Stanford University has issued a new report on the effectiveness of charter schools – this time in Pennsylvania. Their conclusion:

Compared to the educational gains the charter students would have had in their traditional public schools, the analysis shows that students in Pennsylvania charter schools on average make smaller learning gains.

The Stanford study was particularly solid methodologically, comparing charter school students with comparable peers in schools they left.

Yet as long as there is one charter school out there that performs better than the average public school, we will continue to have people swearing that schools should be run like businesses and charter schools are the answer to all that ails public education.

As for me, I want schools run by education professionals, which the Stanford researchers suggest are more likely to lead effective schools. In conclusion, they write:

Charter school authorizing is one of the policy levers that can affect the overall quality of charter school options that are available for families. A systematic, thorough and well-designed charter authorizing process increases the likelihood that an applicant’s desire to help students is matched by a sufficient level of competence and planning to actually be able to do so.

Every time I think I’m going to have time to devote to writing, I quickly become overwhelmed with work, community, and/or family obligations. Hope ever springing eternal at DCT Advisors, I hope to have some time to devote to writing over the next few months.

Some of the things about which I plan to write:

• Public Education. I increasingly am convinced that our public education system is headed in the wrong direction, primarily because we have given our schools over to people who talk solely about accountability and running schools like a business. We also aren’t teaching boys effectively and aren’t teaching very many students to “think.”
• Higher Education. I increasingly am convinced our higher education system is headed for an crash. The price of higher education has risen more quickly even than health care because federal and state governments have subsidized schools in ways that distort markets and allowed them to create bureaucracies whose focus is less and less on the education of students. The quality of education, too, is suffering as we accept more and more students into schools they are ill-suited to attend and “dumb down” our system to produce more graduates. Finally, there are some very thoughtful efforts to improve higher education that should to be highlighted.
• Technology. I think the technology revolution forecasters have been predicting for at least 20 years finally is here, and technology truly is transforming how we work, interact with one another, and even think. We need to understand what technology is doing to us.
• Economic Development. Public officials could not be doing a worse job of fostering economic development. First, they are subsidizing a few large businesses to the detriment of many smaller businesses. Second, they are trying to outsource functions better performed by government. Third, they are trying to insource activities where the market rightly has written off economic development possibilities. Fourth, they are beholden to industries that probably are only to weaken in coming years and decades. Fifth, they aren’t promoting “quality of life,” which goes hand in hand with successful economic development efforts.
• Tax and Spend. Taxes are not out of control; who pays and who doesn’t is. The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few is a recipe for instability over the long haul. By the same token, we do need to reduce the size of government strategically to balance budgets – the key word being “strategically.”
• Finance. There is no greater waste of this nation’s talent than in the financial services industry, which is less and less about facilitating real economic growth and more and more is about creating financial bubbles. They should be exposed for what they are at every opportunity.
• Rule of Law. We have a Bill of Rights for a reason, and it’s what makes us great. We need to stop discarding it every time it’s “inconvenient.”
• Caregiving. I generally write very little of a personal nature, but I think caregiving deserves some discussion/reflection.

So much to say, so little time … and often in error, never in doubt.