Before investing further in charter schools, South Carolina must consider the full picture now becoming clear about how charter schools perform, notably when compared to traditional public schools.
Advocates tend to argue that charter schools provide competition for floundering public schools and high-performing options for parents. However, national studies repeatedly have shown that charter schools produce about the same measurable outcomes as public schools while also demonstrating some disturbing consequences:
- Charter schools tend to segregate students by race and class.
- Charter schools under-serve special-needs students, English-language learners and the highest poverty students — all populations that require significant proportions of public school budgets.
- Charter schools contribute to student and teacher churn by creating revolving doors for students and teachers between charter schools and traditional public schools, which are under added pressure of always accepting students leaving those charter schools.
The picture in South Carolina is no better, especially when charter schools are compared directly with public schools sharing similar populations, as defined by the state Education Department on school report cards.
I did an analysisof charter school report cards for 2011 and 2013, using the metric “Schools with Students Like Ours,” and found that charter schools are overwhelmingly performing about the same as or worse than our public schools. For example, when a charter school receives an absolute rating of “excellent” and public “schools with students like ours” tend to score “excellent,” I rated that charter school “typical.”
In 2011, three of 53 charter schools scored higher than was typical for “Schools with Students Like Ours,” 17 scored the same and 33 scored below. This year, two scored above typical, 20 scored the same and 22 below.
What this means is that charter schools are creating problems related to funding, student and teacher churn, re-segregation of schools and increased stress on the public school system while not producing better measurable outcomes than those that state leaders and the public use to criticize our regular public schools.
This makes it hard to justify the recommendations from the Charter School Facilities Initiative to provide more funding for facilities, which are incredibly expensive and incur ongoing maintenance expenses. In other words, to add brick-and-mortar costs to the state’s ongoing investment in charter schools is making far more than a one-year commitment to models that simply have not performed as advertised.
South Carolina faces some of the most complex and burdensome challenges to state budgets and public school systems — the rising new majority of impoverished children and families.
Experimentation is a luxury the state cannot afford, especially when we have significant evidence that the experiment is floundering at best, and detrimental to our goals at worst.
If charter schools are attractive because they remain public while giving schools autonomy and distance from bureaucracy, we should simply offer the same sort of options to our regular public schools while designing a plan to fully and equitably fund those schools, many of which need facilities investments that will be delayed yet again if the state continues to experiment instead of making evidence-based decisions about our schools and our public funds.
South Carolina deserves data-based and lean school reform policy, and not advocacy-based experiments that clearly fail to achieve the outcomes advocates have promised.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy