I’m a big fan of Thomas Sowell. His books are a joy to read because of how informative they are and because of his blunt style. This new book has compelling information and analysis in favor of charter schools.
Sowell examines the test results of a bunch of charter schools and public schools housed together in the same buildings in New York City (the details of his sample are discussed in the first part of the book) using government data. The overall result: charter schools do better. He also cites some achievements of charter schools in other parts of the country besides New York. For example, on page 103 the Wall Street Journal editorial board reports on a bunch of studies comparing school students who won the lottery to get into charter schools with students who also applied to the lottery, but lost and had to go to a public school instead of a charter school. In New York City, Florida, Chicago, and Boston, the students who went to charter schools did better than the students who lost the lottery.
One shocking thing I didn’t know about was school officials trying to prevent charter schools from making use of vacant school buildings. A very telling example of this occurred in Milwaukee in 2014, where “the city owed at least 15 unused school buildings, costing the taxpayers more than $1.4 million a year for maintenance. When the president of the Milwaukee Public Schools Board was asked what he thought about a pending proposal to pass a law, forcing the traditional public school board to sell vacant school buildings, his reply was that this would be ‘like asking the Coca-Cola Company to turn over its facilities to Pepsi so Pepsi can be expand and compete with the Coca-Cola Company’” (p. 62).
As if this quote was not blunt enough, Sowell points out that “the analogy fails because the Coca-Cola bought and paid for its own assets, while the taxpayers bought and paid for the school buildings— for the purpose of educating children, NOT for the purpose of protecting incumbents in the education establishment from competition” (ibid.). The president turned out to have the same human nature that all humans have. Even if he truly cares about the education of children — or to put it more generally, cares about doing A, B, and/or C — he cares even more for himself. As Milton Friedman once said in his Free to Choose television series, nobody pursues someone else’s objectives as carefully as they pursue their own. Sowell shows in other sections of his book that public school teachers and officials have quite a few incentives to oppose charter schools.
Overall the book is pretty good, but I gave it four stars instead of five because it has some problems that could’ve been corrected. First, in Chapter 2, where Sowell discusses the test results of charter schools and public schools in the same buildings, he failed to account for differences in the number of disabled students between the schools. He did show that in general charter schools don’t have much of a difference in their amount of disabled students compared to public schools (pp. 104-105), but in his sample the differences are bigger than the ones described in that section of the book. For example, some of the differences for Success Academy are in double digits, and sometimes big double digits: the Success Academy school in the building with Frederick Douglass Academy II and Wadleigh Performing and Visual Arts (both public schools) has 31% fewer disabled students than the former and 11% fewer disabled students than the latter (p. 210).
I have tried being as pessimistic as I could towards the charter schools when it came to these disabled student number differentials. To continue the example I just mentioned, I would look at the results of Success Academy and penalize it in the worst way possible: subtract 31 (or whatever the difference is) from the percentage of students who reached Level 4 (the best possible test result) and just assume that that difference would get Level 1 (the worst result) in the charter school. In short, I am being very generous to the public schools in my comparison of the test results.
Before I did this, the Grade 7 scores for math for these schools (I’m only doing just Grade 7 and just math for the sake of brevity) were as follows (see pp. 24, 210):
—-MATH RESULTS—-
(The order is Level 1 to Level 4 left to right. So Frederick Douglass has 44% of its students get Level 1, 25% get Level 2, and so on.)
Frederick Douglass: 44, 25, 19, 13
Wadleigh: 40, 40, 15, 5
SUCCESS ACADEMY: 2, 2, 9, 88
88 - 31 = 57, so that will be Success Academy’s new top score. So the results after this penalization are as follows:
—-MATH RESULTS—-
Frederick Douglass: 44, 25, 19, 13
Wadleigh: 40, 40, 15, 5
SUCCESS ACADEMY: 33, 2, 9, 57
Success Academy is still looking a lot better than other schools in the SAME BUILDINGS. It looks even better when we remember that I penalized with the biggest difference, even though the difference between Wadleigh and Success Academy was much smaller.
When you use my be-as-harsh-as-possible logic to account for differences in the amount of disabled students, you will see similar results to this example, both in math and English (the results for my example are still impressive for the English results, even though I had to take people out of Level 3 since Level 4 didn’t have enough people). The main point here is to ask why the book did not do this work for us, even though this work removes what is in my opinion a serious objection to the sample data (the differences in disabled students are too big). The book also could’ve mentioned that public schools might have incentives to incorrectly classify students as disabled in order to get more funding (Jason Riley mentions this a bit in his book Please Stop Helping Us, in the chapter on school choice). I don’t know how much of an issue this is in New York but this is definitely something to consider when thinking about this issue.
I also wish that he dealt with the issue of English Language Learners. On pages 104 to 105, where he mentions ELLs, he only cites data pertaining to students with disabilities (the aforementioned lottery studies are strong proof that charter schools aren’t successful merely because they supposedly discriminate against ELLs, but I don’t think it would’ve hurt to cite some ELL enrollment data). Unfortunately it seems that lots of schools in the Appendices don’t have data on ELL enrollment, but using my harsh-as-you-can logic seems to show that charter schools in Sowell’s sample are better (for my example, make Success Academy have 7 percent ELL and subtract from Level 4 like I did before. I did this check mainly for Success Academy schools though). Again, I think it would’ve been better if Sowell tried to account for these differences in Chapter 2. One of his sources on page 104 actually mentions that in 2018 “22 percent of charter kids in grades 3 to 8 listed as ‘English Language Learners’ scored proficient on the [New York] state English exams, vs. just 10 percent for the main system. On the math tests, it was 34 percent proficient for charters, vs. 18 percent for the regular schools.” This statement, however, wasn’t quoted in the book for some reason. My only explanation for why this statement wasn’t included in the book is that Sowell forgot to include it.
Finally, the book doesn’t mention that its Albert Shanker (late head of the United Federation of Teachers) quote (“When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children“) is disputed. Apparently the real quote is supposed to be around the lines of: “I don’t represent children. I represent teachers… But, generally, what’s in the interest of teachers is also in the interest of students.” Of course, to paraphrase Milton Friedman, it is unfortunately natural to believe that our work is good, better than the alternative, or even necessary for other people, that our work is in the “social interest.” Demanding smaller class sizes and more school funding are two examples that supposedly are in both groups’ interests and this book (and Sowell’s book Inside American Education) deal with both of these issues pretty well. But my point is that Sowell surely should’ve dealt with this quote issue instead of leaving it to readers to deal with it for themselves.
A similar thing applies when he mentions Dunbar High School (a black high school academically successful during the days of “separate but equal”). He probably should’ve dealt with the counter argument that this success was merely because the black students there were “middle class” (he deals with this issue in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals), but DOES NOT deal with it here.. Hopefully I’m not being too hard on Dr. Sowell here, but I think a footnote to deal with this counter argument would’ve been good.
Despite these flaws, the book is pretty good and a great introduction to school choice.
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Another factual, grounded and good read by Dr. Thomas Sowell
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