From the edusphere

Some education headlines from the region:

Schools receive funds for repair (Daily Breeze, Torrance)

Do the math: Algebra mandate's a formula for failure (Sacramento Bee)

Longtime public schools advocate Kathi Littman joins California Charter Schools Assn. (MarketWatch)

Children of the reinvention (Pasadena Weekly)

Poll: Bond backed, not LAUSD (Daily News, Los Angeles)

Work on disputed LAUSD school set (Long Beach Press-Telegram)

Opinion: LAUSD must do what's right for area children (Daily News, Los Angeles)

Comments

[anon2]

Here is a response to the op-ed from the Charter School Association president:

There are a lot of misconceptions about whether charter schools "hand-pick" their students or essentially take the cream of the crop. The article is misleading about the real practices on the ground, but so is the charge from LAUSD. Conversion charters have to take students zoned for the school. Examples would be early adopters on the westside such as Westwood Charter Elementary, Paul Revere Charter Middle School, and Palisades Charter High School. Start-up charters, and conversion charters with room after the kids zoned for the school enroll, operate with a lottery.

The lottery, however, is itself a sorting mechanism and charter schools have taken full advantage of that to avoid taking undesirable kids. Children don't get their names on the lottery unless they have an involved parent who signs them up. That's true of magnet schools as well and often excludes the most dsyfunctional families right off the bat. Many charter schools further pre-screen by requiring large amounts of paperwork to be filled out before the student can be entered into the lottery and requiring that the parents sign up in person during the work day. Both requirements screen out children from non-English speaking families, children from distant communities, and children from marginal economic circumstances where parents cannot get off for even an hour to go to the school. New West Charter was using all of these techniques to screen students before they got dinged by the accrediting agencies. Nevertheless, they still require in-person sign-ups (although they have Saturday and evening hours now) and they still require parents to pledge a certain amount of volunteer hours. Up until this year, Paul Revere was using a first come, first served lottery, which clearly advantaged parents who didn't work and who were bright enough to find out they needed to camp out on the first day of the "lottery." Their change to a true lottery was likely the result of similar pressure and will undoubtedly lower their scores starting in 2009 when next year's scores are released. A lot of the Green Dot schools are in poorer communities and therefore the screening they do is really mostly about parental involvement (do you have a parent who will take the time to sign you up). Studies have shown, though, that even in the poorest and least educated communities the presence of parental involvement and interest in their child's education is a fairly significant determinant of student success.

Furthermore, even if the sorting mechanisms fail and a charter admits someone who is a troublemaker, they can be kicked out. That kind of ex-post screening is just not available in the same way in a regular public school. So, charters clearly are benefiting in ways that LAUSD school are not. Korenstein and the LAUSD are right, therefore, that it's not absolutely proven that Charter Schools are teaching students "better" or using more effective methods. Nevertheless, the solution probably isn't to eliminate charters and relegate those committed parents and eager students to worse educational environments so it would be more "fair." That's what the court decisions to mandate equal funding did - lower everyone to the lowest common denominator. The solution is to find out how to raise everyone's expectations and involvement. Providing more local control may be one method of doing that.