Aaron Regunberg: The Case Against Achievement First

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Friday, October 07, 2011

Aaron Regunberg, GoLocalProv MINDSETTER™

I have written once before about Achievement First (AF), the charter management organization trying to set up shop here in Providence, and I don’t want to become repetitive. But there are still a lot of folks in our city who aren’t aware of the situation and how it will affect them. I have done my best to find as much information about AF as is available—from news stories and reports by New York charter regulatory bodies—and

I wanted to use this opportunity to lay out as clearly as possible the arguments against this organization coming to Providence.If you are a Providence parent, student, or tax-paying resident, the Achievement First proposal should matter to you. Here are five big reasons to care:

1. Pedagogy of Punishment

Achievement First follows a harshly disciplinarian “no excuses” model of education that attempts to raise academic achievement through severely punitive measures. During an average day at AF Endeavor in Brooklyn last year, more than one in five (and up to as many as one in three) students were given detention for benign infractions such as dropping pencils or slouching. In addition to being constant, discipline can also be excessive, with a focus on public shaming and even allegations from community members of physical roughness. Unsurprisingly, parents at multiple AF schools have spoken out against this culture as harmful to the emotional health of their kids.

For people who aren’t particularly opposed tosuch punitive treatment of children, there’s another reason to care. This model doesn’t actually produce the kind of academic learning that modern employers and college admission officesvalue.While AF has had significant success in raising students’ math scores (for which they should be applauded), their kids still struggle with English language arts skills. That is because, according to the NY State Education Department’s charter renewal report, AF schools are not effective at developing higher-order thinking and often fail to “present students with the opportunity for thinking critically or expressing their ideas.” While we may think higher-order thinking and student voice are important for our kids, it is clear from their record that Achievement First does not.

2. Financial Cost to Our District

Although Achievement First is a private corporation, their schools are funded by public dollars. Every student from Providence that AF enrolls will take around $13,500 out of the system. But the loss of one student doesn’t save our district $13,500, only the much lower marginal cost of educating that student, meaning that Achievement First will make our district many millions of dollars poorer without making it many millions of dollars cheaper to run for Providence’s other 23,000 students. Can we afford to take this hit, considering that, just months ago, the city was so strapped for cash that the mayor closed four neighborhood schools?

The counterargument I’ve heard from Commissioner Gist and others is that the state’s new education funding formula gives more money to Providence, so there’s nothing to worry about. But this money was apportioned because of the significant underfunding of Providence’s schools. Theexistence of slightly more money this year does not negate the fact that the Achievement First proposal, in taking those ‘extra’ dollars right back out of the district, would leave the majority of Providence students in schools that remain as chronically underfunded and in as much danger of closure as they were last year.

3. Failures with English Language Learners (ELL) and Special-Needs Students

In Providence, 16% of our students are English language learners and 17% have special-needs. Yet Achievement First has a poor record serving both groups. In New York City, six out of seven AF schools for which data are available have only 1-2% ELL populations, despite the fact that 14% of NYC’s students fall into this category. The one school with a sizable (10%) ELL population, AF Bushwick, was given only a short-term renewal this year by the New York charter renewal board because of ELL services that were “ineffective” and that “could be seen as violative of federal law.” And special-needs students in AF schools face similar constraints. Does it make sense for our city to bring in a school that will either force out ELL and special-needs students (and their costlier services) for the rest of the district to absorb, or enroll those students and serve them ineffectively?

4. Loss of Public Accountability

Achievement First is a private corporation controlled by a private board. Although the Mayor of Providence would be on its governing body, that is hardly a replacement for the public meetings and regulations that provide community members a legally-mandated voice in the governance of district public schools. Although there are a number of local charters in our community, bringing in an out-of-state chain charter company is absolutely unprecedented in the state of Rhode Island, and there are few if any regulations, rules or policies in place to ensure that this new kind of school acts responsibly and that their board, private funders and leaders are transparent. In other words, to bring AF into Providence is to give them control over our tax dollars and our children without ensuring that there are real mechanisms to hold them accountable—for their finances, their failures to serve all students, or their excessive punishment regimes.

5. Choice isn’t the Problem

Some people say we need more options, more choices in urban education to encourage improvement and competition. I would argue that Providence—home to a cutting-edge career and technical school, a special education high school, district-affiliated and independent charter schools and numerous special programs left from waves of reform that included magnet schools, small high schools and many others—already has a dizzying array of educational structures. This variety, however, has not led to uniform excellence. Why? Because students attend schools that are under-resourced and over-regulated, with increasingly fewer decisions left to the professional educators who greet them each day in their classrooms and hallways. Many charter school advocates say that one reason successful charters work is that most exist independent of district bureaucracies. I am hopeful that with the new leadership of Superintendent Susan Lusi, we can tackle the actual root of the problem, not just jump on the latest wave of reform.

These arguments against Achievement First are not in any way meant to deny that Providence public schools require huge reforms and reinvestments if they are to truly serve our city’s parents and students. They do. And I’d be the first to admit that the thought of achieving suchreforms and reinvestments can sometimes be overwhelming. There are days when it may indeed seem simpler to give up on our community’s ability to make positive changes to our schools, when it may indeed seem like the only answer is to pass the wholemessy responsibility over to private education corporations like Achievement First.

But that’s not the answer. The answer is to identify the practices that do function well and then find the resources necessary to support such systems across our district. A great example can be seen in the saga of Providence’s Hope High School following a state-turnaround effort that—according to almost everyone familiar with the school, even Superintendent Tom Brady upon his retirement—was successful on a number of fronts, from the creation of a positive learning environment to test scores that were on the rise. But these strategies required some extra resources and some extra flexibility for Hope’s teachers and administrators, so instead of using the policies from Hope to improve other schools, the district undermined and eventually eliminated them.

Instead of outsourcing our children's education to an out-of-state company, our challenge must be to identify ways to increase the level of independence (and yes, accountability) that individual principal and teachers have to meet the variety of needs that are before them, and to find the governmental and community resources necessary to support and implement successful models in ways that will create a stronger, better system of public education throughout Providence.

This is easier said than done. But the fact remains that it can be done. It just requires more commitment, energy, and competent effort than we’ve been able to organize in the past, which is exactly why bringing in a resource-draining corporate charter school should not—no, cannot—be our focus. For all the reasons I have laid out above, Achievement First will hurt Providence’s children. It poses a very real and dangerous threat, and if you are a parent, a student, or a taxpayer in Providence, then you’re the one being threatened. Now is the time to stand up and demand that the Governor, the Board of Regents, and the Mayor reject Achievement First and instead come together to truly improve the education of every student in Providence. Real public education isn’t easy. But it’s worth fighting for, and I urge all of us to do so.

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