When People Say They Want to Send Their Kid to a Good School, They Usually Mean Schools Without "Bad Kids"

parents intuitively understand that a school's "quality" is a product of how its student body was selected

yes, this was a real flyer sent out by a real charter school

It’s always useful to be reminded that conversations in the policy world are often very different from those in other contexts, and this is particularly acute when it comes to education. Lots of people who have zero exposure to the world of 10,000-feet educational policy analysis have opinions and influence in American schools.

I’m someone who’s in the policy-and-politics space in education, I guess you would say, though I have a lot of critics who are eager to read me out of any particular part of the conversation. (It always amuses me when people who insist that university Education departments are useless in other contexts also say that I’m not to be trusted because my PhD is not in Education.) Being in the policy-and-politics space is very different from being a teacher, which is very different from being a principal, which is very different from being a superintendent, which is very different from being a parent…. What can happen, when you get into these arguments as often as I do, is that you forget how foreign many of the commonplaces in your particular arena are to those elsewhere. Here I’m thinking in particular about charter schools and the role their selectivity - that is to say, admissions fraud - plays in the results that certain widely-publicized charter systems claim to achieve, even as the median charter school remains no better than the median public school. As you know, I’m very skeptical about the elite charter school narrative and have argued at length that their results are actually the product of selectivity coming in (admissions chicanery) and going out (attrition). The fact that hundreds of charter schools have been caught cheating the admissions process points directly to the fact that there’s no magic happening in the charter school space; as usual, there’s just the overwhelming power of selection effects in educational outcomes. And then the charter defenders insist that I’m wrong and that the kids in charter schools are demographically the same as public, then I say that demographic matching is no substitute for matching by academic ability, blah blah blah. Our parts are well rehearsed.

The question of whether charter schools teach the same types of kids as public, in other words, is highly salient, divided along ideological lines, and subject to heated debate. What’s been interesting, as I’ve become more high-profile in this domain, is encountering a lot of charter school parents, and even some teachers, who happily accept that charter schools don’t have the same students as public schools; indeed, to them, that’s the whole point. These members of the charter school community will tell you that a core advantages of charter schools is the ability to give poor families the same ability to filter out the lowest-performing students as rich families do when they send their kids to pricey private schools. In this telling, certain poorly-performing students (who are called “thugs” a distressing amount of the time, including by Black parents) disrupt the learning process, tax teachers and administrators, and in general create an environment that’s not conducive to receiving a quality education. These kids, they say, bully and harass other students, have no interest in school themselves, and act as a serious impediment to real learning. The mandate that all students have both a right and an obligation to attend K-12 schools has created a world where the least motivated students obstruct the most; charters replicate the same basic exclusivity advantage that private schools have leveraged throughout the history of public schooling. There are some kids who simply don’t want to learn, or so I’m told; teachers don’t want to deal with them and students don’t want to tolerate them. So of course charters cook the admissions books. That’s a feature, not a bug.

Sometimes this is expressed less in terms of student selectivity and more in terms of parents, “home environment,” and overall chance to succeed. As Robert Pondiscio put it in his book How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice, which is mostly about Success Academy schools,

The common criticism leveled at Moskowitz and her schools is that they cherry-pick students, attracting bright children and shedding the poorly behaved and hardest to teach. This misses the mark entirely. Success Academy is cherry-picking parents. Parents who are not put off by uniforms, homework, reading logs and constant demands on their time, but who view those things as evidence that here, at last, is a school that has its act together. Parents who are not upset by tight discipline and suspensions but who are grateful for them, viewing Success Academy as a safe haven from disorderly streets and schools. Charter schools cannot screen parents to ensure culture fit, but the last hour in the auditorium is a close proxy for such an effort, galvanizing disciplines and warning off the indifferent and uncommitted. A the same time, there is something undeniably exclusionary about it. If you don’t have the resources to get your child to school by 7:30 and pick her up at 3:45 — at 12:30 on Wednesdays — Success Academy is not for you. Literally.

The evidence does not, to my mind, really support the notion that parents are being selected rather than students. But the overall point is largely the same: charter schools are in the business of cherry-picking, people within the charter world know that, and the insistence that they aren’t is a fig leaf that many parents, teachers, and administrators don’t really believe. It’s just an argument that’s made in the policy space to fight against skeptics like me. For the record, there have been some high-profile admissions along these lines, in earlier, more innocent times. The founder of the celebrated Boys Latin Charter School has said with considerable candor that attrition is how they get their sterling numbers; the weaker students attrit out, his school ferociously resists backfill, and hey presto, what’s left is the most “tenacious” students, which is to say those most likely to succeed. Geoffrey Canada, of the once-preeminent Harlem Children’s Zone school system, used to constantly brag that HCZ had a 0% dropout rate, despite the fact that every successive year his cohorts would shrink - and in fact he once expelled an entire class (grade) for being below his academic standards. Geoff! If you expel the kids who are hard to teach, you can’t turn around and brag about how good you are at teaching students! It’s like expelling all the kids who have asthma and bragging about how good your school is at respiratory health.

Again, though, that’s me being policy-brained. Charter parents only care about how their own kids fare, not whether the empirical comparison with public schools is fair, and many charter teachers just want an opportunity to teach classes that aren’t subject to regular disruption. I think this kind of pro-selectivity argument, taken to its logical conclusions, leads to the death of the concept of universal education. And charter selectivity makes empirical comparison of educational effectiveness between charters and traditional public schools more or less impossible, in a way the seriously and inevitably harms the perception of traditional public schools. It’s also just a matter of basic procedural fairness - in most contexts, public schools simply can’t exclude the way charters do, and in fact have a much harder time removing truly problematic students. And yet I have more respect for the people who make an affirmative and unapologetic argument for charter selectivity than I do the people who deny that charter selectivity exists. A willingness to admit that this practice is in fact quite widespread and provide a justification for it is better than the shameless denial that it doesn’t exist.

But we need to be careful. The public commitment to K-12 education for all is still fragile and could evaporate if we’re not careful. Those “thugs” do have a right to a free education, after all. Besides, charters continue to advance a narrative of accountability and more talented teachers, when admissions skullduggery creates the perception of positive educational effects. And the public needs to know the difference. Simply creating artificial separation between different students is not a strategy for “educational excellence.” It’s just segregation. It might not be racial segregation, explicitly, but it’s still segregation. “Look at the academic excellence we created by putting all the most-likely-to-succeed kids in the same school” is a scheme that happens all the time, thanks to zoning or private school tuition costs or charter school admissions chicanery, but it’s Three-Card Monte, a sham.

Still, parents who admit that they send their kids to charter schools in order to help them avoid “the bad kids” are being fundamentally honest, and the most important part of this honesty is that it recognizes that there is a certain class of students who will always be left behind - the demand for universality in school reform rhetoric, as exemplified by No Child Left Behind, breaks apart on the rocks of the reality that some students simply aren’t willing to do what it takes to learn. Set aside any questions of inherent aptitude for learning and you are still left with the problem of kids who don’t want to learn. School reform types love to talk as if learning were a purely technical problem - you get the incentives right, adopt the correct pedagogy, collect enough data, and the rest will take care of itself. What they almost never want to admit is the most obvious, inconvenient truth already known by anyone who’s ever taught: kids have to want to learn in order to learn. You can staff a school with the best teachers on earth, give them unlimited resources, and wrap the place in every evidence-based intervention imaginable, and it still won’t work if students are resistant, disengaged, or actively hostile to the enterprise. Education is not something that can be done to someone; it’s something that requires at least a minimal act of will from the learner, and no reform agenda can engineer that away.

This is where I find the gulf in experience in the discourse most frustrating. It’s always easy for pundits to insist that we can educate anyone, as long as we want it enough. But one of the most obvious lessons of my multiple decades of teaching, from kindergarten to doctoral students, is that you can’t make ‘em drink. They have to be willing to work in order to learn up to their natural potential. And what the crude pro-charter-selectivity argument you hear from parents acknowledges is that some of them just don’t. I never know what the Jon Chait types think about the influence of student investment and effort in outcomes; I suppose they assume that the very notion is an excuse dreamed up by lazy, feckless teachers. I would love for them to sit down with a kid who really, really doesn’t want to learn to do division and see if they can teach that kid up to standard. It would be illuminating.

The notion that we should help students learn by purging the worst-performing, most-disruptive students is appealing to anyone who has ever witnessed a classroom torpedoed by a student who has no interest in learning, but of course it’s also dangerous. There’s an inherent inflationary tendency, when we’re defining the worst, least-committed students. Charter school roster-pruning can be, in some instances, sufficiently aggressive to root out students who have an interest in learning but limited talent. And those less-talented kids, below a certain age, have to end up somewhere; this is, indeed, core to the complaints of public school teachers, that they run the schools of last resort and are then blamed when many of their kids fail. From a broader perspective, we could be adults and admit that many parents who send their kids to private schools just want to avoid the “bad kids,” and that whether they admit it to themselves or not, they’re really talking about Black kids or poor kids. We had to have a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation, followed by a massive desegregation effort that was never fully completed, because parents want their kids to be kept away from certain other kids. There is a more sympathetic version of this in the pro-charter-selectivity attitude, and as I’ve intimated, this version is very often made by Black parents who want their kids to escape their station. Whether we decide to give them what they want by engineering benevolent segregation or not, can we at least admit that that’s what we’re doing, and that the public schools who get their leftovers will inevitably look worse for that very reason?