(As a child and adolescent psychiatrist for 30+ years – and a teacher for two years before that – I have special reason to be concerned by the recent attack on teachers unions and public education in general.)

Given increasing school closures and teacher layoffs in many states, moves by Congress and state legislation to cut education still further are extremely worrying. The crusade to privatize public education – by Wall Street, Congress and even the White House – means that these schools are very unlikely to reopen as public schools. What’s far more likely is federal arm twisting, as occurred in New Orleans following Katrina, to reopen them as privately run charter schools.

The Crusade to Privatize Education

We have to be clear here: Republicans and Tea Partiers aren’t cutting education simply to balance the budget and provide tax cuts for their wealthy supporters. They have a far more ominous agenda – namely a 30 year campaign to privatize public education, just as prisons, water, warfare, welfare and other public services are being privatized. The school privatization movement (aka the charter school movement) is no longer a movement, but a Big Business. Predictably Obama, as in the case of the Wall Street bank bailouts and the corporate welfare to health insurance and drug companies under ObamaCare, has come down on the side of Big Business. At present teachers unions are Americans’ last line of defense in the war against public education. Moreover with the concerted attack on teachers in many state capitals, millions of American children are at great peril of losing public education as a basic democratic right.

Ignoring the Research

The so-called education reform debate is centered, as always, around low performing, mainly minority students in inner city schools. Traditionally public education has been funded by local government through property taxes. It seems logical that children in wealthy districts who attend small classes with well-paid teachers would have higher achievement levels than students in poor school districts with understaffed schools and limited access to textbooks and other resources. Unsurprisingly more than fifty years of research bear this out. Nevertheless educators and political leaders who try increase funding to poor school districts are demonized for “throwing money” at the problem.”

The other research neoliberal conservatives like to ignore relates to the most cost effective approach to educational reform – one that doesn’t require additional funding – namely the wide scale adoption of peer teaching/tutoring protocols, in which students themselves become part of the teaching team. Twenty years of peer reviewed research demonstrates that this is the most economical and easiest type of reform to implement, as well as vastly more effective in improving achievement than computer-assisted instruction, reduced class size, extended school days and other perks promised by many charter schools. (I blog about this, providing links to teachers manuals and outcome studies, at http://stuartbramhall.aegauthorblogs.com/2011/02/24/update-on-peer-teachingtutoring/)

Meanwhile the track record of charter schools in improvement student achievement scores is pretty dismal compared to the hype. In 2009 the Stanford University center for Research on Educational Outcomes released the exhaustive study Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States (see http://www.counterpunch.org/weil08262009.html). Here are some of the results of this investigation into 2,403 charter schools in 16 states:

Math

• 46% of students had math gains indistinguishable to public school students

• 17% of students showed significant gains compared to public school students

• 37% showed significantly lower gains than public school students

Overall math learning in charter schools lagged by .03 standard deviations behind math learning in public schools.

Reading

Overall reading gains in charter school students lagged .01 standard deviations behind public school students.

Black and Hispanic students (the ones specifically targeted by the charter school movement) did significantly worse in both reading and math compared to public school students.

To be continued.