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Professor Kane Comments on Mayor Menino’s Charter School Initiative

By News editor
06/19/2009 9:47 AM
2 Comments

On January 6, a team of researchers, led by Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Thomas Kane and MIT Professor , released the results of a study of ’s charter, pilot, and . The study, which used students selected for schools based upon lottery therefore allowing direct comparison of the groups, indicated that charter school students in Boston outperform their peers at other public schools. In the months following the study’s release, Governor and Boston Mayor both revised their positions on . Here, Professor Kane reacts to Mayor Menino’s recent proposal  to create several city-run :

Our report did not offer a blanket endorsement of charter schools. Indeed, our failure to find robust effects of the (particularly in middle school grades) should be a warning that additional flexibility for schools does not ensure results for kids. Rather, we found that the particular charter schools in the Boston area (especially those that were part of the lottery study) seem to be having large impacts on student achievement. If the charter sector in Boston were to expand, those charter schools from our study, with a track
record of success, should be the first in line for expansion and/or replication.

The cap should not be raised for just any charter school. Now that we’ve learned that several Boston-area charter schools are having a huge positive impact on kids, those schools should be allowed to replicate.

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  • katherine merseth

    Essentially agreeing with Tom Kane, my letter to The Boston Globe (published on June 16, 2009) and copied below makes an additional point about political will, should the cap be raised:

    MAYOR MENINO (“Menino boosts charter schools,” Page A1, June 10), the Globe (“Take caps off charter schools,” Editorial, June 10), and Scot Lehigh (“New momentum for charter schools,” Op-ed, June 12) get only partial credit in the charter school debate. Several studies, including “Inside Urban Charter Schools” and “Informing the Debate,” document that several Boston charters perform better than both pilot and traditional schools. The reasons are careful planning, clear missions, strong structures, and a relentless pursuit of strong MCAS scores, sometimes to the detriment of higher-order learning. But Boston has weak charters too. Just because a school has “charter” in its name is no guarantee of success.

    While more charters will give more parents choice in schooling, a lack of thoughtful monitoring will not improve educational outcomes for all students. All schools, charter and traditional alike, need clear goals and well-defined expectations that extend beyond MCAS scores. Those that are underperforming and lack improvement after a period of time should be shut down. The real question is whether Menino, Governor Patrick, and charter advocates have the will to close underperforming
    —
    Editor’s note: Katherine Merseth, a senior lecturer on education and director of the Teacher Education Program at HGSE, is co-author of the recent book, Inside urban charter schools: Promising practices and strategies in five high-performing schools.

  • marc kenen

    While I agree that we should be encouraging highly successful charters in replicating we need to keep the door open to the new education entrepreneurs, especially young ones! After all, where did these high performers come from? At one time they were all unproven – often springing from young, relatively inexperienced entrepreneurs. The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has one of the most rigorous charter applications in the country. As long as we keep the bar high, I think we should say that replicating high performers, plus continuing to support the development of high-promise new charters, is the way forward.

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