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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > July > 13 > Entry
Editorial: Fordham finds school reform isn’t so easy
Markets can’t fix everything.
Ironically, it’s the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a right-leaning think tank and one of the nation’s chief proponents of market-based education reforms, that will tell you so.
Some conservatives say school choice will force reform by making schools compete for students and funding. Good schools will attract more students while bad ones will wither and die.
Fordham’s use of Dayton as a laboratory for seeding charter schools and voucher programs during the past decade helped make the city one of the country’s earliest and most crowded education marketplaces.
But things didn’t work out as planned. The buyers in the market (parents) didn’t always focus on academic quality, allowing too many poor performing sellers (schools) to stay in business.
In a new book out this week, three authors associated with the Dayton-rooted foundation — Chester E. Finn, Jr., Terry Ryan and Mike Lafferty — chronicle its experiences in the school reform trenches here.
“Ohio’s Education Reform Challenges: Lessons From the Front Lines,” amounts to a short history of Dayton’s charter school movement. It also should be a call to arms for tougher rules to address failing schools.
“The education marketplace doesn’t work as well as we believed,” the authors say, “… it should lead to either the improvement or closure of weak schools as the good ones gain market share. But in practice, really atrocious schools can languish for years when nobody intervenes.”
Consider Moraine Community School, one of the area’s first charter schools, still in operation today despite a decade of low scores.
Fordham — newly minted as a charter school sponsor in 2005 — was delighted to take on the reclamation project to turn Dayton’s only south suburban charter school into a high performer.
But less than a year into the arrangement, the Moraine school had had enough and bolted from a stunned Fordham for a new sponsor with a reputation for tolerating poor schools.
“In hindsight, we were deluded about the Moraine school and our ability, through tough love, to turn it around,” Fordham leaders say today. By the end, “It was clear to us they did not see their primary mission as delivering academic success to children.”
This example is one of many in the book that show a continuing need for more accountability. The explosion of more than 300 charters in Ohio since 1997 has added some great new schools in the state. Sadly, though, a disturbingly large percentage of terrible schools have been allowed to stay open, doing more harm than good.
Lawmakers took several important steps to tighten charter rules in recent years, but they need to go further. A few ideas:
• Force swift action for consistently terrible schools. Schools that see their scores dip need a chance to fix the situation, but Ohio has too many schools — traditional and charter — with long track records of failure. That can’t continue.
• Reward schools with track records of success. Top-notch charters, for instance, could be allowed to earn per-pupil funding that matches the local school district, or maybe get a chance to take control of a quality district school building (perhaps one that was closed for poor performance).
• Get tough on charter school sponsors. Too many sponsors have abysmal histories of managing schools with embarrassing academic records. Ohio should have a high bar that strips sponsorship from those that don’t really oversee the schools they’re responsible for.
• Prevent sponsors from charging schools under their control for services. Fordham, to its credit, has refused to charge fees to schools for services it provides, seeing the practice as creating perverse incentives that turn sponsored schools into cash cows that sponsors then can ill-afford to shut down if they fail. But that’s just what’s happened with some dubious sponsors.
Dayton has long been one of the most interesting places to examine the impact of school choice. Fordham’s honesty about what went wrong in its experience here is an important contribution to the greater understanding of school reform.
Ohio shouldn’t miss the chance to learn from it.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
Comments
By Susan R
July 13, 2010 8:06 AM | Link to this
All of this school reform seems to ignore the parents. If parents aren’t being responsible and involved in their child’s education, it is highly unlikely that school reform is going to make a difference. As long as education is free, and parents aren’t being held accountable in some measure, kids will continue to fall through the cracks.
By joe_mamma
July 13, 2010 8:30 AM | Link to this
“Markets can’t fix everything.”….Do markets fix anything really? Speaking in economic terms a “market” is nothing more than a “place” where sellers of a good or service can meet with buyers of that good or service where there is a potential for a transaction to take place. That’s it. They don’t have intentions or goals other than to facilitate the transaction. Also if by using the term “market” you are somehow inferring that Dayton’s Charter School experiment is somehow a “free market” then that is a stretch. There are more than a few exogenous and endogenous parties and variables that get between the buyer and seller in this market.
By Max
July 13, 2010 10:01 AM | Link to this
DDN concludes this is an important contribution to ‘school reform’ when the problem is ‘education reform.’ That Fordham group views education (under the guise of ‘schools’) as a business or market should be a ‘tell’ about their motive; profit, not educated students. Kids are an extremely labor intensive endeavor whether at home or at school. We don’t have kids thinking of them as ‘market indicators’ in their education and, more specifically, their performance. Education is not a manufacturing process although it has succumbed to that in the great minds of many. It is interesting between ODE and Charter Schools lobbies there is exists - especially in Dayton - a desire to use kids as lab animals to further an agenda (privatization) that has, at best, mixed results even when fudging the figures. DPS’s drop out rate has decreased because they count kids who drop out then return to another school and receive a diploma or GED. While a good program, this gives an innacurate accounting of a district’s performance. Similarly, the accountability of charters has a priority of the ledger books with performance a distant second. I think we should give Ms. Ward the opportunity to revamp DPS using her conventional tools FIRST. Any results from her efforts will be skewed as long as charters are around.
By davidss2
July 13, 2010 10:26 AM | Link to this
Now the DDN wants to look analytically at the Charter School business. Some of us told DDN all along that it was a business and not about the kids and effecting real education. The DDN was totally supporting them with biased listings of articles and editorials totally in favor of charters sucking money from the public education bucket. Even Jon Husted got involved with his buds from UD who ran 3 charters. Charters are about party power and about money.
By oldtimer
July 13, 2010 10:43 AM | Link to this
Susan R is right! I’ve heard parents tell their children you don’t have to do what the teacher tells you, don’t have to do your homework, etc. That kind of attitude ensures failure whether in public or charter schools. It’s an old case of you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.
By Max
July 13, 2010 2:05 PM | Link to this
Charter school businesses are opportunists taking advantage of school districts’ malaise and promising what, according to Fordham, they haven’t delivered. Now, DDN, who are the losers here?
By newtimer
July 14, 2010 1:26 PM | Link to this
Charters are no worse than any traditional school you can mention. The one in question above has improved annually and is constantly being challenged with kids dropping out and those that have fallen through the cracks at other schools. A lot of ‘excellent’ charters usually have entrance tests that allows them to take the top students first, and they usually have outside funding that allows them to do that.