On his 90th birthday, he published Charter Schools and Their Enemies, a data-driven evisceration of entrenched interests thwarting poor students’ access to charter schools. It continues his long and venerable tradition of judging policies by their actual results rather than their merely hoped-for results. Charter schools are not the “magic bullet” solution to the nation’s educational ills, but they deliver much better outcomes at a lower cost than traditional public schools — and teachers’ unions hate them. That would be puzzling if educating children were what the debate is about. Sowell argues that it is not.
Performance / The book has two main themes: understanding charter schools’ performance and understanding why they face opposition.
He tackles the former by carefully matching charter schools to comparable traditional public schools and comparing their results. This comparison is important because any claim that charter schools deliver better results at lower cost immediately runs into the objection that the students who attend the charters are different: they have different backgrounds, different degrees of family motivation, and so on. Sowell, of course, is aware of this and tries to make his comparisons as close to apples-to-apples as the data will allow. His statistical analysis probably would not pass muster at a technical economics journal like the Economics of Education Review, but this is a trade press book aimed at an audience of non-specialists. That said, his comparisons are consistent with more rigorous and sophisticated analyses by scholars like Stanford University’s Caroline Hoxby. Charter schools, it appears, yield better performance.
About half of the book consists of commentary and analysis. The other half is comprised of data appendices that constitute an open invitation to both Sowell’s friends and enemies to check his math using the data on which he bases his inferences.
He focuses on one of the lingering issues in education research: the black/white “achievement gap.” Black and Hispanic students tend not to perform as well on assessment tests as whites and Asians. He argues that while the reasons for this are extremely complex, one cannot overlook the elephant in the room: superlative performance by students who attend the KIPP Academy and Success Academy charter schools that are government-funded but privately operated.
To charter school critics who decry public school funding “following” students to the charter schools, he asks: if a student stayed in public schools but moved from one district to another, should her family continue to pay taxes to the first district? Few people — if anyone — would say yes. So, why should families that leave a traditional public school for a charter be responsible for continuing to pay for what they left?
As is his wont, Sowell insists on evaluating public policies with respect to the results they produce in the world we inhabit rather than the results we hope they would produce in the best world we can imagine. Both his own analysis and the literature he summarizes in the book suggest that, in the actual world, math and language skills are of utmost importance and charter schools deliver achievement in those subjects that traditional schools do not. Even in the face of “structural” political, cultural, social, and economic problems that no reasonable person would deny, charter schools get the job done. He gives as one example a charter school where students outperform counterparts whose family incomes are some five times higher than the charter students’ households.
The enemies / Charter school opponent Diane Ravitch makes numerous appearances in the book as one of Sowell’s implied interlocutors. She argues — and I think Sowell would agree — that what we observe in student performance is not an “achievement gap” so much as it is an “opportunity gap.” It is ironic, then, that she and others wish to deny disadvantaged kids the kinds of opportunities that richer families take for granted. My family lives in the city. If a law were passed requiring our kids to attend city schools, we would quickly move to any of a number of decent-to-excellent suburban school districts. The people who stand to benefit the most from charter schools do not have the same opportunities.
By far, the staunchest enemies of charter schools are teachers’ unions, which see the schools as a threat. New York City school administrators bound by a byzantine union contract find that it is prohibitively costly in both money and time to fire an incompetent teacher — hence the expensive problem of “rubber rooms” where teachers who have been removed from the classroom do nothing but clock in and out and accrue seniority and pension benefits. Charter schools do not have nearly as much difficulty getting rid of problem teachers. Union leader Albert Shanker (1928–1997) put the problem in perspective when he said, “I’ll put it this way: I’ll start representing schoolchildren when schoolchildren start paying union dues.” Union leaders and the politicians they support know which side of their bread is buttered.
When confronted with data on charter school performance, these critics offer a string of “what about” objections. Sowell has little patience for these because, he says simply, schools exist to educate children. He shows that a lot of the objections are overblown. Where some charter school enemies claim the schools essentially are resegregation, he argues first that the racial composition of charter schools follows the racial composition of the districts they inhabit, noting that the segregation difference between charters and others is about one percentage point. The same is true for charters’ alleged discrimination against students with disabilities.
He focuses on one of his favorite examples: the remarkable performance of Washington, DC’s all-black Dunbar High School between 1870 and 1955. Maybe Dunbar, which “sent a higher proportion of its graduates on to college than any white public high school in the city,” is an exception, but it seems more likely that educational excellence does not require rich families, lavish funding, or patronizing white saviors indulging what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
What about enrichment and life beyond math and language proficiency? Again, Sowell notes that contrary to the idea that charter schools are stamping out soulless math-and-language-proficient drones, charter students have at least as many “enrichment” opportunities as their traditional counterparts and likely more. Critics chafe at the emphasis on math and language skills, but as the ever-quotable Sowell writes, “While a mastery of mathematics and English can be a ticket out of poverty, a highly cultivated sense of grievance and resentment is not.”
Another objection raised by charter critics is that the schools lack transparency and accountability. This is not an unfair demand given that government contracts are prime opportunities for graft. But Sowell notes that charter schools are “accountable” where it matters most: they must deliver results that please the students and their families. His discussion brings to light the difference between accountability in a bureaucratic system and accountability in something that at least has the dimmest outlines of a commercial system. Traditional education bureaucracies praise “accountability” and fidelity to specified procedures — credentialing, for example. The market — even one so hamstrung as the “market” for charter schools — is “accountable” in that it emphasizes results. We have been pouring money and master’s degrees onto traditional public schools for years without much to show for it. Charters — using less money and non-unionized teachers who do not usually come decorated with credentials — do more with less. Nonetheless, they are tried, measured, and found wanting by their enemies because they are inconsistent with The Vision of the Anointed, to borrow the title of one of Sowell’s earlier books — and, perhaps most importantly, with the funding prerogatives of the labor movement.
Conclusion / Charter Schools and Their Enemies is a classic Sowell performance. The logic is clear, the inferences are driven by quantitative data and other facts, and the writing is razor-sharp. I admit it is not his best work, but the man is 90 years old and still sets an intellectual bar that very few people can clear.
As he puts it, “The fact that an idea sounds plausible, and is consistent with the prevailing social vision, does not exempt it from the test of empirical evidence.” When he looks at the empirical evidence, he finds that charter schools get the job done in ways that traditional public schools do not.
