Our cities face a staggering array of challenges—poverty, unemployment, crime, and lack of opportunity or engagement. A new report by the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), Measuring Up: Educational Improvement and Opportunity in 50 Cities, seeks to measure how our cities are doing according to several education indicators across 50 urban areas. The report determined, not unexpectedly, that some of the news is bleak. Academic performance was flat over the three years of data for most of the cities, fully one-quarter of the students did not graduate on time with a regular high school diploma, and 40 percent of the schools in these cities were in the bottom five percent of schools statewide across all three years. Sadly, the news is worse for low-income and minority students.
We know that educating the children who grow up in urban areas can be incredibly difficult. In 2013, more than half of U.S. public schools in our largest cities enrolled mostly (75 percent or more) low-income children. In the same year, 80 percent of the students enrolled in those schools were students of color. According to the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 70 percent of 8th grade public school students in large cities scored below Proficiency in reading and 79 percent scored below Proficiency in mathematics. But the CRPE report found some bright spots, notably that “inequity in public education, though widespread, is not inevitable.” Washington, D.C., for example, enrolls higher percentages of low-income students at its highest-performing schools than more affluent students. In addition, some cities, such as New Orleans and Memphis, seem to be very effective at closing their lowest-performing schools. So, what’s going on and where can we see hope? The biggest change that has occurred in most, although not all, urban public education systems over the past couple of decades is the advent of charter schools. Charter schools have been able to break through the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and create schools, and networks of schools, that are getting academic results. In fact, according to a recent study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University, “urban charter schools in the aggregate provide significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading compared to the traditional public schools (TPS) peers.” And, more importantly, the results are even stronger for low-income and minority students. One way this is being accomplished is through the No-excuses model. No-excuses schools have several common elements—high academic expectations, a strict behavioral and disciplinary code, a strong sense of community, and extended instructional time. These elements apply universally to all students, regardless of background. And while the bar is set high for all students, there are usually services available, such as extensive counseling, to help bridge the gap between what they experience at home and what they experience at school. A recent meta-analysis of six of these schools found that attending a No-excuses charter school for one year could close as much as one-quarter of the Black-White achievement gap. Beyond academics, charter schools have begun to expand their services to provide needed support—such as mental health services, pediatric care and mentoring—in struggling neighborhoods. The idea of schools as community hubs is gaining momentum as a mechanism to bring children out of poverty through education. Sadly, opposition to charters and school choice remains—even in the most extreme cases of urban plight. We know that the prospects for low-income and minority children living in our cities have been declining for decades, and we know at least one solution to dramatically improve their chances. We should be actively encouraging, funding, and replicating high-quality charter schools.
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