I Don’t Know Why Either

Alex Tabarrok makes an interesting point this morning:

"I don't know why anyone interested in the welfare of children would want to discourage this kind of experimentation."

The experiment he is talking about concerns charter schools in Harlem. According to new research and Harlem parents whose kids are enrolled, these schools have made important improvements in educational achievement among poor and black students. Geoffrey Canada, founder and president of Harlem's Children Zone, a charter school district in Harlem, says that his schools have found the "equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It's amazing. It should be celebrated." Charter school successes in New York are so great that the State Legislature receives regular pressure from voters to lift the limit on the number of charter allowed across the state, including Harlem.

There are some who want to discourage this kind of experimentation. Namely, Bill Perkins, state senator from Harlem, opposes charter school expansion there. He is, among other things, not a fan of the for-profit model that charter schools rely. And as the NYT tells us, he thinks Harlem parents are "being sold something that is hype, that is all about creating more demand."

Well, Tabarrok reminds his readers that one of the more successful charter schools, Promise Academy, resides in Perkins' district. If Perkins gets his way, the successes found at Promise Academy will not be replicated anywhere else in Harlem. That raises two important questions, one of which Tabarrok already alluded to: why oppose this experimentation? And how successful is Promise Academy anyway?

In yesterday's NYT, David Brooks tells us that a new study of Harlem's Children Zone, which counts Promise Academy as one of its own, found "enormous" gains in educational achievement among its students. Brooks gives us a summary of the study:

[T]he most common education reform ideas — reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start — produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations. If you study policy, those are the sorts of improvements you live with every day. Promise Academy produced gains of 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations. That's off the charts. In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.

Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap.

Stirring stuff, indeed. It seems to me that Promise Academy and other charter schools of the same ilk are producing some extraordinary gains.

Yet Bill Perkins' point remains. Charter schools like Promise Academy will likely produce more demand. In the for-profit model, suppliers will do everything they can to convince us that more of what they sell is more of what we need. It'll just be another race to the bottom, according to this argument.

But if that supply produces 1.3 to 1.4 standard deviations in educational gains, what's wrong with more demand? Why would anyone want to discourage these kinds of gains? Don't people understand that opposing charter school expansion means staying with the educational status quo? Why would anyone want that? What's wrong with educational experiments if they produce better outcomes?

I'm with Alex: I don't know why either.

(Addendum: When Brooks uses statistical terms to illustrate the large improvement students in Harlem make at Promise Academy – 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations worth of improvement – he says these achievements are "off the charts." Well, not really. These achievements are large but still on the charts.)