Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, wanted to find alternative ways to educate disengaged students. In his vision of charters, teachers would bring their plan to their colleagues and their district for approval. The new charter school, as he saw it, would seek out and enroll the most difficult-to-educate students, the dropouts, and those at risk of dropping out. The teachers in the charter would be free to make up their own curriculum and try whatever they thought might work. They would share whatever they learned with their colleagues in the regular public school.
As I described in chapter 16, Shanker turned against the charter concept in 1993, when he realized that it was embraced by conservative governors and would advance privatization.
How can charters now work for the common good instead of competing with public schools for students, for facilities, and for resources? How can they collaborate instead of driving into bankruptcy the public schools that educate the great majority of students?
The answer lies in the charter schools’ origins.
Imagine the following changes in state laws.
First, no public school should be operated for profit. At present, for-profit corporations compete to lower costs, and they do this by replacing experienced teachers with inexperienced teachers and by replacing teachers with computer instruction. The primary goal of a for-profit organization is to maximize profit, not to produce great education. Tax dollars for education should be spent entirely on the operation of schools and the provision of instruction and school activities. Not a penny should go to pay investors or stockholders. Certainly, some tax revenues will necessarily go to profit-making corporations that sell supplies and services to schools, but the schools themselves should always be operated as nonprofits.
Second, charter schools should be managed by local educators and nonprofit organizations, not by charter chains. They should be stand-alone, community-based schools designed and managed by parents, teachers, and members of the local community for the children of that district. They should not be run like Walmart or Target. By allowing schools to operate like chain stores, states have encouraged a chain-store mentality, with standardized management and standardized practices, run from another city or state. Schooling is not a commodity that can be packaged and distributed across the nation, a standard product that is not responsive to individual children and local needs. The ideal charter school would be created by the community, to serve the community, reflecting the goals and needs of the community.
Third, charter schools would still be privately managed with a private board of directors, as at present, but the salaries of charter school principals and executives should be aligned with those of local district principals and superintendents. This would eliminate the practice of paying exorbitant executive salaries and would eliminate charter leaders who have a pecuniary interest. It would keep the focus where it should be, on creating a superior and innovative educational program that serves a public purpose, not on cashing in with public funding.
Fourth, state law should closely regulate online virtual charter schools to provide oversight for recruitment practices, attrition rates, misrepresentation, and quality. The reimbursement of virtual charter schools should be reduced to reflect their actual costs of instruction; when students leave the online school in midyear, their funding should follow them to their next school. For-profit schools would be banned, and salaries would be regulated to prevent fraud and abuse. Students who wish to enroll in an online school should be interviewed by guidance counselors and have legitimate reasons for home instruction.
Fifth, a significant proportion of charter schools should enroll and educate the children who are not succeeding in public school, for whatever reason. They should seek out and recruit dropouts or children with behavioral problems or students with special needs whose parents do not want them to be mainstreamed, such as those with profound autism or profound deafness. Charter schools would explore new ways to educate these students. They should develop strategies and curricula to benefit all schools and regularly share what they have learned. If charter schools sought to enroll the neediest students, they would become an integral part of public education and a valued partner of public schools. Instead of fighting with each other over space and resources, the two sectors would have a common goal of educating all children well and a genuine basis for shared responsibility.
These changes are far removed from where we are now. But as the facts on the ground change, our laws can change to adapt to what we have learned and what we hope to accomplish. Charter schools and public schools should not compete; they should work together. Charters can be redesigned to serve the common good. Together, public schools and charter schools can collaborate to pursue equal educational opportunity.
CHAPTER 27
Wraparound Services Make a Difference
SOLUTION NO. 6 Provide the medical and social services that poor children need to keep up with their advantaged peers.
Nearly one of every four children in the United States lives in poverty. This is a far higher proportion than in any other advanced nation. There are children of all racial and ethnic backgrounds who live in poverty, but a disproportionate number are black and Hispanic. One of the main goals of educational and social policy is the narrowing of the gap between children who are advantaged and those who are disadvantaged. School reformers in our era believe that we can “fix” the schools before doing anything directly about poverty, but there is no precedent in history for their belief.
If we don’t act to remedy the social and economic conditions that cause disadvantage, we are unlikely to see any large-scale change in the achievement gaps. While the test scores of poor, black, and Hispanic students have increased in the past twenty years or more and are now at a historical high point, the gaps remain stubbornly large. The gaps are caused by handicapping conditions associated with poverty and grow larger when children from impoverished circumstances attend schools that lack the personnel, resources, programs, and curricula to meet their needs. Other nations have figured out how to remedy or ameliorate or change the conditions in children’s lives so that they are likely to grow up healthy and ready to learn. They make sure that children get off to a good start in life before they begin formal schooling. We pay lip service to the goal but skimp on implementation. In 1990, the nation’s governors and the U.S. Department of Education endorsed an ambitious set of national goals, and the first goal was that by the year 2000 all children would be “ready to learn.” We did not meet that goal, and it is now long forgotten. But the unaddressed needs remain.
In a projection of the feasibility of reducing the achievement gaps, Tamara Wilder, Whitney Allgood, and Richard Rothstein summarized the handicaps that poor children live with daily:
Low-income children often have no routine or preventive medical, dental or optometric care, resulting in more school absences as a result of illness and even an inability to see well enough to read. Children in low-income families are more prone to asthma, resulting in more sleeplessness, irritability, and lack of exercise, as well as poorer attendance. Children born to low-income mothers have lower birth weight as well as more lead poisoning and iron deficiency anemia, each of which leads to diminished cognitive ability, more behavioral problems and more special education placement. Their families frequently fall behind in rent and move, so children switch schools more often, losing continuity of instruction. Poor children are, in general, not read to aloud as often or exposed to complex language and large vocabularies in their homes, so they begin school far behind in verbal ability, reasoning skills, and reading readiness. Their parents have low-wage jobs and are more frequently laid off, causing family stress that often leads to more arbitrary discipline at home and “acting out” in school. The neighborhoods through which these children walk to school and in which they play have more crime and drugs and fewer adult role models with professional careers. Children whose mothers are poorly educated are more often in single-parent fa
milies and so get less adult attention. They have fewer cross-country trips, visits to museums and zoos, music or dance lessons, and organized sports leagues to develop their ambition, cultural awareness, and self-confidence.1
A previous chapter reviewed the importance of providing good prenatal care to every pregnant woman to avoid the consequences of preterm births, such as lower birth weight and diminished cognitive ability. Another chapter showed the necessity of supplying high-quality early childhood education to help children begin school with a larger vocabulary, socialization skills, and broader experience with language and the world beyond their immediate neighborhoods. Other chapters argued that poor children benefit by being in small classes and having access to the kind of curriculum always found in the best schools and districts.
Here I propose interrelated solutions that are known as wraparound services. They should be integrated into and around the school and readily available to students as needed.
WRAPAROUND SOLUTION: Every school should have a nurse, doctor, or health clinic to ensure that children get regular medical checkups and prompt treatment for illnesses. All children should get regular screening for health problems. Such screening is routine among middle- and upper-income families. No child should be denied access to health care because of his family’s economic status. Improving the health of children will improve their academic performance. Children who are sick, who have asthma, who have untreated illnesses, who can’t hear the teacher or see the front of the room, are unlikely to keep up with their peers. Healthy children are more alert, more attentive, and less likely to miss days of school due to illness. There is no body of research that discounts the importance of good health. Improving the health of all children should be a national priority and a focus of educational and social reform.
Every child should have regular access to medical care. Families should not have to use the hospital emergency room for routine medical problems. Is research needed to demonstrate that every child should have a regular medical checkup, regular vision screening, and regular dental care? Just as children in middle-class and affluent circumstances receive preventive care, to avoid problems later, so should poor children. Just as middle-class and affluent children get care and medicine when they are ill, so should poor children.
WRAPAROUND SOLUTION: Disadvantaged children should have summer programs that give them enrichment activities, sports, the arts, tutoring, and literacy activities to maintain the gains of the previous academic year. A major study at the Johns Hopkins University by Karl L. Alexander, Doris R. Entwisle, and Linda Steffel Olson found that summer learning loss among lower-income students contributes significantly to the academic achievement gap. Children of higher-income groups start school with a large advantage due to the inequality of home and community environments. The researchers argued that “the early years of schooling are foundational in that the skills acquired then support all later learning.” What happens in school matters in subsequent years. By the time students start high school, most of what they learn is an accumulation of previous years in school. “But with respect specifically to the year 9 achievement gap by SES [socioeconomic status] background, experiences outside school apparently make an even bigger difference, as that gap substantially originates over the years before first grade and summer periods during the elementary school years.”2
Summer learning matters, whether it is formal or informal. Children from higher socioeconomic groups learn more over the summer than children from lower-income groups, which widens the achievement gap. Because better-off children get more opportunity to learn in the summer, their advantage increases in relation to poor students who do not have comparable summer experiences. This accumulated disadvantage over the years causes low-income students to be more likely to have low test scores, less likely to finish high school, and less likely to enroll in a four-year college. The Johns Hopkins study reached a startling conclusion: “Summer shortfall over the five years of elementary school accounts for more than half the difference [between high- and low-socioeconomic-status youths by grade 9], a larger component than that built up over the preschool years. And, too, these learning differences from the early years that present themselves in 9th grade reverberate to constrain later high school curriculum placements, high school dropout, and college attendance. This lasting legacy of early experience typically is hidden from view.”3
The authors conclude that interventions should begin early, before the disadvantages grow even larger, and “the earlier the better,” with a high priority for preschool programs. Once disadvantaged children are in school, they “need year-round, supplemental programming to counter the continuing press of family and community conditions that hold them back.” While upper-income parents are working with their children on letters and numbers and embarking on family trips with educational value, lower-income students often lack the same advantages. The authors’ study attributes fully two-thirds of the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income youths to differences in summer learning opportunities. They find that children from low-socioeconomic-status homes “come closer to keeping up with better-off students during the school year than they do during the summer months.” They discovered a “school-year pattern of achievement gain parity (or near parity) across social lines,” which “flies in the face of widely held (if only whispered) assumptions about the learning abilities of poor and minority youth. It also flies in the face of widely held assumptions about the failures of public schools and school systems burdened by high minority enrollments. Perhaps these schools and school systems are doing a better job than is generally recognized, with family disadvantages mistaken for school failings.”4
The Johns Hopkins study is part of a large literature that documents the effects of summer learning loss. If disadvantaged students had access to high-quality summer programs, where their learning is sustained while they are enjoying drama and athletics and nature study, summer learning loss could be reduced or eliminated. That would substantially narrow the achievement gap.5
WRAPAROUND SOLUTION: Disadvantaged children benefit if they have the opportunity to participate in excellent after-school enrichment programs.
More than seven million children are without any adult supervision after school. Those who have the opportunity to be involved in after-school programs are less likely to use drugs, less likely to have behavioral problems at school, and more likely to have self-confidence, self-efficacy, and better academic outcomes at school.6
Children who live in poverty lack access to the programs that middle-class and affluent children take for granted. Better-off children get swimming lessons, tennis lessons, attend science camps, have tutoring, and visit museums and libraries with their families. After-school programs give all children and adolescents a chance to have some of the same experiences.
Organized after-school activities have a long history in this country. They began in settlement houses, when women such as Jane Addams opened large welcoming establishments in poor immigrant neighborhoods to offer arts and crafts, counseling, English-language classes, and assistance to children and families.
Today, many children do not have a safe place to play or adult supervision at the end of the school day. Some funders think of after-school programs solely as time for remediation and tutoring, but these are voluntary programs, so they should include activities that students want to do, not just provide more time for test prep. After-school programs like LA’s Best, which serves nearly thirty thousand children in Los Angeles, are safe havens for children, where they may engage in athletics, dramatics, tutoring, music, dance, poetry, writing, and visual arts. They teach conflict resolution and healthy eating habits. They offer classes where children learn typing and computer skills; they have science programs and Junior Achievement, where young people learn how businesses work. LA’s Best gives preference to activities that interest children, and it promotes the development of both cognitive and noncognitive skills.
In his book How Child
ren Succeed, Paul Tough wrote about the chess program at I.S. 318, a racially and economically diverse middle school in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, which was also featured in a film called Brooklyn Castle. The school has won more chess championships than any other school in the nation, public or private. The students work incredibly hard at learning and mastering chess. They develop habits of self-discipline and concentration. Chess is their passion. This is an excellent example of the power of an after-school program to motivate students to work hard, do their best, and develop the persistence that they need to succeed in school and in life. Sadly, the funding for the team’s travel to national chess tournaments is in jeopardy every year.7
After-school programs are not a cure-all, but they fill a valuable role. They give children the chance to learn under adult supervision without the stress of grades and test scores, to play, to strengthen their bodies, to be active, to try out new skills, to make new friendships, to learn how to get along with others in a nonacademic environment. Without them, the millions of children now in after-school programs would be hanging out with nothing to do, their parents at work, susceptible to the influence of the street and of gangs. Why wouldn’t we provide the same opportunities to all children who lack them?
I would add this caution. Adults no longer work a nine-hour day, and children should not be expected to study nine hours a day, fifty-two weeks a year. They need time for recreation, athletics, music, dramatics, and unstructured play.
Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools Page 31