Every election year, the dismal state of our public school system suddenly becomes an urgent problem. But increasingly, the terms "choice," "competition," and "innovation" are obfuscating the basic decisions: Will we provide a good educational system for all our children, or just create safety valves for those few eager and able to escape it? Will we foster learning, critical thinking and whole-child development, or produce test-takers? Will we, as a community, take proper responsibility for our children’s education, or will we find easier targets for "accountability?"

This year, three of the four mayoral candidates have focused on charter schools as bold innovations. Mayor Tom Menino, who always opposed charters as a financial drain, now supports nominal "charters" (de-unionizing and pay-per-score in the lowest-performing schools) now that they draw federal money. Michael Flaherty wants to eliminate the charter cap and "allow money to follow the child" (will vouchers for private schools be a logical extension?). Sam Yoon wants to lift the cap only on the "good" charters, so they can expand to accept their wait-list students and give more families a choice.

Boston’s charters serve about 5,000 students; about 7,000 are on waiting lists. There are about 56,000 students in the public school system. Oddly, none of the candidates proposes to do what the charter "model" was supposed to do: find out exactly what makes "excellence" and diffuse it into the general system so that all children have a good choice. Instead, they simply want to make more of them.

Unfortunately, charter schools are not a systemic solution. Not only because they may be part of a strategy for privatization, union-busting, standardization and corporatization of education and other public services. Not only because they may, at some financial tipping point, lead to the collapse and dismantling of the public school system. Not because they may devalue and de-professionalize teaching and teachers, as well as the concept of collective bargaining, which created America’s middle class. Not only because they may produce regimented, docile test-takers, and create incentives for both teachers and students to cheat in various ways to reap the rewards of test-score "performance." Not only because the application-based process may "cherry-pick" students supported by motivated and involved parents (the oft-cited Boston Foundation study showing superior performance of charter attendees vs. comparable wait-list lottery-losers attending public schools acknowledges its flaw-it includes only the better charters that have wait lists), and, as Menino himself said in his recent Left Ahead blog interview, they can keep the successful students while sending others back to public school.

The problem ultimately is scalability. Many national, state and city studies have found that charter schools, as a whole, aren’t better than "traditional" public schools; they vary in quality, and some are actually worse. And the charters that form the enthusiastic lore of miraculous excellence are not really scalable; that is, they can’t be replicated to become the whole system. There are almost 4,600 charters in the U.S., according to the Center for Educational Reform website. A March 2009 report, "Success at Scale in Charter Schooling," by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a strong charter advocate, states that about two hundred high-performing schools nationwide are the "bright lights" of the charter school movement, including only seven of Boston’s 17 charters. And these excellent "no excuses" schools depend on teachers of which there is a small pool: young, highly educated and willing-usually, for a limited period-to devote extraordinary hours and effort to the Herculean task of rehabbing disadvantaged children. Not enough such teachers will be available-even if we decide to de-professionalize teaching, and make it a resume-brightener for a rotating crop of young people before they burn out or start a family or head for more rewarding career ladders. The competition for such teachers is fierce already, as the study points out, and we are unlikely to lure many future Ivy League-ish graduates into careers of teaching like this.

The AEI’s answer to expanding charters without such super-teachers is to "manage" teaching by buying packaged proprietary materials and practices so standardized and "teacher-proof" that anyone can administer them. (The author has not yet answered my e-mail questioning how this robotic teaching can be the substitute for super-teaching.) The majority of charters would thus feature large classes with low-skill, low-paid staff. The worst-case, long-term scenario is a patchwork of inner-city test-score factories, heavily subsidized by various state, local and federal funds; a small percentage of "bright light" charters would continue to carry the banner while the majority of students sit in 50-student classes, strictly disciplined, and drilled to perform on the tests that provide that all-important "accountability." When everyone who wants a charter has one, charters won’t be what they wanted.

Using charters as an experiment to improve education for all was, I conclude, never really a goal. The Boston Foundation report on charter superiority says: "...our study is not designed to uncover why or how Charter Schools and Pilot Schools might change test scores. Rather we focus on the narrower though still important question of whether different types of schools produce significant achievement gains." It doesn’t try to identify the replicable reasons for charter performance. If we really want to know, we should randomly assign students to charters and public schools and require student retention through graduation, to eliminate the skewing variables.

But we have some excellent traditional public schools. Why don’t we figure out what’s working there and apply those features throughout the system? The Boston Foundation report found, "...the estimated effect of a year spent in a Charter School remains positive and often quite similar to the estimated effect of a year spent in an exam school," which is taught by union teachers. Menino, Flaherty and Yoon send their kids/grandchildren to public schools, not to the charters they are advocating. What is it that works there?

Our goal should be to provide a decent education for the vast majority of our children, and not just a lucky few. The underlying reason for the "achievement gap" is poverty. So instead of more exceptionalism -- METCO, charters, elite missionaries in our very own "third world"-let’s face the real causes of the wealth and opportunity gap, the "hope gap," and remedy that, in the bigger framework of employment, housing, transportation, business assistance, etc. When we succeed, charters will be unnecessary. Until then, let’s look honestly at the educational and social services our children need to cross the gap, and give it to them-comprehensively, universally, and very early in their lives. I know we have the money. Do we have the will?

Shirley Kressel

Published in South End News