouchers.html – that “According to the NAACP, some of the parents participating in the voucher program choose to send their children to ‘virtually one-race schools,’ while ‘racially separate schools are inherently unequal.’”
I am also curious about the NAACP’s seeming silence on the D.C. voucher program when it was in the process of being de-funded. That was another program that apparently had excellent results, but I have not been able to fine any statements by the NAACP on the closure.
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