(inspirational orchestral music)
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In the modern world, we ride the crest of a wave.
Every day, innovators discover new
and better ways of meeting our needs.
The greatest innovations are routinely replicated,
worldwide, except in education, which has remained
stubbornly at anchor while the rest
of the world has sailed past it.
The pace of that modern life seems to provide
an almost endless number of choices,
some of which can have a far-reaching impact.
This seems to be especially true in American public school,
but what about independent private schools?
In private schools, you have
more autonomy and flexibility.
Creativity is valued.
At one U.S. high school,
the melding of modern trends and traditional methods
has clearly resulted in educational excellence.
Michigan's Cranbrook School offers students
a unique educational experience.
The first minute I walked into the classroom,
I was just astonished by the freedom that students were
given not only in the classroom, but outside the classroom.
This school has fostered more than a love of education,
but a love of learning, learning not only
through books, but through people.
In Texas, another school
is part of an expanding network,
offering excellence on a grand scale.
What makes KIPP unique is our high expectations
and a singular focus on college.
Could the success
of this unusual school network hold the secret
that could transform educational innovation?
And what might a natural disaster and the making
of fine wine have to do with schooling?
Join us as Andrew Coulson explores the challenge
of replicating educational excellence in School Inc.
(upbeat percussion and synth music)
Major funding for this program
has been provided by Rose-Marie
and Jack R. Anderson Foundation,
Prometheus Foundation.
Additional funding was provided by:
Gleason Family Foundation,
The Steve and Lana Hardy Foundation.
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In our quest to learn how educational excellence
can be replicated on a mass scale,
Korea's private tutoring sector offers some enticing clues.
Its top teachers reach tens or even
hundreds-of-thousands of students.
We just have to figure out how they do it.
And as long as we're playing detective,
it makes sense to look for the means, motive,
and opportunity driving that growth.
Could it be as simple as choice for families,
competition for schools, and freedom for educators?
If so, we'd expect to see the same kind
of growth among U.S. private schools.
College prep schools, in particular,
seem like a prime suspect.
They're chosen by parents, and since many
accept boarding students, they're
in competition with each other nationwide.
And in one respect many prep schools have reached
enormous proportions, their physical size.
This, for instance, is the 315-acre campus
of the Cranbrook Schools here in Bloomfield, Michigan.
But, despite their often spacious grounds,
most prep schools serve only a few hundred students.
Cranbrook is among the largest,
enrolling roughly 1,700 pupils when its lower, middle,
and upper schools are taken together.
Clearly, there is some missing ingredient,
something that Korea's tutoring sector enjoys
that America's prep schools lack, but what?
The people that are in the competitive market with us,
each are gonna offer something
unique that fits each individual.
I can't imagine that one school could fit every need.
We happen to have a place that I think
works well for a lot of people.
I come from a family of educators,
and most of my family works in public schools, but I felt
in private schools, you have more autonomy and flexibility.
Creativity is valued, and so the practice of teaching
is, at least for me, easier in an independent school.
That's the essence of what I think is
a very important differentiator in terms of education,
the freedom to hire faculty who you feel
will be a good match to the mission
of the school and its philosophy.
I always think about how this place started as farmland,
and an analogy for me is, you know, how land is
cultivated to produce and to yield its bounty.
And working in the classroom with the students here,
you're very much able to do that.
You are cultivating learners.
You are cultivating artists.
You are cultivating scientists.
You are working with these young people.
Well, we've got an institute of science right here,
and that staff will make themselves available
for getting into the planetarium to give an astronomy class
a unique view of retrograde motion of Mars, for example.
(inspirational orchestral music)
Prep schools generally do well
on traditional measures of educational outcomes:
test scores, graduation rates,
matriculation to selective colleges.
But we have to put those outcomes in context.
These schools are academically selective,
so how can we tell how much of their success is
due to effective teaching and how much to the bright,
highly-advantaged students they happen to enroll?
One way is to see how students' performance changes
from the time they are admitted to their graduating year.
The bigger the gain, the greater
the school's contribution is likely to be.
That contribution varies from one school
to the next, but in some cases,
like Cranbrook's, it seems to be substantial.
(inspirational orchestral music)
Another way to gauge school quality
is just ask students themselves.
The first minute I walked into the classroom,
I was just astonished by the freedom
that students were given not only in the classroom,
but outside the classrooms, and just the level
of trust between the students and the teachers,
and how there's so much respect given to the teachers
and also so much respect returned.
For one of my classes, it deals with the art institute,
also with the sculptures on campus.
We have so many sculptures, so many statues.
And so, once a week, usually, the teacher takes us
outside on like a mini-adventure.
It's great.
One side of it is the faculty,
which I personally think are fantastic.
You know, they're obviously well-educated on their subjects,
but I think the other side is being surrounded
by kids who are intellectually curious.
This school has fostered more than a love of education,
but a love of learning, learning not only
through books, but through people.
No single school is right for every child, but this one
seems well-liked by its students and academically effective.
It's easy to see why parents might
want to send their children here.
Which brings us to another possible reason
why prep schools might not scale-up, insufficient demand.
After all, they're expensive.
Financial assistance is available,
but the full sticker price for day tuition
can reach $40,000 a year.
Cranbrook is a relative deal
at $29,000 for its upper school.
But, as it turns out, most prep schools have
more applicants than they can accommodate.
And in addition to having enough demand
to justify expansion, prep schools have
also had plenty of time for it.
Most of them are venerable institutions whose histories
and traditions are a key source of their appeal.
This place was given away by a really wealthy family,
and this was their land, and they built this school,
and they wanted it to serve the community, and they wanted
all the community, not just the well-off kids.
And that continues today with various programs.
The majority of prep schools can trace
their histories back over a century or more.
Linden Hall was founded in the 1740s,
and Milton Academy, the 1790s.
(upbeat percussion music)
By contrast, Korea's tutoring firms didn't debut
until the 1970s, and most are more recent than that.
Despite that novelty, they've grown explosively,
or maybe, because of that novelty.
What if the grand histories and traditions
of prep schools have made them hide-bound?
What if they're too set in their ways
to adopt the latest technologies?
That theory is certainly plausible.
It's also wrong.
Prep schools have begun to use internet video
to reach students beyond their own campuses,
the same technology used by Korean tutors
to reach tens or even hundreds of thousands of students,
but prep schools use it a little differently.
We were among the founding schools
of the global online academy.
It brings us the capacity to offer
our faculty to classrooms
far beyond the Midwest.
We have students now who are
in our own global online classrooms
here at school, who are in classrooms alongside
of students in Hawaii,
in Jordan, in Malaysia.
Our belief is that online learning
will never fill the space
that bricks-and-mortar education holds.
We are centrally committed to the presence
of faculty and students in one space.
We believe that there is no substitute
for student and a faculty being able to sit
on two sides of a log and musing.
So prep schools have the quality, demand, technology,
and time to grow into national networks.
They just don't.
We're running out of plausible explanations here,
so let's turn to a counterintuitive one.
What if they just can't afford it?
(contemplative orchestral music)
That may seem unlikely given the substantial fees
they charge, but tuition actually fails
to cover their full operating costs.
Virtually all prep schools raise additional funding
for their operating budgets from annual donations.
Maybe there just isn't anything left over for expansion.
Unfortunately, that explanation doesn't hold water, either.
In addition to their revenue from annual giving,
most prep schools also have large endowments,
over $200 million in the case of Cranbrook Schools,
and a billion dollars in the case
of Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire.
And yet, the best-endowed prep schools
don't invest their endowments in national expansion.
Why not?
One answer is that it would be difficult to preserve
the character of these institutions
beyond their original locations.
Because our campus is so unique
and because the campus is so much embedded
as part of the curriculum, that it would be difficult
to duplicate that experience and still call it Cranbrook.
(contemplative orchestral music)
But that just begs a deeper question.
Why is the focus on sustaining a particular experience
rather than on reaching a wider audience?
It might have something to do with the reasons
people donate to these schools in the first place.
Many times, it's based on their own experience,
meaning the donors are our alumni.
And so based on the alumni's experience,
they want to be able to give back to the institution
which helped them, nurtured them, supported them.
So, even if their donations could
theoretically finance a major expansion,
that's generally not what they're for.
What we've learned, in other words,
is that Sherlock Holmes and friends have it right.
It's not enough to find a suspect
with the means and the opportunity.
They also have to have the motive.
And America's prestigious prep schools,
though they have many wonderful qualities,
simply don't have a motive to scale-up.
They're striving to perpetuate beloved traditions,
not to start national franchises.
Which raises an interesting question.
What would happen if someone did deliberately set out
to replicate educational excellence?
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That's not a hypothetical question.
In fact, it's fairly easy to answer
because there already is a large and growing category
of schools that philanthropists are
trying to scale-up, charter schools.
Charters are public schools that are freed
from some of the rules and red tape that apply
to their regular, district-run counterparts.
They have more control over what they teach, what methods
they use, and how they measure student achievement.
Charter schools also tend not to be unionized,
which means that principals can hire whomever they want.
That's a lot different from traditional
public school contracts that allow older teachers
to bump younger ones out of a job,
no matter what the principal thinks.
(bell ringing)
Of course, it's not all sunshine and roses.
Charter schools receive a lot less funding per pupil
than traditional public schools, $3,500 less every year.
And charters also receive less funding from private sources.
And that's where it gets interesting.
Charter schools and traditional public schools
use their private funding very differently.
If your local public school principal
does a great job and gets a huge donation,
she cannot use that money to open
new public schools in other districts.
Charter school leaders can.
They can create whole networks of schools
that share their mission and methods,
and philanthropists know that.
So, when they make donations to charters, it's very often
with that replication in mind.
And it's working.
There are now 130 charter school networks
enrolling a quarter of a million students, and they've been
growing in both size and number for over a decade.
One of the fastest-growing is
the Knowledge is Power Program, better known as KIPP.
KIPP was founded in 1994 by Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg,
who were two young teachers in Houston public schools.
They saw what was working in the schools
where they were teaching, and they put all the things
that they saw into an innovative kind
of experimental one-classroom,
and that experience led to a lot of success.
And they grew that to operate a middle school in Houston
and a middle school in New York.
Their goal was to help low-income children
gain both the skills and the habits
necessary to succeed in college.
To do that, they stretched
the school day and the school year,
raised academic expectations, and studied the methods
of the best teachers they could find.
KIPP is different from other
schools for many, many reasons.
One of the first things that comes to mind
is our principals and our teachers.
KIPP really innovated in how they train
and select school leaders, and that's created
a network of amazing leaders who have been given
the autonomy and been empowered to run their schools.
Not content to just run their own schools,
Feinberg and Levin created training programs
for teachers and principals.
Everything they learned about success
in and out the classroom was distilled so that it could be
passed on to a new generation of educators.
As Mike and Dave ran their schools,
they got national attention and they got
to the place where the question was asked:
how are we going to replicate this?
How are we going to take this nationally?
And so they developed a theory of change for our country
that really focused at first on the school leader.
And they attracted this group of young teachers
who wanted to drive change in different cities.
Within a few years, people all over the country
were asking them to open schools in their neighborhoods.
So KIPP currently operates in 20 states
and the District of Columbia, and we have
183 schools and serve 70,000 students.
Of course, expansion like that costs money,
but generous individuals and foundations came forward
to make that expansion possible,
contributing over $400 million to grow the network.
KIPP Austin was founded as a 5th grade middle school
in 2002, and we grew one grade
each year until we had our first class
of 8th graders go off to high school.
At that point, we saw the demand in the community,
we saw the success of the program for our students,
we saw the student achievement levels,
and we decided to grow to become K through 12.
We've been growing almost about one school a year.
To this point, we're at nine schools, 4,400 students,
and next year we'll be at 10 schools and 5,000 students.
(contemplative orchestral music)
But what is the slope of a line
that is vertical, that looks like this?
First group to finish gets the plus three,
second group to finish gets the plus one, go!
We have B, C, and D left.
One of the best things about KIPP is the community
we create between parents, teachers, and students.
When you go to a KIPP school, you will see
a principal who will make day-to-day decisions
based on what's best for kids.
That, in turn, creates an environment where teachers are
really able to thrive and do amazing things for our kids.
(teacher clapping)
(students clapping)
Teachers at KIPP are different than a traditional school
because the teachers care about you.
They want you to go to college.
They want you to succeed.
The teachers are very exciting
and very passionate about what they teach.
They really enjoy it.
You can tell they enjoy it by the passion in their voice
and in their eyes and in their movement.
It's good to see people who actually
like what they're doing.
My old school was different from KIPP because,
here in KIPP, teachers care about you more.
They want you to master the subject
and be able to go to college.
It's different because the teachers really challenge you
a lot more than the teachers did before.
Because when they teach, they didn't really go over
the lesson as the teachers do at this school.
When I was at a different school,
I didn't feel very challenged because the classwork
that they were giving us wasn't really that hard.
It was simple stuff that I could do any day.
But once I came to KIPP, I felt
more challenged because the work was
a lot harder than what I was given before.
My old school was different because, here at KIPP,
the classes are a lot smaller so teachers get
to know you on a personal level.
The one thing that KIPP offers
that I couldn't get at another school is
having a good relationship with your teacher
and getting feedback on the work you do.
I think KIPP is challenging because they give you
hard subjects, but then you feel like,
when the teachers teach you, you can
understand it better and you can master it.
Are they succeeding?
A recent Stanford University study
compared charter school networks,
both to each other and to traditional public schools.
They found that students are learning more at KIPP.
The differences aren't large, but they appear
in both mathematics and reading.
And other researchers have found similar positive results.
(contemplative chime music)
So now that we've made sure that we have
the terminology ready to be able to--
At KIPP, we believe that all children
deserve an exemplary public education.
Our mission is to get students to and through college.
So, regardless of whether a student's
an elementary student, a middle school child
or a high school student, we're focused
on college and you see it from their first day.
When a kindergartner will enroll at KIPP Austin,
one of the first numbers they'll learn
is the year they'll go to college, and they'll soon be
called the class of 2023 or the class of 2025.
They'll visit colleges starting
all the way in elementary school,
all their way through their high school.
One thing that KIPP offers that you can't get
at another school is all of the information
about college and all of the focus towards college.
KIPP is different from the school
I went to before because...
KIPP has pushed us more to focus onto college.
It has boosted my standards of college
that I wanted to go to way higher than I had before.
After I graduate, I would either like to attend Stanford,
Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, and study chemistry/physics.
Once I finish going to school at KIPP,
I am planning on going to college.
I'm not sure where yet, but I would like to major
in language interpretation and translation.
I would like to study environmental science and music.
What makes KIPP unique is our high expectations
and a singular focus on college.
Our mission is to get students to and through college.
80% of KIPP graduates have gone on to college.
And KIPP graduates aren't just more likely to be accepted
into college, they're also much more likely to complete it.
KIPP currently has a college completion rate of 51%
for students who completed 8th grade with us.
That's approximately five times the national average
for students from a similar background.
Not only do we work with our children to make sure
that they apply to the best colleges possible,
but we will stay with them and provide support,
provide mentorship, provide coaching
all the way until they complete college.
Arrows at both ends.
Of course, KIPP has its critics, some of whom claim
that it only succeeds by cherry-picking the best students.
But the Stanford study actually controlled
for students' prior test scores,
and KIPP kids still learned more.
KIPP proves that it's possible to run
a successful, popular network of charter schools,
and to grow it thanks to philanthropic investment.
It's doing something that traditional public schools
cannot do and that elite prep schools choose not to do.
It's a really good opportunity to come to school here.
I really, really enjoy it and I think
it's important for people to come here.
I wish that everyone could come here. (laughs)
The demand in our community from our families
for schools like KIPP is extremely high.
Next year, when we'll be at 5,000 students,
we'll still have 2,000 students on our wait-list.
The students here really feel known for who they are.
And the parents really come to trust their teachers
and that they're all acting together
in the best interest for their child.
But is KIPP's story representative
of charter schooling as a whole?
To find out, I studied all the charter networks
in California, how well they had performed academically,
and how much funding they had received from donors.
For the broadest possible picture,
I looked at both the state's own tests
and also the Advanced Placement tests
administered by the College Board.
(keyboard clacking)
What I found is that the correlation
between performance and grant funding is tiny.
To put it in perspective, I also measured the correlation
between how well the charter networks perform
and the number of letters in their names.
That one is small, too, but it's
actually bigger than the link
between performance and total donations received.
What that means is that philanthropists have been scaling-up
California's charter networks more or less at random.
If the same thing is happening in other states,
that might explain why the networks are
not out-performing independent charters.
(basketball slapping)
But that may not be the only problem.
In order to open a new charter school,
you have to be approved by an official agency.
And sometimes that agency is part
of the same public school system that will be competing
to attract students with the new charter.
It's like allowing athletes to eliminate
certain players from the opposing team.
(contemplative orchestral music)
That sounds like a classic conflict of interest.
It gives authorizers an incentive
to reject promising proposals.
But surely that doesn't happen in practice.
We decided to start our first charter school
in Massachusetts because, at the time,
the City of Springfield wanted
to introduce some competition.
The city was not performing well and the superintendent saw
that as an opportunity to bring in charter schools.
We were selected to take over the second
lowest-performing school in the district.
We opened as a K-7 school and grew
over time to a full K-12 school.
And we graduated our first senior class in 2001.
And since then, we have been sending kids off
with 100% college acceptance rates.
(contemplative piano music)
But despite its record of success
in Massachusetts, a proposal to open
a SABIS Charter school in Brockton
was rejected by the state board of education.
The motivation for rejection, no doubt, was political.
We learned the hard way that, in the charter movement,
politics is very much part of the process.
Unfortunately, it is not only about identifying
a need and proposing a solution.
There is a lot of politics in the mix.
Is that true?
A good person to ask is Basan Nembirkow,
because a few years before he acknowledged
that SABIS has a good educational model,
he successfully campaigned to stop
their proposed charter school from opening in his district.
At the same event at which Nembirkow
praised the SABIS model, the moderator raised this question.
Why wasn't SABIS good enough for Brockton,
whenever that was, five years or so ago?
Why wasn't that good enough for you
to support them to come to Brockton?
My title was Superintendent of Brockton Public Schools.
(audience laughing)
So, right off the bat, there's
an enlightened self-interest involved in that.
Basically, the issue was finance and politics.
It had nothing to do, or very little to do,
with the quality of the program.
SABIS came, and we saw that as a threat,
simply a financial threat to us
if it took money away from us,
which was about four or five million dollars.
Based upon that, our progress would
have been substantially affected.
So my job, defending the Brockton public schools,
as a superintendent, was to do whatever I could
to stop that particular threat at that particular time,
so we mounted a very good political campaign.
SABIS's experience
in Massachusetts is hardly unique.
In fact, public school officials not only prevent
promising new charter schools from opening.
They sometimes shut down successful existing ones.
In the spring of 2014, the Los Angeles
Unified School District decided to close
two high-performing charter schools
serving low-income Hispanic students.
The reason was that the charters had opted
not to use the district's own special education services.
Instead, they chose an independent service provider
that was already working with 300 other schools,
something they had every right to do under California law.
So why did the district want to shut them down?
According to county school board member Douglas Boyd,
the district has been trying to blackmail charter schools
into using its own special education services,
shutting them down if they refuse,
because it wants the money that the state
attaches to each special needs child.
Fortunately, for these two charter schools
and the children they serve, the county school board
overturned the district's decision,
but no one expects the district
to stop trying to get what it wants.
(contemplative piano music)
One of the most striking cases of a district
voting to shut down high-performing charter schools
played out in Oakland, California.
As a whole, students here perform
far below their peers in the rest of the state.
And the district has its own armed police force.
But, over the course of a decade,
one of Oakland's worst schools was gradually turned
into the highest-scoring school in California.
It's called the American Indian Public Charter School.
For the past six years, it has ranked
among the top middle schools in California.
And it's part of a small network that includes
a second middle school and a high school,
both of which are also in Oakland
and also among the top-performers in the state.
And that's not because of their demographics.
Every racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic subgroup of students
at these schools easily outperforms its statewide peers.
And all of them beat the average
for wealthier white students.
The high school has topped the Washington Post's
list of the nation's best.
All of its students take Advanced Placement courses
and they score remarkably well on the year-end tests
administered by the College Board.
How do they do it?
The fact that the high school classes,
and the 8th grade classes, too, can be so productive,
that's entirely predicated on what happens in 6th grade.
That's where it's the roughest adjustment.
So we get kids from neighboring elementary schools.
They come in, and I think it's a shock to them,
their first three weeks maybe month, month-and-a-half.
And it's about acclimation and it's
about this is how you conduct yourself at this school.
There's a student contract, there's a code of conduct
for students, and the parents and students are required
to review it and sign it prior to applying, and it helps
because the students know exactly what's expected.
When I came here in the 7th grade, I was failing,
so, yeah, it was really hard for me to get used to it.
It was just a really big transition
because the school that I went to,
they actually gave me a textbook and put us in the back
of the classroom to learn and teach ourselves.
I've actually experienced some of this.
I'm the tutor at the downtown campus,
and I usually do one-on-one sessions
with some of the students that are struggling.
And most of the students that I've tutored actually
are just transferring from different schools.
Some of them are at a 4th or 5th grade level,
when they should be at a 9th or 10th grade level.
I was nervous going into 7th grade
because I knew I was going to be getting new students.
There's just a lot to catch up to in terms of, like,
the workload, just the school culture,
and then just, yeah, behavioral adjustments.
But, because the core group of students that I'd had
since the beginning of 6th grade was so well-behaved,
new students just kind of adjust.
In some schools, children may not try adjusting
because the teachers don't try.
If they don't do a couple of assignments,
the teacher won't mind because that's
just one less for the teacher to grade.
But I think at this school, it's more,
they're not like attacking but they're
more on you in what you do.
When it comes to catching them up on academic stuff,
I'll take on that extra work if it means that
that student makes the progress.
So, after-school tutoring, in-school tutoring,
before-school tutoring, you know,
taking them aside during class time
and working with them one-on-one,
because that's the other good thing
about having really well-behaved classes,
is that the students can work independently,
and that really does free the teacher up
to work one-on-one with the students who do need help.
Usually, this school,
people may feel that their workload may be stressful,
but they get used to it, and the fact that our school
creates a sense of community, that sense
of community in itself motivates us.
The thing that keeps this school together
is definitely the teachers.
Yes, definitely.
And I feel like the students kind of accept, after they've
seen so much that they can do, that they accept the fact
that these teachers are doing something right.
(contemplative orchestral music)
But in the spring of 2013,
the Oakland Public School District voted
to shut down all three American Indian charter schools.
They based their decision on alleged financial improprieties
by the school's former administrator,
who had retired the previous year.
The schools responded that he was no longer affiliated
with them, and that they would address
any shortcomings in their accounting practices.
They also emphasized that, while they received
less per-pupil funding than district schools,
they prioritized instructional spending
and paid their teachers higher salaries.
The district refused to reconsider its decision,
and so the schools filed suit to overturn it.
For over a year, they struggled under this legal cloud.
Their previously rising enrollment stalled.
Finally, in the summer of 2014,
a state court ruled that the district
had broken California law in deciding to close the schools
because it had not given enough weight
to their students' academic success.
That sort of opposition would certainly
stifle the growth of good charter schools,
but it doesn't seem to be a problem here in New Orleans,
where support for charter schooling
spiked in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
(contemplative orchestral music)
When the storm hit in August of 2005,
it closed every school in the city, and damaged most.
It took six weeks for the first school
to reopen, a small Catholic school
in the French Quarter called Cathedral Academy.
The staff there had to make hundreds of calls
to track down students who'd been scattered
to other cities and other states.
Cathedral Academy not only opened
its doors to its own students,
but also to those of another Catholic school
that had been more badly damaged by the storm,
having sat under 10 feet of water for weeks.
The students attended in shifts, and the staff
of both schools alternated management duties.
Not every school was able to find places
for its students within the city,
but determined educators still found ways to keep teaching.
Two other Catholic schools, Cabrini High and Holy Cross,
located a Christian school in Baton Rouge that was willing
to host their lessons in the evening at no charge.
So, for weeks, the students made
daily three-hour round-trips to Baton Rouge,
returning home long after dark.
Finally, after a grueling two-month cleanup effort,
Cabrini High itself was able to reopen,
but not wanting to leave the students
of Holy Cross in the lurch, it too adopted
a shift schedule, minus the three-hour commute.
By November, eight Catholic schools
had reopened, but none of the public schools.
And by the following May, 60 private schools were
serving students, but only 25 public schools had reopened,
and virtually all of those were charters.
That wasn't lost on state and local officials,
and charter schooling in the Big Easy
was cleared for takeoff.
(contemplative orchestral music)
Today, 3/4 of New Orleans public school students
attend charters, a higher share
than anywhere else in the country.
And charters here are more likely to belong to networks.
As a result, New Orleans is seen
as a test case for charter school expansion.
So, how is it working out?
According to the researchers at Stanford,
charter schools in Louisiana are
outperforming traditional public schools,
and that's particularly noticeable in New Orleans.
The difference isn't enormous, but it's good news.
But there is one disappointing element to the story.
Networks of charter schools in Louisiana are actually
performing slightly worse than independent charters.
The best are not crowding out the rest, at least not yet.
It's a similar picture to the one I found in California
and that others have found nationwide.
There's a lot of scaling-up in the charter sector,
but it's indiscriminate.
If we want to find a place where the schools
being replicated are outperforming
the rest, we'll have to keep looking.
Which is why we're headed to Casablanca.
(dramatic orchestral music)
(record scratches) No, not that Casablanca.
Because you're getting on that plane.
(contemplative orchestral music)
Welcome to the Casablanca Valley,
just outside Santiago, Chile.
We haven't come here for the waters or even the wines.
(woman speaks in foreign language)
Oh, thank you very much!
We haven't come here just for the wines,
but as long as we're here...
(upbeat acoustic guitar music)
Winemaking in Chile goes back almost 500 years.
But in 1938, the government capped wine production,
restricted the creation of new vineyards,
and outlawed the importation of foreign machinery.
Officially, the import ban was
supposed to boost domestic manufacturing,
but cutting it off from foreign competition
actually caused it to stagnate.
In the meantime, European vintners
developed ever-improving wine presses,
fermentation tanks, and bottling systems,
virtually none of which made it to Chile.
With so little consumer choice and competition,
winemakers could put pretty much
anything in a jug and sell it, at least they could
until trade barriers were slashed in the 1970s.
Suddenly, Chileans had access to wines
from all over the world, which they promptly ignored
in favor of newly available soft drinks and beer.
Wine consumption fell off a cliff.
(contemplative chimes music)
That put Chile's wineries in a bind.
Their domestic market dried up, and they couldn't export
what they'd been making because it just wasn't good enough.
For a few years, the industry was badly shaken.
But then it stirred.
With the trade barriers gone, Chileans could
finally import the latest equipment,
and new players could easily enter the marketplace.
Even foreign investors were allowed to come to Chile
to start joint ventures or launch labels of their own.
One of those new labels was Lapostolle,
founded by the makers of Grand Marnier liqueur
and Chateau de Sancerre wines.
Companies like Lapostolle didn't just bring
a lot of foreign dollars into Chile.
They also brought the knowledge
of how to run a cutting-edge wine business.
Some of that know-how is evident in the construction
of Lapostolle's Clos Apalta Winery.
Half of the six-story building is underground,
for temperature control, and the wine flows
from one floor to the next by gravity,
eliminating the need for pumps.
(upbeat orchestral music)
After the final barrel stage, the wine is bottled
and shipped to 60 different countries around the world.
In 2008, several of those bottles wound up
in blind tastings by the Wine Spectator.
Apparently the dump buckets didn't see
a lot of use that day because Clos Apalta was named
the number one wine in the world, for the money.
But the knowledge of how to make good wines
at competitive prices didn't stay locked up
in the vaults of foreign producers.
It was contagious.
As soon as these high-tech operations arrived around 1980,
their techniques began to be copied.
That international crosspollination has spawned
a whole new generation of wineries.
So, over the last quarter century, both the scale
and the quality of Chilean winemaking rose dramatically.
But what does that have to do with education?
Well, just after Chile opened up its wine industry
to consumer choice and competition,
it did the same thing for schools.
(contemplative mandolin music)
First, they decentralized public schools
from the Ministry of Education to the municipalities.
There are about 345 municipalities in Chile.
And second, they introduced a flat, per-pupil voucher
which has since been differentiated,
so parents can choose between a public
or a municipal and a private voucher school,
which are for profit and nonprofit,
and the per-pupil voucher follows the student to the school.
The voucher is differentiated by a student's
socioeconomic background characteristics.
So, when a school enrolls a low-income student,
the school receives approximately 60
to 80% more per pupil than if they enroll a student
from the middle class or upper-middle class.
So, what did all those reforms accomplish?
Did opening up the marketplace do as much for education
as it did for the wine industry?
Chile spends about $2,000 per pupil
in primary and secondary school.
It's more than most Latin American countries spend.
And Chile spends about a sixth of what they spend
in the United States per pupil in K to 12.
Chile outperforms all other Latin American countries
that participate in the international tests,
and Chile is the country that has showed
the most improvement on the most recent PISA test.
Between 2000 and 2009, Chile's overall
quality showed the most improvement.
In 1990, about half of Chileans
lived under the poverty line.
Today, it's, you know, less than 15%.
(upbeat percussion music)
Many people here and around the world have noticed
these improvements, but not everyone is impressed.
Large-scale student protests erupted
in 2011, led most visibly by a college
geography major named Camila Vallejo.
Now a Communist Party Congresswoman,
Vallejo's central demand was that the government provide
universal free access to college.
But the protesters also called for changes
in Chile's system of elementary and secondary education.
(crowd shouting)
They demanded a moratorium or an outright ban
on the creation of new private voucher schools,
a ban on copayments by parents,
a ban on for-profit voucher schools,
replacing local control of public schools
with nationwide central planning, and even an end
to school choice itself in favor of mandatory
student assignment to schools by the government.
Chile's young protesters believe
that their nation's education system
is shortchanging low-income families.
According to Camila Vallejo, "Children who are born poor
"will receive a poor education and continue to be poor."
But Chile's education outcome-gaps between the rich and poor
are actually smaller than those
in most other Latin American countries,
in some cases, the smallest in the entire region.
And Chile's education gaps are shrinking
because the students at the low end of the performance range
are improving faster than those at the top.
(inspirational orchestral music)
Chile's improvement is mainly explained
by the improvement of the lower-income students.
So there's been a closing of the achievement gap
over the last 10 years, and this is reflected
on international tests and also on national tests.
Another way to measure educational outcomes
is the number of years of schooling that students complete,
called educational attainment.
By that measure, Chile has the lowest level
of educational inequality of any country in Latin America.
As for income inequality, it is
high in all developing countries,
but that's been shrinking in Chile, too.
And several teams of researchers have attributed
the improvement, in part, to its system of public
and private school choice, which just happens
to have been introduced during the 1980s,
under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
And there's the rub.
Regardless of its success, Chile's education system
is tainted in many people's eyes
because it was favored by a brutal dictator.
That's understandable, but should we condemn something
solely because it appealed to a tyrant?
Here comes the car.
Okay, now watch me.
I'm gonna use number one.
Keep your eye on that thumb, baby, and see what happens.
One of the biggest box office hits of 1934
was the romantic comedy It Happened One Night.
It swept the Academy Awards and is still
delighting audiences nearly a century later.
It was also one of Adolf Hitler's favorite films.
The fact that Hitler liked the movie
doesn't make it any less charming,
nor does its charm make Hitler any less hateful.
It doesn't make sense to judge one
based on the qualities of the other.
(upbeat percussion music)
Under President Hugo Chavez, Venezuela introduced
a curriculum whose central goal is
to promote the official government ideology.
All public and private schools
must follow it or be shut down.
The government acknowledges this by name as indoctrination,
but maintains that it is necessary
to eliminate capitalist ideas.
And they might be right, but that's not one of the goals
that Chilean people ever mention in public opinion surveys.
What they really care about is academic quality.
Parents choose private schools partly because they think
the schools are going to respond to their preferences,
so the school owners listen to parents.
Parents feel that they have, you know,
a more active voice in the schools.
Private schools have more flexibility in hiring
and firing teachers, recruiting good teachers,
firing poorly-performing teachers.
(contemplative mandolin music)
Of course, not all private schools perform well,
but most studies find that they outperform
Chile's public schools, after controlling for differences
in the students and families they serve.
An even more interesting finding is that competition
from private schools actually improves
the performance of nearby public schools.
But the extent to which public schools improve
as a result of competition depends
on how tightly their budgets are tied to their enrollment.
All government funding for private voucher schools is based
on enrollment, but that's not the case in the public sector.
In some municipalities, public schools are
given substantial extra funding
regardless of the number of students they serve.
When that happens, those public schools don't improve
as much in response to growing competition.
Makes sense.
They don't have to improve to remain financially viable.
A second crucial discovery researchers have made about Chile
is that chains of private schools have a large advantage
over independent, mom 'n' pop schools.
On top of that, the larger school networks perform
even better than the smaller ones.
Successful private schools grow.
This is a very key difference
between the public-run system and the private-run system.
In a privately-run school, what we would do is take
advantage of that opportunity and we will expand the school.
We will invest to grow and from having
1,400 students, like here, we will go to 2,000.
We will purchase a site next door
and build a new building, you see.
But in the case of a public-run school,
who might be interested in something like that?
The principal doesn't have the money.
He cannot influence.
That runs through another system.
But this doesn't mean that
the public-run don't do anything.
You know what they do?
The good teachers from those schools
start giving private lessons.
So, large school like the Instituto Nacional,
which is a famous public school,
we should ask ourselves, "How come don't we have
"30 Institutos Nacionales
"all over the country, all over Santiago?"
Because you don't have the incentives.
The people who have developed and conserve
and run the Instituto Nacional don't have the incentives
to duplicate the Instituto Nacional, but they do duplicate
their personal earnings by giving private lessons.
But the research on the role of incentives
and entrepreneurship has not been widely discussed in Chile.
The public conversation here has been dominated
by the demands of the country's young protestors,
and since the protesters helped to bring
the current government to power,
its policies naturally reflect their views.
In the spring of 2014, the Chilean government proposed
banning tuition copayments by parents,
re-centralizing control over public schools
at the national level, and outlawing
for-profit private voucher schools.
Not everyone thinks that these ideas
have been carefully thought through.
People will feel the impact
if they do ban for-profit schools.
1/3 of families send their children to for-profit schools.
If they ban for-profit schools, one million students are
going to have to find a new school.
And I think it's unfortunate because I think, really,
what we need to be doing is focusing
on guaranteeing access to high-quality schools,
improving the quality of our teaching force,
and other reforms that are much more likely to have
an impact on improving the quality
and equity of our school system.
However, I think that when the politicians start to talk
about banning for-profit schools,
if you talk to school owners, they stop investing.
They think that they're going to lose their school.
We had the plan to develop and build many schools,
but, as you probably know, the public
politics and orientations in Chile
are not moving in that direction.
It's moving in the direction of more public schools.
We did have some sites already selected
to build new schools, but we have decided not to.
It's very hard for nonprofits to get loans
from the bank to kind of expand operations,
so nonprofit schools that don't belong
to a religious organization or a large foundation
run by a wealthy individual, it's very hard
for them to actually get money
from the bank and expand their operations.
(Luis speaking in foreign language)
Basically, the school's owner
that you interviewed is right.
Therefore, we have uncertainty.
Obviously, it is not just happening to this school's owner,
but also to all the school owners around the country,
who are waiting for the new policies
to see if they are going to keep investing.
Logically, if the current policies change,
the owners are going to stop working
and they are going to start selling schools.
In fact, there are cases where that is already happening.
(inspirational orchestral music)
We can still hope that Chile won't abandon
the policies that have brought it such academic
and economic success, but even if it does,
it has already taught the world a great deal
about replicating educational excellence.
What makes Chile so exciting is
that its most successful educators
are building networks of schools.
And the better they are, the bigger they grow.
Professional freedom, consumer choice, and competition
are having the same beneficial effect
in education as in winemaking.
The catch is that the increasingly uncertain future
of Chile's parental choice program
is discouraging the growth of school networks.
And we're still left with a couple of nagging questions.
Why do growth and quality go hand-in-hand in Chile?
And even if we figure that out, how do we know
that model could be replicated in other countries?
One way to answer those questions
would be to find that model working
in a totally different place, maybe somewhere like...
(regal orchestral music)
On the final episode of School Inc.,
Andrew Coulson continues his personal exploration
around the globe to discover
the secrets to educational innovation.
In Sweden, lessons of the past provide a warning
for educational policymakers today.
And in India, a population explosion sparks
something dramatic in their educational landscape.
With so much at stake, can we ride the wave of innovation
and replicate educational excellence
on a scale never before imagined?
(upbeat orchestral music)
Major funding for this program
has been provided by Rose-Marie
and Jack R. Anderson Foundation,
Prometheus Foundation.
Additional funding was provided by:
Gleason Family Foundation,
The Steve and Lana Hardy Foundation.
(inspirational orchestral music)