[MUSIC] We haven't articulated well in the charter space about what we think we're doing that is innovative. We haven't really defined what innovation is. Is innovation in schools a brand new idea that no one has done before at all? Or is innovation a practiced idea that's been done over and over again, but that it's done differently. Has a new adaptation in the charter school in that we've seen success. Could it also be that charters bring about a different way of thinking about, well, what is school success? What are the metrics that we should be looking at? If charters have the flexibility to have an accountability system that it doesn't necessarily tie to what the districts accountability system says it's important. All of a sudden, charters can then build themselves and spend money in a way that they're going after a different goal. But perhaps, what we've seen a lot in charter schools is that to say that you're a high quality school, you've got to do well on the same test scores that all of the public schools, or all of the district schools are going after. That desire then to get great results on test scores might limit a charters willingness or appetite for innovation because you're not certain of those innovative ideas boost reading scores or boost high school graduation rates. >> So, I understand all of the positive and negative, I mean I understand both sides of the charter issue, and I think just from a completely non-ideological stand point, I think you can make an argument for why some innovation is good for the system. But the thing that worries me is that there's not much cross learning between public schools and charter schools, so the idea that we were going to create these innovative charter schools that we were going to all learn from. That's another promise that hasn't really occurred, maybe because the kids are different, maybe because it has become so politicized. We don't really learn from each other, and I think that's a problem. >> Well, probably how they're financed, a lot of them have private money. And a lot of the private money comes from very specific sources, so there's people see another purpose behind this, because of where the funding is coming from. Very suspicious about why are these people doing this. And so you get a little paranoid. Is it about undermining public education, blowing up public issue has been know it, and just going all choice and voucher or something like that. And also you have to admit that the teachers unions don't like the competition at all. So I think some of it sort of, it is politically driven. But I also think that we're not seeing the innovation and experimentation that we'd like to see in these schools. The ones that succeed most, they tend to have longer hours, they tend to, it's based on traditional stuff that's we're not getting the innovation from. We're not getting the innovation in the charters and we're not seeing the spill overs to the traditionals. >> I think people make a lot of assumptions about charter schools. I've heard a lot of them sitting in a charter. One is that, we cream students off the top which was a false assumption. Our students participated in a lottery, and came from all over the city of Chicago. As long as they lived in the city they had access to the school, so that's one false assumption. Another assumption is that we are selecting for a certain type of parent, it's not a level playing field when you're doing that, and again, the same application is online for everyone. So it typically has to do with student selection. And then that's not a fair playing field with neighborhood schools. Again, I will say that often times charters will pull from neighborhood schools because families want options. And so that actually that does happened. The other assumption is around teachers. And, teacher choice and how you select teachers and how teachers are treated. So, what's been interesting and fascinating for me is that our teachers always worked a longer school day, and had more professional development during the week. Then most public schools, yet they loved it. They wanted to stay, and they wanted more professional development. So, it didn't pose a problem for them to not be a part of the union, and work a longer school day, and be expected to participate in more professional development. They saw it as an opportunity for growth and an opportunity to support their student's growth. So they welcomed it. >> If you go back to the time before charters, those students would be in a failing school right now. And they're not. That's a hugely important outcome of the charter movement. Now, are there complicated things about it? How do those practices get shared? What are the other implications? What about the students who don't get into charter schools? These are important issues and they've got to be solved and we've got to keep attracting people into this work that want to solve those issues. But absolutely, the students who now have college degrees because they got to go to a great high performing school that's going to change our country. >> Fundamentally, I waiver between both of these. I went to public school in New York, elementary through high school. And consider myself a strong public school advocate. But when it turns out that the people who are running public schools and are within those systems aren't able to sort of step out from their particular context in a way that helps them recognize some of the issues and challenges and problems to actually improve it. Then you need to do something to shake them up. You need to do something to begin to get their attention. And I think that charter schools have done an incredibly good job of really shaking up and waking up public educators about what's happening in those particular systems. >> Charters are not the answer, per se to guaranteeing access to a high quality education. There are a lot of under performing charters as well. There are options I would always recommend that people do their homework. And seek out the rationale for why the charter was started and of course, how that charter is doing. And how it's serving its students and how it's serving its families. We, our school sat in a neighborhood with, surrounded by three really low performing schools. And so a lot of our students did come from the schools that were low performing so, and two of those schools did end up closing. So it has been very controversial, but on the other side, we took those students in, and they're doing really successful, and 85% of the students are meeting and exceeding benchmarks, so it changed those students lives to have our charter as an option for them when their neighborhood schools weren't serving them well. >> Well, I think that places where this is more common, and where, at least a larger percentage of the students, are attending charter schools are in major media centers and in major cities. And they're also in places where there are strong teacher's unions that feel like this is an assault on them as teachers and on the communities in which they work. I think that's one of the reasons why the attention seems to be disproportionate to actually how many students across the country are in charter schools. >> More than the greatest benefits of charter schools is that you have flexibility. And you've got the leeway to be innovative on entrepreneurial. One of the greatest challenges of charter schools is that you've got the flexibility to be innovative. And so I would say often times in the charter space, I'm not certain if administrators and school leaders stick with the programs that they've thought about long enough to see them go through. >> Well, the basic idea of charter schools was a crazy idea in the sense that the basic idea was schools, that freedom would equal results. So what's the basic idea behind charter schools? The basic one is you get flexibility over hiring and firing, use of money, policy, use of time and governance. So you're no longer being governed by the local district, you have your own board, but those five sort of flexibilities were given to charter schools. And in exchange the theory was that they would be better. Well, if you think that flexibility equals better teaching and learning. It's a funny idea. It's a misguided notion. Some schools did remarkably well and leveraged that flexibility in very clever ways, and have done extraordinary things. And that's a group of charter schools that our country should be paying very, very close attention to. But other schools, with this flexibility, either recreated the pathologies they just left, or just didn't leverage it. They didn't think cleverly about how do you actually take a lump sum budget, and create a different kind of schooling? Or how do you think about curriculum in a different way? Or how do you leverage this incredible gift on some level of being able to hire who you want and not have to spend three years firing a poorly performing tenured teacher. That they didn't leverage that flexibility in a productive way. >> We have some charter schools that are making claims that seem amazing. That they're making five or six point gains on the ACT, or they have 100% college admission. And those sound too good to be true. And when we start to look into them, we do find that they are too good to be true. But often we'll find that those schools, even if they're not actually achieving the things that people say they're achieving, they're still doing really well in those areas. So, maybe they're not making five or six point gains on the ACT for all of their students, but their students are still making higher gains than any of the other schools in the district. Maybe they're not getting a 100% of the students that started that school going to college, but they still have much higher college enrollment rates than other schools. And so there's a need to figure out what is the truth there. A lot of times people hold these schools up as examples of what can be done. But then people question the statistics behind that. And they say, well, are they just exaggerating how well they're doing, or do they look good only because parents have to select in, they have to apply in. So what we really need is research that says, hey, these are the schools that are doing better than expected, and this is what they actually have been able to do. And this is how much is due to selection issues. So the fact that they're getting higher achieving, or maybe more motivated families applying to the school, or that they're somehow getting students with higher achievement, or students with higher motivation coming to the school. So, this is what it is due to the fact that they're getting different kinds of families are students coming, and then this due to their actual practices, and then figuring out what those practices are. [MUSIC]
