LITTLE ROCK — “ Please, please, please,” whispered the boy sitting to my left in the crowded auditorium, clenching his fists. Clearly too young forthe sixth grade, he seemed to be praying for his brother, who sat nearby. If the brother’s name was called from the podium, he would begin sixth grade next year at Democracy Prep, a four-year-old Harlem charter school.
The odds were against it: a few days earlier, the 205 names being announced had been randomly drawn from a pool of 1,250 applicants. But finally it happened. “Yes!” the boys’ mother yelped, smothering Democracy Prep’s newest student in a bear hug. The younger brother beamed.
Still, most people’s prayers weren’t answered that day. Once the final name was called, disappointment weighed heavily on the faces of the unlucky. Nothing less was at stake than the future of 1,250 children. Democracy Prep’s was the last of the charterschool lotteries for the entering class of 2010, which will be known within the school as the “College Class of 2021.” Most students whose names weren’t called will enter one of Harlem’s dreadful traditional public schools, from which they’re as likely to drop out as graduate.
So for children whose parents can’t afford to pay private-school tuition or move to neighborhoods with good public schools, asimple roll of the dice determines whether or not they will get a quality education. That is horribly unfair to the losers. But the lotteries are proving how good charter schools are-and helping fuel the charters’ growth in Gotham.
Charter schools are taxpayer-funded public schools that operate free from many of the bureaucratic restrictions imposed by state and district policies and by collectivebargaining agreements with teachers. New York City’s nearly 100 charter schools enroll about 15 percent of Harlem students, for instance, even though they serve less than 3 percent of children citywide.
The lotteries are necessary because demand for charter-school seats far exceeds supply. By law, enrollment is determined randomly-with students who live in the local school district getting preference-whenever a charter school receives more applicants than it has available seats. That was the case for all but one of the city’s charter schools last year.
The lottery mechanism varies by school.
The Harlem Village Academies blindly pick index cards with children’s names and contact information out of a box. Democracy Prep and the Harlem Success Academies use a computerized random-number generator. An independent auditor oversees each school’s lottery, and statistical tests in past years have confirmed that these are indeed random draws. Most schools now conduct their lotteries privately, either becausethey want to avoid the media attention or because they can’t stand seeing the pain on the faces of kids whose names aren’t called.
Democracy Prep, however, continues to hold a public lottery, intent on showing the world thousands of flesh-and-blood parents desperate to get their children into better schools. My conservative estimate is that more than one-third of all fifth-graders enrolled in public schools in Harlem’s District 5 entered Democracy Prep’s lottery this year.
What motivates Harlem’s parents and children to apply in such numbers to Democracy Prep is a chance to trade up from one of the city’s lousiest middle schools to one of its best. Many of the students in Democracy Prep’s lottery are zoned for a traditional public middle school called the Academy of Collaborative Education (ACE). According to the metric that New York City uses to evaluate its schools, ACE is the city’s single worst middle school.
Given a choice, no sane person would send a child to ACE. In the New York City Department of Education’s annual survey last year, when asked to evaluate the statement “I feel safe in my school,” 79 percent of ACE’s teachers “strongly disagreed,” while the remaining 21 percent just plain disagreed.
Many believe that schools like ACE have such toxic environments because the students who attend them are monsters created by poverty and racism. But if that were true, you might expect Democracy Prep to be equally dangerous: its main campus sits directly across the street from ACE; the lottery’s preference for children in the local district ensures that most students in the two schools are neighbors. Nevertheless, in the city’s survey, all of Democracy Prep’s teachers agreed that they felt safe in school.
According to the city’s metric, moreover, Democracy Prep is the highest-performing school in Harlem and among the 20 highest-performing middle schools in the entire city. Democracy Prep doesn’t boast a special curriculum, fancy classroom-management techniques, or smaller-thanaverage class sizes. Its success-like that of many good charter schools-has three primary ingredients: efficient use of funds, a culture of high expectations, and a “no excuses” approach to school discipline.
Democracy Prep, like other city charters, spends about as much per pupil as the surrounding district public schools do: though it doesn’t receive capital funds from the state, it makes up the difference in philanthropic contributions and by locating the sixth grade in a public school virtually rent-free. But the school’s charter status allows it to use its resources more wisely than the district schools do. Democracy Prep saves money by employing many young teachers, substituting 401(k)-style plans for the pensions bestowed in the traditional public sector, and eliminating administrative bloat. Thanks to these savings, the school can pay its teachers 10 percent above the traditional public school pay scale. The school also has money left over to provide students with enriching activities: before they graduate, Democracy Prep’s kids will have visited more than 75 college campuses and set foot on five continents. Again, all of this is done for about the same amount of money that advocates for traditional public schools say is insufficient to purchase even basic resources.
The second key to the school’s success is its culture of excellence. As its name suggests, Democracy Prep teaches students that it’s their responsibility to be active, engaged and educated citizens. The school’s motto stresses this message: “Work Hard. Go to College. Change the World!” At Democracy Prep, every adult is dedicated to sending every child to college-an attitude few would claim is widespread in the city’s traditional public schools in poor neighborhoods. The college expectation permeates theatmosphere: homerooms are named after universities, usually the teacher’s alma mater, and college banners from across the nation adorn the hallways. Since the school’s first cohort hasn’t reached graduation yet, we can’t know for sure how many of these children will graduate and go to college. But their test scores and the look in their eyes suggest that their prospects are far more promising than those of their peers.
Discipline is the final and perhaps most important element of the school’s success. Democracy Prep is one of several exceptional charter schools that apply the “no excuses” model pioneered by the Knowledge Is Power Program, which now operates 82 charter schools in 19 states. At Democracy Prep, kids sit at their desks and are expected to work at all times.They walk from one classroom to another quickly, quietly, and under adult supervision. The disciplinary policy is based on the Broken Windows approach that has worked wonders in big-city policing: the school deals with small infractions seriously and creates an environment in which major violations are simply unthinkable. On the day I visited Democracy Prep, the school took the uncommon step of requiring the sixth-graders to eat lunch in absolute silence because they had been “mean” to one another recently. I felt no need to ask whether weapons had been involved in the meanness.
Children seem happier in Democracy Prep’s safe, structured environment, too. When you stroll through the school’s hallways, you can feel curiosity, security, and even joy-a far cry from the noise and aggression that characterize ACE.
When critics of charter schoolssee places like Democracy Prep, they tend to respond with two arguments. The first is that Democracy Prep isn’t typical. A few charter schools may be stellar, the critics admit, but most don’t help children any more than traditional schools do.
In New York City, at least, that argument doesn’t hold water. A recent study by Stanford University economist Caroline Hoxby found that about 45 percent of Gotham’s charter-school students attend charters that have a positive influence on English proficiency, relative to the public schools that their students would have attended otherwise, of between 0.1 and 0.2 standard deviations (read “large difference”); for 31 percent of the students, it’s more than 0.2 standard deviations (read “enormous difference”). Meanwhile, 16 percent attend charters that are roughly on par with their previous public schools, and only 8 percent attend charters that are worse. Hoxby’s results in math were only slightly less positive.
The critics-led by the local teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT)-focus on the few charters that are seriously underperforming, demanding that the city shut them down. That may indeed be the right approach with those schools, but the teachers’ union is endorsing a glaring double standard. When the city recently tried to close ACE and 18 other failing public schools, the UFT filed a lawsuit to keep them open. If a state Supreme Court judge hadn’t ruled in the UFT’s favor, last year’s entering class of sixth-graders would have been the last to endure the mayhem within ACE’s walls.
The critics’ second argument isthat charters’ impressive performance is a mirage. The reason that New York charter schools report better educational outcomes than traditional public schools, they say, is that the charters attract students with higher proficiency levels. The critics claim that charters are really no more effective than the traditional schools; they’re just starting with better students.
Ironically, what allows charterschool advocates to rebut that argument is the very lotteries that will one day, they hope, be unnecessary. The charters’ random-selection policy has allowed Hoxby’s team to evaluate them with a randomized field trial (RFT), the kind of experiment often described by social scientists as the “gold standard” in research design.Hoxby took a pool of subjects (students applying to New York City charter schools); took advantage of the random nature of the lotteries, which assigned the subjects either to charters or to traditional public schools; and then compared their academic achievement. Because access to a charter school is the only meaningful difference between the two groups, comparing the groups’ later achievement tells us what effect charters have on student performance.
The RFT yielded unambiguously positive results. For the average applicant, winning a spot in a charter school in kindergarten leads to academic gains that close most of the testscore gap between the average student in Harlem and the average student in Scarsdale-a wealthy New York City suburb known for its high-performing schools-by the end of eighth grade. The charter-school critics have offered scant rebuttal to this remarkable finding, preferring to cite a study byanother Stanford professor, Margaret Raymond, which found wide variation in charter-school performance nationwide. But when Raymond studied New York City’s charter schools, she found results similar to Hoxby’s. Many think that the reason that New York does better than the rest of the country is the state’s tough charter-authorization process.
Luckily, charters are expanding rapidly in New York. This spring-after a heated, yearlong battle in which the Hoxby study was repeatedly cited-the New York State Legislature raised the cap on the state’s allowed number of charters from 200 to 460. With another 114 charter schools expected to open in New York City in the next four to five years and current schools continuing to expand, charters could soon serve as many as 10 percent of Gotham’s kids and the lion’s share of students in low-income neighborhoods like Harlem and the South Bronx.
Random chance shouldn’t determine whether children go to great schools or broken ones. But thanks to random chance, we can say that the benefits accruing to New York students from charter schools are no longer in dispute. And the expansion of charters in New York City brings us a little closer to realizing what only recently seemed an impossible dream: a good education for all children that doesn’t depend on the luck of the draw.
Marcus A. Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, conducts research and writes about education policy. Adapted with permission from the Summer issue of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal (city-journal. org).
Perspective, Pages 79 on 09/19/2010