Speaking of schools and wisdom

"Conventional" - with usually means right-wing inspired, media-parroted - wisdom for the last several years has had it that our system of public education is horrible, broken, a failure on all counts, and the only issue to be considered is which method of privatization is going to be the most profitable for private busin - er, for the children.

Vouchers, of course, have a history of repeated failures that drain resources from public schools in favor of largely-unaccountable private institutions that can cherry-pick their students - not to mention their repeated violations of church-state separation - and even then they generally show no statistically significant improvement in student performance.

Still, though, there were the charter schools, the ones that could focus on students, focus on learning and discipline, without having to worry about interfering government bureaucrats and teachers' unions. Surely these examples of educational entrepreneurship would point the way to the future.

Not.

Washington, Aug. 16 (New York Times) - The first national comparison of test scores among children in charter schools and regular public schools shows charter school students often doing worse than comparable students in regular public schools.

The findings, buried in mountains of data the Education Department released without public announcement, dealt a blow to supporters of the charter school movement, including the Bush administration.

Which is likely why they were buried instead of being splashed across the headlines and trumpeted in glossy brochures issued by Education Secretary Rod Paige, the man who back in February described the National Education Association as a "terrorist organization." In fact, more than buried, actively hidden:

The new test scores on charter schools went online last November, along with state-by-state results from the national assessment. Though other results were announced at a news conference, with a report highlighting the findings, federal officials never mentioned that the charter school data were publicly available.

Researchers at the American Federation of Teachers were able to gain access to the scores from the national assessment's Web site only indirectly: by gathering results based on how schools identified themselves in response to a question.

The researchers not only made overall comparisons, they broke down the data by three measures of race and ethnicity (black, white, and Hispanic), two of economic status (eligible or not for school lunches), and three of population density (from urban to rural). That's a total of eight comparisons between charter and public school students in both math and reading: a total of 16 comparisons. In 14 of them, public school students outperformed their charter school counterparts.

The results, of course, did not actually move charter school proponents, who simply spun faster than they had before, when a good number of charter schools were forced to close amid charges of questionable finances and poor performance. For example, despite admitting the charter school students' scores are "dismayingly low," Chester E. Finn Jr., a supporter of charters and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, excused the results on the grounds that the quality of charter schools varies. He insisted the results should be seen as "baseline data." Meanwhile,

[s]upporters of charter schools said the data confirmed earlier research suggesting that charters take on children who were already performing below average. "We're doing so much to help kids that are so much farther behind, and who typically weren't even continuing in school," said Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, in Washington, which represents charter schools. She said the results reflect only "a point in time," and said nothing about the progress of students in charter schools.

But of course the results do not in any way show that charter schools tend to take on struggling students. You can only say that if you assume that charters offer a superior educational experience as compared to public schools - and since that's exactly the point in contention, that's exactly what you can't say.

What we can say is that charter schools have not shown themselves to be an improvement over traditional public education. At the same time, they do function as a means to undermine the principle of community, the notion of a shared responsibility, each to the welfare of the whole and the whole to the welfare of each. They turn education into just another commodity in the marketplace, something else to be bought and sold, another means to enrich some private company skilled at making elaborate claims.

Yes, there are excellent charter schools, usually community-based nonprofit ones. But there are also excellent public schools. If we're not to judge the success or failure of public education only by the best of them, neither can we judge charter schools by the excellence of the handful. They must be judged by the whole - and on that basis and applying their own standard, they have failed.