Assume that charter/experimental schools achieve better results than regular schools, which of the following is true?
1. You should try to send your child to a charter school:
- True
- False
- Impossible to tell with the information given
- 2. Regular schools should become more like charter schools:
- True
- False
- Impossible to tell with the information given
And the answers are, respectively
- True
- Impossible to tell, but probably false
Charter/experimental schools work for two related reason
- What kind of teacher decides to work in some kind of non-standard school?
- What kind of parent send their child to a non-standard school?
Committed, enthusiastic teachers who are willing to learn and experiment.
Parents who’ve given thought to their children’s education.
The simple fact is that that combination will achieve above average results. (The best predictor of children’s education success is parents who care about their children’s education.
That is why educational experiments work, and why they usually don’t scale. There simply aren’t enough such parents and teachers.
So what works? Improving the quality of teaching, and getting parents more involved in their children’s education, perhaps by giving them some hope that their children have a chance of a decent education in the first place. If you know your child’s school has a low graduation rate, and teachers who’ve given up it feels futile to even try. Just as if the child’s options are minimum wage or crime and prison it’s pretty hard to explain to them why the relevance of colonial history.
My conclusion? Charter schools and experimental schools are wonderful places to try out new ideas, some of which might work in the wild. (The wooden blocks in every kindergarten in New York are a wonderful case of such an example.) And if you can get your kid into a charter school, then do so.
But this doesn’t mean that making all schools charter schools will improve over-all standards. The keys to that lie outside schools. And if I knew the answer to that I would let you know.