Another Study Shows Charter Schools Not as Good As on Public Schools

Lawrence Mishel, president of the nonprofit, nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute and three other university researchers from Columbia and Stanford universities are publishing a book "The Charter School Dust-Up." From the Boston Globe.

They are reporting the result of their research on Charter Schools. They reviewed federal data together with the results from 19 studies in 11 states and the District of Columbia. Charter school students "have the same or lower scores than other public school students in nearly every demographic category." The especially note that the results for minority students (who are the focus of a lot of their propaganda) is a bit worse than in public schools.

This isn't going to be accepted by the right-wingers who are out to destroy public education provided by governments because they don't think government should exist. But for the rest of us, it should point to the fact that low-performing students are less the fault of inadequate schools than they are of an inadequate society.

Too many people are herded into parts of cities that have inadequate housing, too few jobs, too much crime and inadequate health care and then the schools are blamed for not educating the children from those parts of the city.

It's a funny thing how the parts of a city with poorly performing schools also have poor and overcrowded housing, few jobs, a lot of pawn shops, lots of check-cashing stores and tons of payday loan kiosks, no banks or credit unions, a lot of closed stores, high crime, lots of used car lots for people with no credit or bad credit selling older use cars, and mostly minority residents. (See my earlier blog on Predatory Lending to Low Income People.)

The real problem is not the schools. It is our total society, and the wealthy and upper middle class want it that way. They are blaming the people who are trapped in those conditions for things that are mostly beyond their control and using that as an excuse to not spend government money to improve the conditions. What they don't realize (and what China does) is that the real economic resource of powerful, growing society is its people. Failure to invest in our people (and this requires government spending) is the greatest drag on our society today.

The poor performing public schools are just another canary in the mine shaft.