Dumb and Dumber by Matt Palumbo

Author:Matt Palumbo [Palumbo, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642937770
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2020-11-20T14:32:06+00:00

New York City’s War on Education

New York City’s schools are failing, and Bill de Blasio has adamantly condemned the one solution we know for sure works: choice.

De Blasio has launched a war against his city’s charter schools. “I hate the privatizers and I want to stop them,” he told teachers at a union-sponsored education forum in July 2019. “I am angry about the privatizers. I am sick and tired of these efforts to privatize a precious thing we need—public education. I know we’re not supposed to be saying ‘hate’—our teachers taught us not to—I hate the privatizers and I want to stop them,” he said, unaware the charter schools aren’t private schools. “Get away from high-stakes testing, get away from charter schools. No federal funding for charter schools,” he said.160

With opposition like that, you’d assume that the evidence against charter schools was overwhelming, yet the evidence is overwhelming only in proving the opposite.

To start with some context, the National Assessment of Educational Progress test (effectively the “national report card” on the performance of fourth and eighth graders in math, reading, and other subjects) shows that only 32 percent of NYC’s fourth graders in public schools are proficient in math, 27 percent in reading, and 18 percent in science. For eighth graders, the figures are 27 percent for math, 26 percent for reading, and 13 percent for science.161 All these proficiency rates lag the national average for public schools, and large city public schools specifically (though they all have much room for improvement).

With test scores like New York City’s, one might think a mayor would be desperate to try anything to improve them, even if it meant trying something completely new. You’d never expect opposition to the solution we already know works from a mountain of evidence: charter schools.

As a result of the New York Charter Schools Act of 1998, there are now almost three hundred charter schools in New York State. According to a 2017 study on Charter Performance in New York (the entirety of the state, not just NYC) published by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcome:

The analysis shows that in a year’s time, the typical charter school student in New York shows stronger growth in both reading and math compared to the educational gains that the students would have had in a traditional public school (TPS). The findings are statistically significant for both reading and math.

Thinking of a 180-day school year as “one year of learning,” an average New York charter student demonstrates stronger growth equivalent to completing 34 additional days of learning in reading and 63 additional days of learning in math in a year’s time. [emphasis mine] Probing these overall findings, the analysis reveals that certain subgroups exhibit stronger growth than their TPS peers while others do not. Notable growth occurs among Hispanic and Black charter students in poverty, who post stronger growth compared to their counterparts in TPS, during the period of the study.

Overall, over the four growth periods of the study, charter students demonstrate positive growth in both reading and math.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.