GreatSchools: Bill's Blog

Charter School Wars

On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Education came out with a new study showing that fourth graders in traditional public schools are doing significantly better in reading and math than comparable children attending charter schools.

Most experts are not making much fuss about the study. The head of the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. Department of Education agency that put out the study, advised parents to pay no attention.Other experts interviewed by Washington Post Reporter Jay Matthews agreed.

But this study and others like it do add up to an inescapable conclusion: Charter schools are not currently performing way better than traditional public schools on standardized tests.

That in itself is a significant finding.  Some people have supported charters over the years because they thought that they would do way better than traditional public schools on these tests. Freed from most regulations and open to innovation, these schools would soar.

Earlier this year I heard Ted Koldrie, a father of the charter school movement, discuss charter school  performance at a conference. The original motivation for the creators of the charter school concept was not to prove that schools freed from government regulation do better, he said. The idea, rather, was to set up a legal structure that would allow and encourage educational innovation beyond what the traditional public school system was affording.

The important question, he suggested, is not whether charter schools as a group do better than traditional public schools. Rather, we should be asking: Which charter schools are doing well and why? What kinds of innovations that charters have piloted show promise? What can we learn from them?

It would be nice if we could say that being a charter school — being free of regulations — leads to much higher academic achievement for students, but no such luck. We're going to have to follow Ted's advice and look deeper for lessons that we can use to improve all schools, charter and traditional.

Parents in the Driver’s Seat

With Back-to-School season in full swing (In some parts of the country, school has already started!), it’s a great time to keep in mind that—as important as schools are—they do not make as much difference in the educational development of children as families and communities do.

Most parents I talk to recognize this. They know that what they do with their children is very important. They know that schools can’t do it all themselves, and they seek out schools where parent involvement is high.

Research confirms parents play a leading role in their children’s education.

In a 2001 review of dozens of research studies on this topic, MIT economist Caroline Hoxby reported that the consensus view is that family factors account for about 90% of the education attainment of 30-year-olds, while school factors account for less than 10%.

The studies generally show that the parents’ education level is the single most important factor for predicting their children’s educational attainment. But what parents do with their children matters a great deal, too. 

Reviewing the research, Hoxby noted that “Family conduct variables that are statistically significant predictors of good student outcomes include owning an atlas, owning a dictionary, owning more than 50 books, having a computer for child’s use with homework, having attended a school event, parents’ checking that homework is done, parents’ planning course-taking with child, visiting the library, visiting science or history museums, parents’ knowing what courses child is taking, parents knowing how well child is doing in school, and parents knowing graduation requirements.”

Of course, these aren’t the only important things that parents do. This is a representative list of behaviors that researchers were able to measure.

The key point is that we parents need to be involved with our children’s education. What we parents do is more important than what we say. We need to demonstrate to our children that learning is important.

A key way we can do this is to never stop learning ourselves, whether we have Ph.D.s or whether we haven’t yet graduated from high school. We need to constantly ask questions of our children, ensure that our children do their homework, attend school events and take our children to interesting places that spark their curiosity.

GreatSchools offers some helpful tools for stimulating your thinking about how to be a great parent when it comes to your children's education. I suggest starting with our grade-by-grade newsletters that help you know what to expect in your child's development this year.

Welcome back to school, parents!

Hippy Valley Middle School

Last week I sat next to an 11-year-old on the plane as I returned from Washington, D.C., back to San Francisco. We struck up a friendly conversation and I asked him about school. I learned that he just graduated from elementary school and that he'll be entering middle school this fall.

I also learned that he does not like school.

"Is there anything about school that you like?" I asked.

"No."

"What didn't you like about your elementary school?"

"The teachers, principals and the kids."

"Sounds rough," I said. "What kind of school would you like to go to?"

"It would be called 'Hippy Valley' Elementary," he replied. "Everyone would wear tie-dyed shirts and glasses shaped like hearts."

"What would you learn there?"

"How to fight the people who want to cut down trees."

"What do you think you need to know in order to do that?" I asked.

"I don't know," he replied.

"Do you think you're going to like middle school?"

"No."

Nice to see some social justice passion there, but this kid seemed to have really low expectations — even for an 11-year-old.

After learning that he lives in the Oakland/Berkeley area, I suggested to him that he and his family look around for charter middle school options. There are some good charter schools in the area, I told him, and if he looked around, he might find a school that would teach him a lot and that he would actually enjoy attending.

"Nobody likes school," he responded. "You can't like school and have a life," he responded.

OK, it was clear to me: This kid really needs to be surrounded by teachers that ask a lot of him and work hard to ignite his own passions. I hope his parents recognize his potential and know that they have choices.

I hope he finds Hippy Valley Middle School and that the teachers really rock.