Eva Moskowitz is a former New York City councilwoman who now runs the Success Academy Charter Schools, a network of twenty-two schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx serving some 6,700 children. I first met Moskowitz in 2003 when she was still a member of the city council. She headed its education committee, and decided to hold four days of hearings on what she described as the “indefensible” teachers’-union contracts that govern K–12 education in New York. My editor suggested that I interview her and sit in on the hearings. The local union, headed by Weingarten at the time, tried to stop the hearings, even though the city council had no power to change any work rules. Since Moskowitz wouldn’t back down, however, the union made it clear to its members that they shouldn’t cooperate. “I reached out to dozens and dozens [of teachers and principals] to talk about work rules and ask them about their ability to do their job,” Moskowitz told me. People were willing to talk to her privately, but she found that requests to testify at the hearing were met with disbelief. The responses ranged from “Are you kidding?” to “I’m not that brave” to “I might be blacklisted.” The upshot was that most of those who did appear at the hearings had their voices disguised and their names withheld. It was like watching a mob trial. My editorial was titled “Witness Protection for Teachers.”21
Two years later Moskowitz would leave the city council and, in 2006, open her first school, Success Academy Harlem I, with 165 kindergarten and first-grade pupils. Within a few years the students—almost all black and Hispanic kids from low-income families—were outperforming not only their peers in traditional public schools but also white students in posh suburbs. Success Academy Harlem I, which selects students by lottery, shares a building with PS 149, one of the city’s better traditional public schools. Both schools serve kids from the same racial and economic background in classes that have approximately the same number of students (the charter school’s class sizes are slightly larger). But the similarities end there. In 2009, 29 percent of students at PS 149 were performing at grade level in reading and 34 percent were at grade level in math. At Harlem 1—literally across the hall—the corresponding figures were 86 percent and 94 percent.22 Ninety-seven percent of Harlem I’s students passed the state exam that year, ranking it in the top one percent of all New York state public schools. Naturally these results, and her efforts to open more schools to better serve more of the city’s disadvantaged kids, made Eva Moskowitz a major enemy of the New York City’s education establishment.
Democracy Prep is another charter-school network that excels at teaching disadvantaged kids. It too opened its doors in Harlem in 2006 and also shared building space with a traditional public school. The results were even more shocking. “We both opened with six grades and about one hundred kids, though we had more special-ed children and English language learners,” Seth Andrew, Democracy Prep’s founder, once told me. “After two years in the same building with the same kids on the same floor, this school was the lowest-performing school in Harlem and we were the highest-performing school in Harlem.”
Moskowitz and Andrew like to talk about test scores. So do other high-performing charter-school operators, such as David Levin and Mike Feinberg of KIPP and Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone. That’s understandable, given their ability to improve outcomes among groups that many traditional public schools have given up on. But charter-school parents also appreciate the safer learning environment. The father of an eighth grader at Democracy Prep told me that he had pulled his son out of the district school two years earlier because of regular bullying that once left the boy hospitalized. “I just happened to get a flyer about Democracy Prep soon after that,” he told me. “We entered the admissions lottery and got accepted. I didn’t know anything about charters. I was just looking for an escape.” He said that students at Democracy Prep are told to cross the street before walking past the district school down the block “to avoid, literally, raining textbooks—books being throw out of the school at them. That’s the school my son is zoned for. If he wasn’t in Democracy Prep, that’s the school he’d be in—the school with the book throwers!”
Liberals who claim to care so much about underprivileged blacks not only relegate them to the worst performing schools, but also the most violent schools. The Obama administration has chastised schools for disciplining black kids at higher rates than white kids, as if racial parity in disciplinary outcomes is more important than safety. Such thinking also assumes that the suspensions reflect racial animus rather than simply which kids are acting out. But if statistical outcomes prove discrimination, what explains the fact that Asians are disciplined at lower rates than whites? Are the schools also anti-white? Liberals do no favors for blacks kids who are in school to learn by sympathizing with black kids who are in school to make trouble.
Charter-school opponents insist that the schools’ superior results come from turning away kids who are more difficult to teach. “Union critics of charter schools and their supporters have repeatedly asserted that schools like Harlem Success ‘skim’ from the community’s most intelligent students and committed families, or that they teach fewer learning-challenged or impoverished students and fewer students who are English-language learners” wrote journalist Steven Brill. “None of the actual data supports this.”23
The best charter studies are those that use randomized experiments, which nullify self-selection bias by only comparing the kids who attend charters with those who entered the lottery but didn’t win a spot. These studies, conducted by Stanford University’s Caroline Hoxby, Harvard University’s Thomas Kane, and the Rand Corporation, among others, have found that charter students score significantly higher on math and reading tests and are much more likely to graduate from high school and attend college.24 A Hoxby study of New York City found that the typical charter-school student, who tends to be black and poor, is closing the achievement gap not only with his white urban peers but also with children in wealthy New York suburbs like Scarsdale. “On average,” Hoxby concluded, “a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86 percent of the ‘Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap’ in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English.”25
When Ron Zimmer of Vanderbilt University and Cassandra Guarino of Indiana University looked at data from “an anonymous major urban school district to examine whether we see exit patterns consistent with the claim that charter schools are more likely to push out low-achieving students than traditional public schools,” they found “no empirical evidence to support the notion of push-out.” If anything, wrote the authors, what they found “suggests that low-performing students are more likely to transfer out of a [traditional public school] than a charter school.”26
When Marcus Winters of the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, looked at the special-education enrollment discrepancy between charter and traditional public schools, he found no evidence of charter-school bias against kids with disabilities. Instead, he found that children with special needs were less likely to apply to charter schools, and that traditional public schools were more likely to classify children as special-needs cases.
The gap in special education rates between charter and traditional public schools grows considerably as students progress from kindergarten through third grade. A large part (80 percent) of the growth in this gap over time is that charter schools are less likely than district schools to classify students as in need of special education services and more likely to declassify them. . . . the results do not suggest that charter schools are refusing to admit or are pushing out students with special needs. In fact, more students with previously identified disabilities enter charter schools than exit them as they progress through elementary grade levels.27
Other research provides clues as to why traditional schools are more likely than charters to classify a student as learning-disabled. A 2002 paper by Jay Greene and Greg Forster found that “33 states and the District of Columbia had ‘bounty’ f
unding systems, which create financial incentives to place children in special education.” Greene and Forster also discovered “a statistically significant positive relationship between bounty funding systems and growth in special education enrollment.”28
Of course, what allows charter schools to be so effective is their ability to operate outside of union rules that put the well-being of teachers ahead of students. “The Harlem Success teachers’ contract drives home the idea that the school is about the children, not the grown-ups,” wrote Steven Brill.
It is one page, allows them to be fired at will, and defines their responsibilities no more specifically than that they must help the school achieve its mission. . . . The union contract in place on the public school side of the building is 167 pages. Most of it is about job protection and what teachers can and cannot be asked to do during the 6 hours and 57.5 minutes (8:30 to about 3:25, with 50 minutes off for lunch) of their 179-day work year.29
Union leaders sometimes claim that they welcome charter schools, and that may be true to the extent that they can organize them. But their actions more often than not betray an antipathy for school choice. Unions in New York first tried to prevent the state from passing a charter law. When that failed, they focused on making the law as weak as possible, primarily by capping the number of such schools that could exist. Even after charter schools in the state had demonstrated their ability to educate low-income minorities, the teachers’ unions didn’t give up their fight.
In 2009 New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein announced that they were closing two persistently failing public schools in Harlem and replacing them with high-performing charters. Randi Weingarten went to war. “The schools Weingarten aimed to keep open were PS 194 and 241, notorious low performers that had both received Ds on their district report cards and, of course, were operated by members of Weingarten’s union,” wrote Terry Moe.
Parents, voting with their feet, were avoiding these two schools in droves. PS 194 had space for 628 students, but enrolled only 288. PS 241 had space for 1,007 students, but enrolled only 310. Most parents clearly did not want their kids in those schools. The district’s plan was to replace them with new charters run by Harlem Success, whose existing, nearby charters had achieved spectacular academic results. Parent desperately wanted to get their kids into these Harlem Success schools: the previous year, some 6,000 students applied for just 500 available seats.30
The teachers’ unions filed a lawsuit to keep children in Harlem’s failing schools. This scenario has played out across the country, from New York to Philadelphia to Chicago to Sacramento. After numerous interventions—more money, new curriculum, staff changes—reformers move to close persistently failing schools, and unions fight to keep them open. Again, if your goal is to do what is best for children, you steer them to schools that succeed. But if you are the teachers’ unions and believe that the primary purpose of public schools is to employ your members, then you keep children trapped in the schools where your members work, and you fight to keep those schools open regardless of their quality. After all, bad teachers in bad schools still pay dues.
An even more effective reform for the urban poor that unions fight tooth and nail is the school voucher program, which allows parents to send their children to schools entirely outside the reach of the AFT and NEA. There is no disputing the fact that poor black kids who attend religious or nonsectarian institutions via vouchers perform better than their peers in traditional public schools. But that hasn’t stopped liberal opposition. President Obama speaks often about the importance of staying in school, and has even urged states to raise the dropout age. At the same time he has repeatedly tried to shut down a voucher program in Washington, D.C., that serves poor minorities and produces significantly higher graduation rates than both D.C. public schools and the national average.
“President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address that teenagers be compelled to remain in school until they turn 18 or graduate,” wrote Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas in 2012. “Who needs such Big-Brother-like compulsion? When the government provides more students with access to private schools through vouchers the kids stay in school willingly.” Wolf is the U.S. Department of Education’s independent evaluator of the D.C. voucher program. In 2009 the nation’s fifty largest cities had an average high-school graduation rate of 53 percent.31 But in a study published the next year, Wolf found that the D.C. voucher recipients had graduation rates of 91 percent, versus 56 percent for D.C. public schools and 70 percent for students who entered the lottery for a voucher but didn’t win one. At a Senate hearing about the voucher program, officially known as the Opportunity Scholarship Program, Wolf testified that “we can be more than 99 percent confident that access to school choice through the Opportunity Scholarship Program, and not mere statistical noise, was the reason why OSP students graduated at these higher rates.”32
Nor is Washington, D.C., the only place where access to vouchers has improved the likelihood that a minority will finish twelfth grade. A study of Milwaukee’s older and larger voucher program showed a 94 percent graduation rate among students who stayed in the program throughout high school, versus a 75 percent graduation rate for their peers in the city’s public schools. Not that the argument for vouchers rests entirely on high-school graduation rates. Voucher recipients have better test scores, and a 2013 study found that vouchers boosted college enrollment for blacks by 24 percent.33 Moreover, it’s less expensive to educate children using vouchers (and charter schools), which is a boon to taxpayers. And the competition from voucher programs can push traditional public schools to improve. Thus school choice indirectly benefits even those kids who don’t exercise it. Education scholar Greg Forster has surveyed the large and growing body of empirical voucher studies, and summarized the key findings this way:
•Twelve empirical studies have examined academic outcomes for school choice participants using random assignment, the “gold standard” of social science. Of these, 11 find that choice improves student outcomes—six that all students benefit and five that some benefit and some are not affected. One study finds no visible impact. No empirical study has found a negative impact.
•Twenty-three empirical studies (including all methods) have examined school choice’s impact on academic outcomes in public schools. Of these, 22 find that choice improves public schools and one finds no visible impact. No empirical study has found that choice harms public schools.
•Six empirical studies have examined school choice’s fiscal impact on taxpayers. All six find that school choice saves money for taxpayers. No empirical study has found a negative fiscal impact.
•Eight empirical studies have examined school choice and racial segregation in schools. Of these, seven find that school choice moves students from more segregated schools into less segregated schools. One finds no net effect on segregation from school choice. No empirical study has found that choice increases racial segregation.34
When he ran for president in 2008 and was asked about school vouchers, Obama said that if he were presented with evidence that they improve outcomes, he would “not allow my predispositions to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn . . . you do what works for the kids.” In fact, his administration has ignored scholars like Forster to placate teachers’ unions, and has even sat on evidence of voucher success.35 In 2013 the Justice Department sued to block a school-choice program in Louisiana that provides vouchers to poor kids to attend private institutions. Some 90 percent of the voucher recipients are black, and 86 percent of them formerly attended schools that received a D or F grade from the state. No matter. Justice argued that allowing children to leave these awful schools could make the public-school system less white in composition and hamper school desegregation efforts. Got that? To the Obama administration, the racial balance of a school is more important than whether anyone is learning.
Even if the administration’s claim that school choice “
frustrates and impedes the desegregation process” had merit, you might still question the logic of trying to help black people by consigning their children to the worst schools. But the claim is questionable at best, according to evidence that voucher opponents willfully ignore. Politico reported that
Louisiana hired Boston University political science Professor Christine Rossell to analyze the effect of vouchers in 34 districts in the state under desegregation orders. Rossell found that in all but four of the districts—some of which are majority white, some majority black and some more evenly split—vouchers improved or had no effect on racial imbalance. And in the districts where racial imbalance worsened, the effects were “miniscule.”36
A separate study out of the University of Arkansas also undermined the notion that school choice reduces integration. “The evidence suggests that use of private school vouchers by low-income students actually has positive effects on racial integration,” wrote Anna Egalite and Jonathan Mills.
Among the subset of students for whom data are available, we find that transfers made possible by the school-choice program overwhelmingly improve integration in the public schools that students leave (the sending schools), bringing the racial composition of the schools closer to that of the broader communities in which they are located.37
Voucher opponents say they want to fix the public schools to help all kids, not just those lucky enough to get a voucher. But that’s an argument for expanding, rather than limiting, school choice. And while the president and others urge poor people to sit tight until those bad schools are fixed, they themselves typically show no such patience. Obama sent his own children to private schools both before and after he became president. Bill Clinton, another anti-voucher president, also shielded his daughter from Washington’s public schools. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, one of the fiercest opponents of the D.C. voucher program, chose private schools for his children. Even the late Ted Kennedy, considered Congress’s greatest defender of public education for decades, “never found a public school good enough for his own children,” wrote Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute. Kennedy’s opposition to school choice had nothing to do with whether children were better off. Rather, it was “good politics,” said Stern.
Please Stop Helping Us_How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed Page 12