Wall Street Journal Publishes Dueling Op-Eds About School Reform
In the space of a week, The Wall Street Journal published dueling op-eds regarding the impact of the school reform movement.
In “Charter Schools’ Success Is an Illusion,” published August 27th, Glenn Sacks contended that the high test scores posted by charter schools reflect the same phenomenon of student sorting exhibited by district magnet schools.
Sacks, a teacher at a magnet high school in Los Angeles and co-chairman of the United Teachers of LA, explained that his students substantially outperformed students across California on the 2019 Advancement Placement U.S. Government and Politics exam but downplayed his own success as their teacher by noting the selection effect involved in magnet school enrollment. Sacks wrote this same effect is widely evident at charter schools.
“The selection effect that makes me appear more successful than I am,” Sacks wrote, “also makes charter schools appear more successful than they are…. Each spring, pro-charter websites are filled with standardized-test-score and college-acceptance hype, contrasting charters’ ‘success’ with traditional public schools’ scores and rates, as they were competing on a level playing field.”
Sacks wrote the playing field is quite tilted, however, and cited as evidence his own experience as a teacher at a neighborhood public school before moving to a magnet school. “Charter skimming is apparent in the public classroom,” he wrote. “Each year in the residential school, I lost a few students because they had been accepted to charters. Almost all of them were top-tier students.”
Making matters more challenging for neighborhood public schools, Sacks continued, is the charter school practice of shedding underperforming students: “At the same time, we received students midyear who struggled in charters and were bounced back to public schools.”
Seven days later, on September 3rd, the Journal published Karl Zinsmeister’s op-ed defending charter schools as well as the education reform movement in general.
In “Education Reform Will Weather the Left’s Assault,” Zinsmeister, lamented the recent backlash against charter schools and vouchers but declared the school reform movement is not going anywhere.
Resistance has mounted and growth has slipped, wrote Zinsmeister, editor in chief of Philanthropy and former domestic policy adviser to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and President George W. Bush.
As examples of pushback against the reform movement, Zinsmeister cited the rejection of applications for new charter schools in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles as well as the refusal in these cities to lease more space in school buildings to charter organizations; the decision by Houston’s Board of Education in May to discontinue using Teach For America to staff schools; and Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf’s veto in June of a bill to expand the state’s tuition tax credit program funding scholarships at private K-12 schools.
Yet there are reasons for reformers to remain optimistic, Zinsmeister maintained. “For one thing,” he wrote, “they have built a parallel infrastructure outside the old education establishment for teacher training, curriculum development, building acquisition, classroom management, etc. These institutions are durable enough to survive the current hostility, and they’re producing clear positive results.”
Zinsmeister wrote that another reason for hope is the presence among reformers of “inventive and fearless leaders,” one of whom, Virginia Walden Ford, is the subject of a feature film, Miss Virginia, to be released in October.
Ford, played by Emmy-winning Uzo Aduba, led the campaign for vouchers for low-income students in Washington, DC. The city’s Opportunity Scholarship Program was launched in 2004 and now allows approximately 1,600 students a year to attend private schools with public funding.
Zinsmeister compared Miss Virginia and its potential impact to Waiting for “Superman,” the 2010 documentary directed by Davis Guggenheim.