Yesterday brought the official release of a much-hyped and professionally leaked "study" of U.S. charter schools by the American Federation of Teachers, timed to coincide with the union's convention in Las Vegas.
In a word, it reeks.
It reeks of error, distortion and untruth about charter schools, how they're working, what effects they're having, what we know about them. It also reeks of politics and self-interest. But why expect otherwise? As Lawrence Patrick of the Black Alliance for Educational Options remarked, "An AFT study on charter schools has about as much credibility as a Philip Morris study on smoking." Everybody knows that the teacher unions find both their monopoly and their memberships threatened by an education reform that focuses on independently operated (and staffed) schools that compete for students, money and teachers. The bigger the charter movement has grown, the more threatened they feel. This "study" illustrates one way of containing that threat.
What's dismaying is that some people take the AFT seriously when it declaims on education policy issues. There were grounds for that response when Al Shanker was in charge. Today, there are far fewer, and none at all in the increasing number of policy domains-charters being a prime example-where the AFT is driven by politics rather than by education.
Every place across the land where the AFT has a presence, its state and local affiliates are doing their utmost to maim and kill the charter school movement. This has been true for years. Ask any legislator or governor. (Increasingly, you could also ask judges, as the latest tactic-in Ohio, for example-is to ask the courts to quash a charter law that elected officials seem disposed to keep.) Wherever there's a push to re-regulate charter schools into pale facsimiles of conventional public schools, you find the union's fingerprints. Wherever there's a move to "cap" the number of charters, the union is involved. Wherever there's an effort to take money away from them, the union is lurking. Wherever there's a campaign to elect to candidates bent on throttling the charter idea, the union is at work.
The union wants to kill off charter schools. Where it cannot do that, it wants to contain them in the smallest possible box with the maximum possible rules. That's its agenda.
This is true of both teacher unions, to be sure. The difference is that the NEA wouldn't have the chutzpa (or brains) to issue a "study" of charter schools and pretend that it's objective. Nor does the NEA have a track record of respectable policy analysis.
The AFT, however, can trade on its track record, which over the years has included solid reports on issues (e.g. state standards, reading instruction, core curriculum) where its agenda is pro-reform. This legacy traces to long-time AFT leader Shanker, an undisputed education reformer and statesman, who hired able people, gave provocative talks, wrote interesting articles and columns, launched a first rate magazine and had his organization issue some insightful reports on serious education issues. (Partly because of that history, Bill Clinton's Education Department lavished money on the AFT to study, among other things, charter schools. No doubt Uncle Sam thereby subsidized this squalid report!)
In Shanker's day, the AFT had a split personality. Al and his Washington team engaged in reformist pursuits even as the union's state and local affiliates (with a tiny number of happy exceptions) were busily subverting every sort of reform, including many of those that Shanker championed.
The subversion process continues. Without Shanker at the helm, however, the union's Washington apparatus has now been enlisted in it. This new "study" is a case in point.
Authorless-a hallmark of Sandy Feldman's regime is that no AFT staff member gets public credit-and glossy, with beguiling photos and the trappings of scholarship, it's simply a hatchet job on charter schools. Though it purports to review a decade of research, in fact it chooses its material from the most critical studies and harps on problems rather than accomplishments. Its conclusion-that policy makers ought to cease any charter-school expansion "until more convincing evidence of their effectiveness or viability is presented"-is precisely the opposite of that reached in the recent RAND review of research on charters (and vouchers), namely that the evidence to date is so spotty that further experimentation is essential before any policy guidance can confidently be drawn. (Rhetoric vs. Reality: What We Know and What We Need to Know about Vouchers and Charter Schools)
But further experimentation with charters (as with vouchers) would threaten the AFT's self-interest. So it couldn't be the conclusion of an AFT "study" of this topic even if it's the conclusion that any objective analyst would reach.
This "study" trifles with the truth. It stretches the facts about charter-school enrollments (which are more heavily minority and low-income than their states' student populations). It fibs about charter-school finances (which in most jurisdictions are far lower than the per-pupil allotments of conventional schools). It simply lies about charter-school innovation and experimentation (much of which involves staffing, compensation, and management, areas where the AFT does not want anything to change). It fudges about school accountability. It is disingenuous about the effects that charter competition is having on regular public schools-as yet, few places have enough charters to pose much competition-and it selectively reports the data on student achievement. No, we oughtn't be content with overall charter performance, but there are some stellar schools, some states where the charter results surpass those of regular public schools, and numerous situations where-considering that most of these school are just 2-3 years old-it's way premature to draw firm conclusions about their instructional effectiveness. (Some serious research indicates, for example, that new schools often have an achievement drop at the outset but make it up-and more-once they get a few years under their belts.)
Then there is the overt and implicit "spin." Consider this sentence (from page 58): "Of the more than 2,327 [charter] schools that have opened, only 206 have closed." The reader is supposed to think "Good grief, why so few?" To me, however, it says that, within a single decade, the accountability mechanisms bearing on charter schools have produced a closure rate of 9 percent. How does that compare with the closure rate of failed schools in such AFT-ruled systems as New York, Philadelphia and Chicago?
Which brings us to the most distressing part. The Education Department recently estimated that some 8900 public schools in the United States are already-today-subject to the NCLB provision that says they're so ineffective, and have been for so long, that their students have the right to exit for other schools. Because of establishment lobbying, however, much of it by the AFT, Congress only assured these youngsters the right to transfer to other public schools in their own districts, INCLUDING charter schools. Not to other districts. Certainly not to private schools.
I don't know about you, dear reader, but most of the failed schools I know are located in districts where there aren't a heckuva lot of successful public schools with space for those kids to transfer into. That leaves charter schools as the only other option under federal law. Now the AFT would halt their spread, too.
Coincidence? Hardly. Politics is politics and organizational self-interest must be assumed. What's disgusting is to see it masquerading as disinterested research. And to see people taken in by it.
"Do Charter Schools Measure Up? The Charter School Experiment After 10 Years," American Federation of Teachers, July 2002
