Implications of "counseling out" part II -- missions

This is the second part of a reply to a previous comment about counseling out disruptive students. In the first part I discussed how charter schools' greater freedom to get rid of problem students makes reliable public-to-charter school comparisons difficult, but as important as that question is, there's another that's even more fundamental when discussing these practices: what exactly do we want charter schools to do?

We have two basic choices:

The first is that charter are what all schools should eventually be. In this model, charters provide the template for the American education system. If this is what we're asking from them, then charters' problems dealing with disruptive and non-cooperative students is a serious failure;

If, however, we look at charter schools as niche programs designed to target specific areas and subpopulations, then counseling out student for academic or behavioral reasons may not be a problem at all. If the purpose of these schools is to allow room for experimentation, pump additional resources into under-served areas and provide a better match for certain kids who aren't getting what they should from the one-size-fits-all approach, then counseling out is a necessary part of the model.

Most champions of charter schools would probably pick the first model but most of the major criticisms that have been made recently about charters schools (data biasing issues, accusations of cherry-picking, questions about scalability) largely go away under the second model.

I have a feeling we'll be coming back to this one.

Implications of "counseling out" part I -- metrics

This comment from Michael Bish raises a couple of big questions:

One important point is that there is a big difference between counseling a student out because they have low test scores and counseling them out because they are actively disrupting the education of their peers.

The first issue here involves metrics. The idea that you should build a school system around a handful of test scores is one of the central tenets of the reform movement. Test scores are supposed to drive funding, contracts, allocation of resources, evaluations, bonuses, even terminations, but if you give certain schools more freedom to get rid of disruptive students the whole system breaks down.

Disruptive students not only take up time from the teacher that could be used in instruction; they also make it difficult for students to concentrate and tempt other others to act up. The result is that everyone's test scores go down.

By getting this student transferred you've not only raised the scores of an entire classroom of your students; you've lowered the scores of a comparable number of students in a public school in the same area. Since your school's evaluation, funding, and future contracts are dependent on your performance relative to other schools in the area, you can get a substantial double lift out of that single transfer.

And since public school to a large extent have to work with the students they are given, charter schools always win this one.