If a proven entrepreneur comes up with a great new dining concept, he has no problem finding the money to create a chain of restaurants. If a real estate developer discovers a profitable model for erecting shopping centers or residential communities, he can raise hundreds of millions of dollars to build more of the same. But public schools are different. Bad schools don’t go out of business, and good ones don’t grow.
In the past decade or so, big-league philanthropists have tried to change that dynamic by underwriting promising charter schools with the goal of replicating their educational DNA and reproducing what works. We haven’t seen much of that in Virginia because only four charter schools operate in the state. But perhaps we could learn from the experience of other states.
One thing we could learn from reading a new Cato Institute report, “The Other Lottery: Are Philanthropists Backing the Best Charter Schools,” is that the philanthropists may not be getting it right either. Focusing on California, which has the largest number of charter schools in the country, Andrew J. Coulson ranks charter school networks by performance in standardized tests (adjusted for student characteristics and peer effects) and the level of philanthropic support they generate. He finds that the three highest-performing networks rank 21st, 27th and 39th in terms of private grant funding out of 68 networks. “The results are discouraging. There is effectively no correlation between grant funding and charter network performance,” he concludes. Philanthropic funding is like a lottery, with funds distributed randomly.
Free markets work when failing business models go out of business and successful business models take their place. In public education, failing schools don’t go out of business — they get subsidized — and successful schools have no incentive, or means, to recreate what they do elsewhere. As a result, the system remains static and largely impervious to change. The beauty of charter schools is that they allow experimentation that would not occur otherwise. However, charter schools are hardly a panacea. Some charter experiments are successful, others are not.
Research sponsored by foes of chartered schools suggests that on average, charter schools add no more value than traditional public schools. Putting the emphasis on average results obscures the fact that some charter schools are very good and others are failed experiments. The goal shouldn’t be to ban all charter schools, it should be to replicate the successes and retire the failures.
The problem is the lack of a clearly defined “bottom line.” Businesses have a bottom line: Are they making a profit or not? Schools have no bottom line. How does one measure the success of a school? By standardized test scores? That’s not fair because students of diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds score differently for reasons that have nothing to do with the school. What schools need is a measure of educational achievement added, which adjusts for the background of its students and allows performance to be compared fairly. But even that is a tricky proposition, for the issues are so complex.
Computing profits is not an easy thing to do. That’s why businesses have evolved Generally Accepted Accounting Procedures (GAAP). The educational system needs something similar, like Measures of Educational Value Added (MEVA), that has wide buy-in from educators and those who fund them.
The existence of widely accepted metrics would allow philanthropists to base their funding decisions on more than personal relationships and self-serving data provided by school administrators desiring to look good. Such metrics also would allow state governments to compare the performance of school districts, school boards to compare the performance of schools and principals, and principals to compare the performance of teachers.
Virginia was a leader in instituting standardized tests. Perhaps we could take the next step and become a leader in measuring educational value added.