By Martin Boughner
Port Moody Public Library

There is a consensus among educators in the United States today that the education system is failing its students, and especially failing poor students, with profound implications for economic health in the twenty-first century.  One alternative to the public school system is charter schools.  Charter schools are chosen voluntarily by parents and students, generally are non-union (allowing poorly performing teachers to be disciplined or fired), and tend to have much longer and more rigorous programs.  The superstar among the charters is the Harlem Children’s Zone Project and its director Geoffrey Canada, the subject of Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes.

Harlem’s Children’s is a 97 block chunk of Harlem containing 7,000 children.  Canada’s program addresses practically every aspect of family life, from prenatal and parenting classes to pre-kindergarten programs to afterschool programs, as well as a K-8 charter school. Canada himself is a native of the South Bronx who was able to overcome an impoverished background, and is determined, heroically determined, to find methods to allow Harlem children to have the same chance. Tough’s book is an in-depth look at the individual lives of the parents, teachers, and children of the Zone

And what is the test of success?  What can be most easily quantified are the year by year results on standardized tests.  Canada’s teachers “teach to the test”—test prep is the core of the curriculum (as is true in most charter schools). If third graders are reading at a second grade level and read at a fourth grade level in fourth grade, the educational strategy is assumed to be successful.

The results are mixed, as shown by Diane Ravitch in The Death and Life of the Great American School System.  Her title is telling: it’s a variation on Jane Jacob’s 1960 blockbuster Death and Life of the Great American City, which demonstrated the intellectual bankruptcy of the city planning ideology of the time.  The educational philosophy based on standardized tests, choice, and competition, Ravitch argues, is not only not preparing students to take their places in the twenty-first century economy, it seems almost deliberately designed to destroy the public school system— the only real hope for the future.

Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education and once a proponent of testing and choice, has taken a cold hard look at the research.  Overall, she argues, charter schools have not significantly improved student performance, and to the extent that they have it’s because of selection.  Most charter schools choose their students on the basis of a lottery—and of course, it’s only the most motivated parents who sign their children up for the lottery in the first place.  And if a charter school child is doing poorly or is a discipline problem, they are encouraged (or forced) to leave the charter school and return to the public school system, which is forced to admit them.  Similarly, if results on a standardized test are the criteria for success (and for teacher evaluation), a bias towards improved test scores is built into the system – and, Ravitch argues, these imaginary improvements vanish as children move through the system.

Ravitch sees the only real hope for the future as rigorous national curriculum standards, and wonders why if the charters get results by insisting on things like neatness and good behavior public schools can’t to the same.  Whether a rigorous national curriculum is possible in a country where the majority of the population doesn’t believe in the theory of evolution, is a question that Ravitch, perhaps, couldn’t bring herself to address.