Kevin Williams reviews Thomas Sowell’s new book on
charter schools in the July 27 issue of National Review. The review is
published under the headline The
Collapsing Case against Charter Schools.” The review opens:
Thomas Sowell — who will have just turned 90 when this
review is published — could have retired by now. He could be publishing the
memoirs of a celebrated intellectual or the late-career tracts of an éminence
grise. What does he give us, instead? A methodologically rigorous, closely
argued, data-driven case for charter schools, with very little high-flown
rhetoric (I noted one exclamation point) and 94 pages of data tables. Charter
Schools and Their Enemies is a bloodbath for Sowell’s intellectual
opponents, and it ought to be a neutron bomb in the middle of the school-reform
debate. But Thomas Sowell has been giving the reading public and the
policymaking class some of the most intelligent advice to be had for many
decades — why would they start listening to him now?
Much of Charter Schools and Their Enemies is
dedicated to the seemingly simple — but not simple — project of comparing
educational outcomes at charter schools with those at conventional public
schools. He begins with an illustrative case that will be familiar to many
conservatives: The Texas–Iowa public-school comparison. If you judged simply by
scores on standardized tests, you would conclude that Iowa has much better
public schools than does Texas. But there’s a wrinkle: White students in Texas
outperform white students in Iowa, Hispanic students in Texas outperform
Hispanic students in Iowa, and black students in Texas outperform black students
in Iowa. But Iowa is very, very white, and Texas is not. The source of the
disparity in standardized-test outcomes for white, black, and Hispanic students
is of course the subject of some controversy, but those disparities are
longstanding, they are similar in many cities and states and from urban to
rural areas, and they are slow to change — with one important exception: in
charter schools. In conventional public schools, the majority of the students
are white or Asian; in charter schools, the majority of the students are black
or Hispanic. Studies finding that charter schools perform only about as well as
conventional schools actually tell us something very interesting: that in
charter schools the racial gap in achievement has been significantly diminished
and in many places eliminated, while in public schools it has not.
Sowell’s major analysis considers the overwhelmingly
black and Hispanic student populations in both charters and conventional public
schools in New York City. Why these students? For one thing, Sowell has gone to
great lengths here to compare students who are very similar to one another. In
fact, Sowell’s main study is limited to charter-school students attending class
in the same building as conventional public-school students in the same grade,
in schools that are majority-black and -Hispanic, with a special focus on the
charter-school networks that meet in five or more buildings, meaning the
biggest charter groups: KIPP, Success Academy, Explore, Uncommon, and
Achievement First. Focusing on these New York City students has a couple of
added benefits: New York keeps track of students by ethnicity and socioeconomic
status, facilitating a better apples-to-apples comparison, and — crucially, for
the purposes of this kind of study — it assigns children to charter schools
through a lottery. Parents have to nominate their children for a spot, and
there is presumably some difference between the parents who bother and the
parents who don’t, but the charter schools are not able to cherry-pick the best
students and thereby pad out their performance numbers.
And the numbers? That’s the bloodbath I mentioned.
There is, as one would expect, significant variability in
the performance of the charter schools, just as there is significant
variability in the performance of the conventional public schools. (And here it
bears underscoring: Charter schools are public schools, publicly funded and
serving public-school students; the difference is that charter schools are relieved
of some of the constraints imposed on conventional schools by public-sector
unions, their financial interests, and the political interests built atop those
financial interests.) In almost every case, the charter schools — including the
worst of them — outperformed the conventional public schools operating in the
same buildings, in the same neighborhoods, serving very similar students. In
most cases, the share of charter-school students achieving proficiency or
better on standardized tests was a multiple of the number of the conventional
public-school students doing so; similarly, in most cases the number of
conventional public-school students receiving the lowest classification on
those same tests was some multiple of the number of charter-school students
doing so. Sowell lets the data speak for themselves, reporting the high and low
English and math figures for each of his comparison sets.
(Sowell’s convention is to group the grade levels the
charters and conventional public schools have in common in each of the
buildings they have in common; so, for example, if a charter school has four
grades in common with public schools in five buildings, that produces 20 grade
levels for comparison. It looks a little weird at first, but it makes sense.)
For the charter schools, the data are a litany of
triumph, and for the conventional public schools, they are a lamentation….
Williamson concludes his review on a bitter if realistic
note: “Our political culture is sick, and many of our institutions are corrupt.
Many of them would not be capable of acting on what they could learn from Charter
Schools and Their Enemies even if they were so inclined, which they aren’t.
Thomas Sowell is a national treasure in a nation that does not entirely deserve
him.” The review makes for compelling reading. I wanted to bring it to the
attention of readers along with Sowell’s new book.
Mark Levin devoted a recent episode of Life, Liberty
& Levin to an interview with Sowell about the book. I can’t find a
video of that interview online, but Peter Robinson got there first last month
just after Sowell had turned 90 (video below).
Thomas Sowell: A
legend at 90
