Book Review: Charter Schools and Their Enemies
by Thomas Sowell, New York, Basic Books, 2020
In the spring of 1975, I had just graduated from university, with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, living with my parents in Chicago and facing a shaky economy. My only marketable skill was my ability to type quickly and accurately. My mother urged me to apply at Illinois Bell, and they offered me a job working the swing shift in their typing pool.
Most of my fellow typists were black women. One I remember very well – a divorced mother of a teen-age boy, who was working the swing shift because the extra 10% we got for working at night gave her enough money to send her son to a Catholic high school. She wasn’t a Catholic, but she wanted to keep her son away from the gangs in her local public high school. Whenever we had a break, she would call her son, asking if he’d done his homework, if he’d done his reading, giving him advice and encouragement – trying to monitor, and support, her son however she could. Wouldn’t it have been great if that mother could have had some sort of public support for her son’s education, so she could have been home with him at night, when he needed her?
This need to give poor parents access to alternative schools is the subject of Charter Schools and Their Enemies, by economist Thomas Sowell.
Thomas Sowell
Sowell was born in 1930 to a deeply impoverished family in rural North Carolina. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised by a great aunt, first in Charlotte, NC, and then in Harlem. He was a bright student with a talent for math, but a difficult home life led him to drop out of high school at 16. For the next decade, he spent time in a home for “wayward boys,” did menial jobs, then a tour in the Marine Corps. After his discharge, he got his GED, then his bachelor’s degree at the age of 28, and his doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago a decade later.
Sowell’s believes his difficult experiences help him in his work as an economist: “They taught me things that would be hard to understand otherwise … I have lived through experiences which [other economists] can only theorize about.”
A prolific author, Sowell’s work is clearly written, with masses of data that are well-organized, carefully explained, and illuminated by his fierce desire for the truth: “Wherever black people were going, and wherever we wished to go, we had to get there from where we were – which meant we had to know where we were, not where we wished we were or where we wished others to think we were.”
The life of Thomas Sowell demonstrates how a poor black youngster who came of age in the 1940s, when anti-black racism was far more virulent than it is today, can use a mastery of math and English to overcome poverty and bigotry, and forge a successful career.
What Are Schools For?
Sowell’s answer to this question is shocking in its clarity: Schools “exist for the education of children. They do not exist to provide iron-clad jobs for teachers, billions of dollars in union dues for teachers unions, monopolies for educational bureaucracies, a guaranteed market for teachers college degrees or a captive audience for indoctrinators.”
Schools and Minorities
Education is particularly important for children born into poverty. For many, education is the only way they can climb the economic ladder.
Yet numerous reports and studies show that our educational system is failing those children, the ones who need it the most. How do we correct this failure?
One approach is to look at the schools that are failing, try to determine the cause of the failure, then fix it. Unfortunately, this approach assumes that it’s even possible to determine the cause – or, more likely, the many causes – of failure; and it further assumes that the system as it now exists will let us do what needs to be done.
Sowell takes the opposite approach: He looks at schools that are successful in educating children of the underclass, and says that we should create more schools like them.
Yes, there have been schools in which minority children received an excellent education. Sowell offers the example of Dunbar High School in Washington, DC. During the period of 1870 to 1955, when Washington’s schools were racially segregated, Dunbar “sent a higher proportion of its graduates to college than any white public school in the city”. Its alumni include the first black Cabinet member, the first black general, and the first black federal judge.
Further, such schools exist today. Many of them are charter schools – that is, schools that are funded by the state, but are operated independently of the mainstream school system.
What Should Schools Teach?
For Sowell, the two key subjects are English and mathematics: “For low-income minority students, a mastery of mathematics and English is a ticket out of poverty, and a foundation for developing skills in a wide range of professions. Without such skills, these children will be lucky to find decent jobs when they reach adulthood, much less fulfilling careers.”
Math and English alone are not sufficient for an education, but they are the foundation skills on which practically every other subject rests. If a school fails to teach its students these subjects, then it has failed.
How Should Schools Be Evaluated?
Sowell argues that because schools exist for the education of children, they should be evaluated solely on how well they educate the children enrolled to them. A school may have a beautiful campus, win championships in sports, and have all manner of activities, but if its students do not acquire the skills they will need to make their way in the adult world, it has failed.
Sowell believes that standardized tests offer the best means to evaluate objectively students’ mastery of English and mathematics. Some critics object to this approach, saying it is too rigid, and too harsh. Sowell’s replies that a school should be preparing its students for life in the adult world – a world in which only results matter: “What [a critic] refers to as the ‘harsh sanctions’ of standardized testing in the schools are as nothing compared to the bitter and lasting consequences that life has waiting for those who go out into the world as adults, with neither skills nor educational foundation for acquiring skills that would give them a better life.”
Charter Schools: The New York Study
The heart of the book is Sowell’s comparison of charter schools and traditional public schools in New York City. Each charter school was matched with traditional school using three criteria:
The schools had similar ethnic compositions, with a majority of students in both being black or Hispanic.
The schools were housed in the same building.
The schools had one or more classes at the same grade in the same building.
The criteria help ensure that apples are being compared with apples.
Further, Sowell looked only at charter networks that shared five or more buildings with traditional public schools. This was done to avoid cherry-picking among schools.
The paired charter-traditional schools were compared using the scores on the standardized tests in English and mathematics that New York City administers each year to grades 3 to 8.
At the risk of oversimplifying the mass of data that Sowell presents, the results show that for nearly every grade in every school, students in the charter school had better scores than did the children in the traditional school – and in some cases, they did significantly better. Again, these were majority black or Hispanic students living in the same neighborhood and being taught in the same building as the students enrolled in the traditional public school.
These results certainly are appreciated by New York’s parents: in 2019, when the book was written, 50,000 students were on the waiting list hoping to be enrolled in a charter school.
Enemies of School Choice
The enemies of school choice are those who benefit from the system as it exists now: the school bureaucracies, the teachers’ unions, and the politicians whose campaigns are funded by the bureaucrats and the unions.
To quote Albert Shanker, former head of the United Federation of Teachers: “When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren.”
It all comes down to the issue of who controls of the enormous sums of money that are spent each year on education – the educational establishment, or what the establishment calls “the competition.” Consider this: If all of the 50,000 children on New York’s waiting list were to be enrolled in a charter school, the school establishment would lose control of more than a billion dollars of school funding. Those dollars wouldn’t disappear; they would still be spent to educate children – and, in many cases, better spent than they are now. But the power of the school bureaucracy and the teachers’ union would be greatly diminished.
Yet, schools exist “for the education of children. They do not exist to provide iron-clad jobs for teachers, billions of dollars in union dues for teachers unions, monopolies for educational bureaucracies, a guaranteed market for teachers college degrees or a captive audience for indoctrinators.”
The School Choice That We Face
In the fifty years since I worked with that single black mother, her son has grown up and is approaching retirement. And his children have grown up and had children of their own. And those children in turn are having children. And over those three generations, public education in Chicago has steadily grown worse.
And this doesn’t even take into account the catastrophic effect that the Covid-related shutdown of public schools had on students – with impoverished students, who were the most vulnerable and who had the least access to resources, being hurt the most.
But Wisconsin has no reason to gloat over Chicago’s failures. The latest NAEP test scores show that Wisconsin scores last in the nation in teaching black students to read, and is near the bottom in teaching them mathematics. What a waste of human potential! What a tragedy for those students!
It’s said that insanity “is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Yet in education, we keep doing the same thing, year in and year out, generation after generation, expecting the results to improve somehow.
School choice is arguably the most important issue for impoverished families today: for the simple reason that school choice gives their children the clearest path out of poverty.
How much longer will we deny to impoverished parents what every parent with means has – that is, the power to choose the best school for their children?
How many more generations of children must have their lives stunted by inadequate education before we say “Enough!” and try something different?
—RPKC Member Frederick Butzen