High Expectations, High Support

Monday, November 7th, 2016

Social scientists have quietly spent years analyzing the outcomes of students who attend charter schools, and the findings are stark:

Many charter schools fail to live up to their promise, but one type has repeatedly shown impressive results.

Hannah Larkin, the principal at Match, refers to such schools as “high expectations, high support” schools. They devote more of their resources to classroom teaching and less to almost everything else. They keep students in class for more hours. They set high standards for students and try to instill confidence in them. They focus on giving teachers feedback about their craft and helping them get better.

“My mother has been teaching forever. My father has been teaching for 10 years,” Christopher Perez, a physics teacher at Match, told me. “They don’t get observed. I get observed every week and have a meeting about it every week.”

While visiting Match, I was struck that teachers hardly seemed to notice when I ducked into their rooms, midclass, to watch them. They are obviously used to having observers. They welcome it, as a way to improve.

The latest batch of evidence about this approach is among the most rigorous. Professors at M.I.T., Columbia, Michigan and Berkeley have tracked thousands of charter-school applicants, through high school and beyond, in Boston, where most charters fit the “high expectations, high support” model.

Crucially, the researchers took several steps to make sure the findings were real. They compared lottery winners with losers, controlling for the fact that families who applied for the lotteries were different from families who didn’t. They also counted as charter students all those who enrolled, including any who later left.

When you talk to the professors about their findings, you hear a degree of excitement that’s uncommon for academic researchers. “Relative to other things that social scientists and education policy people have tried to boost performance — class sizes, tracking, new buildings — these schools are producing spectacular gains,” said Joshua Angrist, an M.I.T. professor.

Students who go to Boston’s charter schools learn reading and math better and faster than students elsewhere. They are more likely to take A.P. tests and to do well on them. Their SAT scores are higher than for similar students elsewhere — an average of 51 points higher on the math SAT. Many more students attend a four-year college, suggesting that the benefits don’t disappear over time.

The gains are large enough that some of Boston’s charters, despite enrolling mostly lower-income students, have test scores that resemble those of upper-middle-class public schools. The seventh graders at the Brooke Charter schools in East Boston and Roslindale fare as well on a state math test as students at the prestigious Boston Latin school, the country’s oldest public school and a school with an admissions exam.

A frequent criticism of charters is that they skim off the best students, but that’s not the case in Boston. Many groups that struggle academically — boys, African-Americans, Latinos, special-education students like Alanna — are among the biggest beneficiaries. On average, notes Parag Pathak, also of M.I.T., Boston’s charters eliminate between one-third and one-half of the white-black test-score gap in a single year.

Comments

  1. Ross says:

    Two words: “deep practice”

    Talent Code, Daniel Coyle.

  2. Borepatch says:

    And yet with all of this research, we find that educational outcomes have been stagnant (at best) for 50 years.

  3. Scott says:

    There is political incentive to keep education an unsolved problem. Therefore it will remain unsolved, even if the solution is staring us in the face.

  4. Lucklucky says:

    Since we don’t have educational competition, 90% of teachers think it is beneath them to be part of a capitalist society. They act like aristocrats, so they are in fact conservatives trying to preserve the ideas of the 19th Century or just hopeless romantics.

    That is why no one is worried that a teacher can only teach the same number of students as a 0 A.D. teacher 2016 years ago. How about that for productivity improvement?

    Students today also leave school too old, since good students mostly can’t jump years. Creativity is curtailed since major output tends to be in late teenage and lower adult years.

  5. Bomag says:

    Sounds like they read “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” and implemented those suggestions.

  6. Asta Kask 77 says:

    The problem is that countries like Finland do the opposite and are way ahead, according to the OECD, as well as Taiwan. Charter schools and current schools are a joke. We might want to look at examples of other places that are doing way better than us and see what they are doing right and make adjustments here.

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