Their rigid opposition to charter schools and in-person learning has parents and even politicians fed up.
Perhaps it doesn’t receive much attention anymore because it’s become so commonplace. The best schools in New York state are again public charter schools. Ho-hum.
According to the most recent data from School Digger, a website that aggregates test score results, 23 of the top 30 schools in New York in 2019 were charters. The feat is all the more impressive because those schools sported student bodies that were more than 80% black and Hispanic, and some two-thirds of the kids qualified for free or discount lunches. The Empire State’s results were reflected nationally. In a U.S. News & World Report ranking released the same year, three of the top 10 public high schools in the country were charters, as were 23 of the top 100—even though charters made up only 10% of the nation’s 24,000 public high schools.
We are told constantly by defenders of the education status quo that the learning gap is rooted in poverty, segregation and “systemic” racism. We’re told that blaming traditional public schools for substandard student outcomes isn’t fair given the raw material that teachers have to work with. But if a student’s economic background is so decisive, or if black students need to be seated next to whites to understand Shakespeare and geometry, how can it be that so many of the most successful public schools are dominated by low-income minorities?
Some will argue that charter schools obtain these results by picking the best students, which isn’t true. Of the 43 states that have charters, all but three—Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming—mandate that lotteries be used to choose students randomly. Washington Post education writer Jay Mathews reports that even states that don’t officially require the use of lotteries use them anyway or employ “other impartial ways of admitting students.”
A second popular argument against charter schools is that they benefit from having motivated students, which is true but misleading. Numerous empirical studies have shown that charter students outperformed similarly motivated peers in traditional public schools who applied to a charter but weren’t admitted. But there’s an even more fundamental problem with the “motivation” explanation of charter success, as Thomas Sowell explains in his most recent book, “Charter Schools and Their Enemies.”
“While those parents who enter their children’s names in the lotteries for admission to charter schools may well be more motivated to promote their children’s education, and to cooperate with schools in doing so, those who win in these lotteries are greatly outnumbered by those who do not win,” Mr. Sowell writes. “When charter schools take a fraction of the children from motivated families, why does that prevent the traditional public schools from comparably educating the remaining majority of children from those motivated families?”
It’s a good question, and one that more Americans are sure to be asking in the wake of the pandemic. Covid-19 has exposed just how much control teachers unions have over K-12 education and, by extension, over so much else that affects our everyday lives. Randi Weingarten, head of the 1.7-million-member American Federation of Teachers, wakes up every morning in search of ways to keep children confined to traditional public schools, regardless of their quality. She and her thousands of state and local affiliate unions do this because it is good for their dues-paying members, and those interests come before the students and their families.
A failing school may be a disaster for students, but it still means lots of middle-class jobs for Ms. Weingarten’s members. Remote learning may defy the recommendations of just about every public health expert and frustrate parents who struggle with home schooling and need to get back to work, but it gives Ms. Weingarten enormous leverage to demand better pay and benefits for the employees she represents. In recent weeks, elected officials in San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere have started to complain publicly about the strong-arming, but it won’t shock you to know that this is being done out of expediency, not principle. For decades, the big-city Democrats who oversee our largest school systems have enabled the teachers unions in return for generous political support. In effect, they’re on Ms. Weingarten’s payroll as well.
We’ll find out in time if the unions have finally overplayed their hand. The New York Times reported this week on the recent “shift in attitudes toward the unions in affluent suburbs and urban neighborhoods.” Some parents “have moved their children into private schools, which are more likely to be open, or charter schools, which are just as likely to be closed, but in some cases pivoted faster to live, online teaching.” If this is a real trend, it’s overdue. Liberals like to complain about persistent racial inequality, but a decent education is the first step in addressing it, and teachers unions are standing in the way.
This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal