THE HMO’s OF EDUCATION
THE PLEDGE
Once upon a time – about 40 years ago or so – Health Maintenance Organizations became part of the American health care system with one specific goal: to help people stay well, healthier and less likely to need the health care system.
Just look at the name – Health Maintenance Organizations or HMOs as they became known. Health, not illness. But then the system “got to work” on the idea and when finished, made it invisible.
Today history confines HMOs – when they are mentioned at all – to the marketing name of a health insurance policy you can buy from one of several sold by the giant health insurance companies which dominate our system. Not every company has a policy with that title…but some do.
That’s it. Good name. Good – maybe great – idea. But twisted completely out of shape by the players in the industry until the meaning and essence of the concept is obliterated and essentially disappears.
So will it be with America’s charter school movement.
Charters were established twenty years ago here in NYC and across the country with great expectations.
The goals were clear and concise. Charter schools would be part of the public school system and financed by taxpayer money BUT would be operated separately by groups or individuals who would receive a “charter” to organize, establish and manage a public school which would:
- Be independent of the rules and regulations that guided (some would say deterred) other public schools, including those especially “onerous ones” bargained for by the teachers union;
- Be rigorously reviewed and shut down when they failed to perform, unlike traditional public schools which were allowed to fail without significant consequence;
- Would be the models, the labs to ‘good practices’ (to use current educational jargon) that could – when proven successful – be introduced to the traditional schools – schools more often than not in NYC, sharing the very same building…called co-location.
THE TRUTH
Well that was the charter school idea. And today? As they say in New Jersey ‘fuhgettaboutit’.
As a recent New York Times lead editorial stated: “With thousands of charter schools operating in 40 states, and more coming open every day, none of these promises have been kept…this despite the growing number of studies showing that charter schools are generally no better – and often worse – than their traditional counterparts.”
The editorial goes on to say that state and local agencies around the country have continued to let these failing schools operate “ …even those that continue to perform abysmally for years on end.”
The facts…the truth about charter schools…is again found in a new analysis from the Center for Research in Education Outcomes at Stanford University. The large-scale study tracked charter school performance in 25 states. In its report the Center says that only 17% of charter schools provided a better education than traditional schools and that 37% actually offered children a worse education than traditional schools.
Tellingly, the study debunks the notion that it takes time to get a new charter to perform as pledged and to know whether a new school can actually improve on traditional school learning. The study clearly notes that after three years, it is possible to know which schools will be high performers or not…and which will clearly be mediocre.
“For the majority of (charter) schools, poor first time performance will give way to poor second years performance. Once this happens, the future is predictable and extremely bleak…For the students in these schools this is a tragedy that must not be dismissed.”
The study suggests that this awareness should be a caution against allowing low-performing charters schools to become charter management organizations. The study found that minority students and those from poor families fared better in charter management organizations…but chose to mention only the KIPP schools and the Uncommon school networks as two that work.
We know them as two operations that maintain an extraordinary contact with each teacher providing constant and continual ‘best practices’ training and collaboration. Despite the failure of the study to look closely into the nature of the success of these two special programs, it does report that KIPP and Uncommon have actually managed to eliminate the learning gap between poor and higher-income learners in their programs.
While we talk about them a great deal, only 6% of all schools in America are charter schools, and charter networks account for only about one-half of that total.
The study says nothing at all about the concept of sharing success with traditional schools.
THE REALITY
It is obvious in highly political NY that charter schools see themselves not as models but as alternatives to traditional schools. The Mayor of NY has suggested that parents do everything possible to get their kids into a charter schools.
Yet the facts – not the sell, not the con and not the ‘magic bullet’ – indicate that while the backers of these charter schools might be making a handsome profit with public money, there is no success rate to applaud or to emulate.
Liberal Party Mayoral candidate Tom Allon, himself close to the charter movement and the co-founder of two public high schools, says very directly:
“I believe in the premise and concept of charter schools as models to help improve our public schools but until charter schools comply with the specific promises made that supports their existence, I am not in favor of expanding what exists now. They were supposed to be models for sharing, not alternatives to public education. The success rates-to-date are essentially less than promising on all counts. I hope that will change despite evidence in this study at least, that what we see is what we’ve got.”
What we see is that when the focus is on making great teachers in order to develop great students, (as in KIPP and Uncommon) the charter idea works. But so will it in any public school in America.
Martin I. Hassner
Executive Director
and Managing Editor
Yes charter schools (two of my four grandchildren are in charter schools and doing very well despite the hardship of long traveling) have developed along the same road that HMO’s have gone and with about the same results – if you have money and power you will get a good school and good results.
note: Since the advent of HMO’s I have personally suffered from the terrible care given by cheap HMO’s and have lost two brothers and one dear cousin to the mismangaged treatement afforded them by this system. One died on Medicaid, one died because she could not afford an HMO, and the other was mismanaged by not one but three different HMO’s as he switched back and forth for financial reasons – he was disabled. I now have Medicare and pay through the nose for an expensive HMO.
Hey what’s new? As I’ve said before the key to good schools (in the 60’s where my chldren attended the PUBLIC school within walking distance they did as well as their own children are doing now) is MONEY MORE TEACHERS MORE COUNSELORS ETC.
When I went to live with my grandmother last year of high school and went from the Catholic school which was the only safe choice in uptown Manhattan West side to a PUBLIC NJ school in an upscale NJ town I was awed by the quality of the education I now received. Guess what – it was well funded and people complained but paid the taxes to support.
The public schools in Staten Island where my children thrived in the 60’s are now terror filled crumbling affairs where any good teacher who has devoted his life (and I know of one who stayed as a principal even when his whiteness brought death threats) are harassed and threatened with dismissal because their students are not up to par.
What happened – the city of NY looking desperately for a place to put hundreds of problem citizens housed in expensive hotels in Bronx and Brooklyn decided that my old Staten Island neighborhood (lower middle class and ethnically diverse) was the ideal place to dump them. Result immediate influx of drugs, guns and people who did not take care of things, displaced damaged people with no hope. And how was this problem addressed – cut subsidies, cut COUNSELORS, cut after school classes, music art etc. You don’t have to be a genius to see what was coming.
I feel real grief at what I’ve seen and more “teacher training” is just a red herring to distract the public from actual problems. Looks good on paper – lousy in real life. Another waste of money. When I did my K-12 Masters at Teacher’s College Columbia I was told by most of my fellows that I would be crazy to teach in NYC public schools. Most of them said they were going to suburbia or getting “principal training” so they wouldn’t have to teach a bunch of criminals and risk their lives.
It’s a tragedy that the few dedicated who choose to stay in this lousy system are given no respect no recognition of their need for decent salaries, housing and medical care. They are just more of those Republicans choose to label as the unfairly “entitled.”
The union has its beneficial effect. By providing defense and grievance procedure for teachers, it helps sustain morale in their high stress environment.
One of the few rewards teachers did have was a feeling of security in an otherwise unrewarding profession. Of course there were intangible rewards such as the joy of having students learn things one felt were valuable and the social interaction between the old and new. But teachers are not the highest paid members of our society and an environment where money is withheld the is needed for smaller classes and necessary supplies. So piece by piece the respect that should be given our educators is slowly cut away until the teacher becomes an interchangeable cog in a system that only rewards numbers – valuable numbers being determined by a productivity module that is impossible to assess on paper.
Without unions with all their deficiencies ALL American workers become mere servants to uncaring power brokers. I wouldn’t want any comparisons made to HMO’s most of which, I feel, have served to downgrade American Healthcare as they are modeled on a productivity module that is driven by cost and has no relevance to actual decent patient care.