Some Problems with Charter Schools

Many aspects of charter schools sound awesome.

• Incentives for teachers whose kids do better on standardized tests
• Parents don’t have to send their kids to the awful public school in the neighborhood (they get some “choice”)
• Schools have more freedom to hire teachers with degrees but no teaching credential – which often can be an expensive hurdle for people transitioning into teaching
• Private donations to help with funding

A lot of these things sound great, and they really enticed me when I read first read about KIPP in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers when I was 15 years old. Little did I know I’d be teaching in a KIPP school 10 years later!

Problems with Charter Schools

I taught at the largest network of charter schools in the US (KIPP) for years. A lot of people have a view of urban charter schools that these schools take these poor black and brown kids and give them better opportunities.

I can tell you after teaching at charter schools for a few years that I no longer believe this. That definitely happens sometimes, but its far from the norm. I think they cause more harm than good.

Here’s why.

Charters teach directly to the standardized test

Charter schools are run like a business. If workers in a traditional business are optimizing for profit and loss, teachers and admins at charter schools are optimizing for standardized test scores. This is their holy grail. This is what they are judged by every week of the year.

What does this mean? It means that when it comes to learning something, it doesn’t matter why that thing is true. It only matters that you know it well enough to get it right on a multiple choice test.

Every class is a drill session for the test. Think of your SAT prep class that you may have taken back in high school. Constant drilling of the same problems over and over again. Working back from the answer choices if that’s the faster option. Always thinking of ways to beat the test.

This is what a charter school is like every day of the year for pretty much every class, for 12 years of a kids life if the kid goes to a school like KIPP from Grade 1 to Grade 12.

Imagine what that does to a child’s brain.

Massive teacher turnover

Charter schools usually have a longer school day. (that’s part of the business model) A longer school day means teachers can’t hang for very long. KIPP’s school day went more than an hour longer than the local public school, every day of the week.

You always hear about teacher burnout from teachers at public schools. Imagine the burnout that comes with working an hour extra every day for years at a charter school!

I left teaching about 5 years ago. None of the principals I worked under are still working at any school. They didn’t just leave that school, they left education all together. Most of my colleagues are not in education anymore at all.

Charter schools hire young teachers aged 22-29 ish and work the hell out of them. Then the teachers leave after a year or two or three if the school is lucky. Then they have to hire all new people again. The cycle perpetuates.

There is 0 continuity at most of these schools.

The school day is boring

Most schools are boring, but charter schools are extra boring. Because they want to game the standardized test, they add extra time to all the tested subjects. (math, reading, science in many states)

I taught 8th Grade – here’s what a school day looked like for our kids.

• 83 minutes of Math, Reading, History, Science
• 83 minutes of Art/Gym alternating days
• 45 minutes of lunch/activity time (total)

That’s it. No health. No computer class. No woodshop. etc.

Their thinking is that since these kids are WAY behind where they should be, they need more of the important stuff (core “tested” subjects) and less of the non-important stuff (non tested subjects).

Imagine being 12 years old and having to sit through 83 minute core classes all day. And these core classes are just drilling for the standardized bubble test.

Mind-numbing.

Charter schools can hire anyone

In many states these schools can hire anyone off the street as long as they have a bachelor’s degree. In theory, this could be good. There’s a teacher shortage, and there’s plenty of people with a math/science/history/english degree. Why not have these people teach?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like this. Charter schools generally have tough kids. (charters exist in poor neighborhoods – there would be no use for a charter in an area where the public school is good)

Classroom management is 99% of the job. A degree in Math does not prepare you to teach Math to a roomful of 30 low-income kids. New teachers get absolutely shredded by the students in year 1 – guaranteed.

Another downside to hiring anyone with a degree is that they’ve invested nothing in this career. Meaning they’ll teach for a year or two to try it out – then they’ll leave. This ties into the revolving door part of charter schools. Teachers are constantly cycling in and out every year or two.

Teachers have managers

Since school is run like a business here, every teacher has a “manager”. Meaning someone watches you teach 1-3 times per week and grades you on your teaching. You have a performance meeting 1 time per week. They give you “action steps”. They want your questions scripted by the minute for class.

Basically, its exhausting for teachers. This is a huge part of why they leave. The demands are just way too high. The school day is long, you have very little free time, you’re dealing with tough kids, and the pay isn’t great. It’s a ticking time bomb.

Charter schools take money from the local public school

Does it make sense to give out random lottery tickets to kids in a neighborhood, take them away from their local school, and send them to the charter school?

Admission to most charter schools is not merit-based. It’s a lottery system, with preference given to kids who already have older siblings at the school. For every kid in the neighborhood that goes to a charter school, some of their tax money is siphoned away from the local public school toward the charter school.

Public schools have overhead that they need to pay regardless of how many kids they have. Building costs, cafeteria costs, etc. Less money coming from the local students because they’re going to charter schools means less people to share the costs with.

Charter schools have caused a lot of the public schools to shut down on account of not having enough money.

Charters go out of business all the time

Because of the lax regulations, they’re constantly under investigation for embezzlement of public money, breaking rules, etc. Here’s an example.

What happens when a kid goes to school at a charter school til 3rd grade then that school goes out of business? The kid has to find a new school. This kind of chaos is awful for children, and kids who go to charter schools will have to do this multiple times in their K-12 journey.

What do supporters of charter schools say?

Charter schools are not all bad. I’ve read a ton of books written by supporters of charter schools. I myself used to be a massive supporter of charter schools – including most of the time I spent working in them.

Here are some common things said by proponents.

Test scores are higher than the local public school

Sometimes true, sometimes not.

Regardless, my response would be to fix the public school, not siphon off some money to a part private, part publicly funded school and let kids in via lottery. That makes no sense to me.

And even if charters always achieved higher test scores, I would argue that the means that charter schools take to get to this outcome is awful for child development and definitely not worth the creation of these schools. The purpose of school is not to memorize a bunch of information and regurgitate it on a multiple choice test at the end of the year.

Test scores should not be the sole thing that schools optimize for.

Teachers are paid based on performance and not for just showing up

This is a common one. Teachers at charter schools are often evaluated every year based on percentage of students that passed their standardized tests. Teachers who do well are rewarded, teachers who do poorly are not.

Unfortunately, this just turns into a game to maximize your students standardized test scores. It doesn’t matter that your students understand the nuances of compound interest, just that they know how to do this on their TI-84 calculator.

Test taking strategies are taught every day of the year. Every week teachers are compared to their peers based on their students test scores.

What teacher wants to work in an environment like this?

Schools can hire people more freely during teacher shortages

Good in practice, bad in theory. Charter schools have very tough kids, and the chance that someone off the street is going to be able to come into a classroom of 30+ kids and control them enough to have a conducive learning environment is very low.

Every person who has ever taught at a charter school will tell you their first year was absolute chaos in the classroom. It takes time to get classroom management down with a roomful of tough kids.

When you hire an amateur off the street and throw him to the wolves you’re “sacrificing” a year of those kids’ lives. They’ll never get that year back.

Parents aren’t forced to send their kid to the failing public school

This one is totally understandable. A lot of public schools are awful. If I was a parent, I’d want the freedom to send my kid to a charter school if I felt like it was safer, had smaller class sizes, and would prepare my child better for college.

I often rationalize the school choice movement as better for the individual, awful for society. For your kid – it could very well be better. At scale, it can’t work.

The fairest way to fix the education is to fix it for everyone. Not just a select few. You might be happy that your kid won the lottery and got into the charter school, but what about the hundreds of other kids who didn’t?

We need to fix the underlying problem, not put a bandaid on the wound which is what I see charter schools often as.

While most of these things are true, I still don’t think charter schools should be allowed to operate.

If you send your kid to a charter school, you’re taking money away from the local public school – there’s no way around this. A public good should be a public good. Everyone that lives within that area should contribute to the school.

If you want to pay your money to a private school that’s fine. But you don’t get to randomly take your money to a charter and make it harder for everyone else at the public school.

Also, charters are soulless institutions that care about the test and the test only. Kids should not be subjected to this kind of learning.

Teachers are hired with few credentials and leave in a heart beat.

Magnet schools are a different story. At least kids get to merit their way into these schools via their test scores. (Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science in NY) There’s definitely an argument to be made that cities should have at least 1 magnet school for the higher achieving kids.

But that’s not what charter schools are.

What People Don’t Realize About Charter Schools

I think the biggest problem with charter schools is that their inherent purpose is to beat out the neighborhood school on the standardized test. This is literally why they exist. So what do they do? They pour every minute of the school year into optimizing for that multiple choice test.

To summarize, here’s why I think charters are bad.

• they take money from the public school
• they teach directly to the standardized test
• they hire “teachers” who have never taught before and have no training
• they turn the school day into army-style “drill instruction” and make kids hate school and everything that has to do with it

With all this being said, I understand why some people send their kids to these schools. Often times they are better than the neighborhood public school.

What did I get wrong?

Sam