An op-ed in the Baltimore Sun calls on Marylanders to enact bottom-up education reform, since top-down reform hasn’t worked. Our response, detailing a few things our great schools are doing, is found below.
George W Liebmann, the volunteer executive director of the Calvert Institute for Policy Research in Maryland, is the author. He thinks Maryland public schools should upgrade their thinking about education reform and make better use of reform-minded ideas, including
- charter schools
- long-distance learning
- flipped classrooms
- alternative teacher certification
The argument Mr Liebmann presents leaves out several important facts that have been published in peer-reviewed journals. Some are mentioned in our response.
Charter schools
Mr Liebmann claims Maryland has “the nation’s weakest charter school law.” I believe some people would argue it has the “strongest” charter school law, but this is simply a matter of opinion.
The original intention of charter school laws was to strengthen the public schools by creating competition. A 2002 article in the Harvard Business Review shows that creating charter schools via corporate philanthropy can enhance contributions to one’s community and result in a higher-quality education product through competition, even in nearby public schools. “As long as companies remain focused on the public relations benefit of their contributions, they will sacrifice opportunities to create social value,” wrote Michael E Porter and Mark R Kramer.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of today’s charter schools don’t sacrifice any opportunity to make money, even if it means causing harm to the education of students at the school. Many students drop out of charter schools, and charter schools close quickly so they can run away with the money, making it nearly impossible for districts to recover per-pupil dollars sent to the charter schools for children they are no longer educating.
Furthermore, four charter schools in Maryland—the Chesapeake Math and IT Academy, the Chesapeake Math and IT Academy North aka CMIT Elementary, the Chesapeake Math and IT Academy South, and the Chesapeake Science Point in Hanover—are all affiliated with the Gulen charter school movement.
One commentator on these pages wrote that “the Gulen Movement continues to extract millions of US taxpayer money intended to educate children, grants, and loans. They must be stopped, I am no fan of Erdogan but many theorize Erdogan” may be able to dismantle the Gulen Movement if he “is around long enough.”
What the Gulen Movement allegedly does in at least some of its schools is to take money that is supposed to be used for the education of Maryland students and send it to Turkey to support an Islamist campaign to take over the government or turn Turkey into a nation that follows Sharia law.
Whatever money we do send to schools, even charter schools, should be used to run those schools, not to overthrow the government of Turkey.
Of course, not all charter schools are corrupt, but the huge amount of money they receive from the taxpayers of Maryland could very easily get abused and misused.
Long-distance learning
Scathing exposés of for-profit cyber-charters, like those run by Virginia-based K12 Inc, have been published by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. These aren’t the most conservative papers, but evidence of the mismanagement of the learning process is undeniable, regardless of politics.
On top of that, several states have enacted a moratorium on virtual charter schools, including Illinois, as we reported after an attempt by K12 to open one revealed how little these companies know about educating children.
A study published by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado and another by Stanford University (the well-known CREDO study from Pennsylvania) both show that students in cyber-charters get lower test scores, graduate less frequently, and are more likely to drop out and return to their local public school.
When they return to a public school, the money often stays with the cyber-charter. So these schools, except those that serve a small percentage of special-needs students who truly need one-on-one attention at home, as we documented with the help of a parent of a student at the Iowa Connections Academy, here, can list as their only innovation that they generate a lower-quality education for students and higher profits for their investors.
As we reported, cyber-charters wouldn’t be able to make enough money to stay open if the only students who enrolled were those who could benefit from that arrangement. That’s one of the reasons we’d be wrong to eliminate these schools entirely and the biggest reason they need to focus on their contribution to our communities, not on profit.
Flipped classrooms
This is not an innovation. It is kids and teachers using technology to its fullest advantage. Several educators, in several real schools, even in Maryland, flip their classrooms all the time.
Alternative teacher certification
As with the charter school idea, alternative teacher certification has become corrupt, as it has deviated so much from its initial goals that it is barely recognizable.
Take, for example, Teach For America. What a great idea, right? Make a contract with teachers to serve underserved communities for at least two years, and (a) get those students a great education and (b) end teacher shortages, especially in fields like math, science, and special education, where key shortages exist in perpetuity.
Well, neither (a) nor (b) has actually happened. Writes Gary Rubinstein, who served in the very first class of TFA:
Joining the 2015 TFA corps is a terrible mistake. Two years from now everyone will know this, but right now TFA has managed to get a few last lies out of their well-oiled PR machine and lure a few more unsuspecting kids into their trap. But here’s the problem with TFA: They are a bunch of self-serving liars and anyone who joins up with them is an accomplice to any of the damage that this lying results in.
How do these well-meaning organizations become so corrupt? Money, of course. The TFA organization receives a finder’s fee for every teacher they send a district, and districts aren’t just using them for underserved schools. It turns out, it’s cheaper for districts to pay TFA’s finder’s fee than it is to recruit and hire actual teachers.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a strong believer in alternative paths to teacher certification. No one should be restricted for the rest of their lives based on a career choice they made at age 19. However, I’m not in favor of fast-track, abbreviated, or shortcut paths to teacher certification.
If someone really cares about teaching, then they will put in the time necessary to receive the training their colleagues will have so they can join them in the proper way. They will receive at least some training in the art of collaboration, the art of cooperation among peers, to improve performance, and they’ll put competition in its proper place.
These programs exist in Maryland, supported by public school districts, but there’s no doubt TFA has a much bigger microphone, courtesy of its PR machine.
