“Charter schools were originally developed by—of all folks—the teachers’ unions,” says Gary Sasso, dean of Lehigh’s College of Education. “The original intent of charter schools was to act as a laboratory where procedures and techniques and curriculum could be tried out with different kinds of kids, under certain circumstances, to determine what would work and [then to] use that to inform public schools so it could be replicated across all of our schools.”

Instead, says Sasso, charter schools, which receive both public and private funding, compete directly with public schools. Lehigh’s College of Education is working to find common ground between the two.

“We feel that common ground… can be found in an empirical look at what works in schools and how it works,” says Sasso, stressing that decisions should not be made on political considerations.
    
“Some of the things we know will work can be found in both public and charter schools,” says Sasso. “There is no such thing as saying public schools are bad or charter schools are bad because some are good and some are bad.”

There has been much discussion, Sasso notes, about using high-stakes testing to evaluate teachers. “Most of us are not averse to the evaluation of teachers,” says Sasso. “But the evaluation of teachers through one test based on how well your kids do is not an accurate way to do it.”

Comparisons to student test scores in other nations prove equally inaccurate. The United States, with its uniquely heterogeneous population, says Sasso, is “the only country that tries to teach everybody.”

“Our kids do as well as kids in China and as kids in Finland. It’s only kids who are at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, recent immigrants, and African Americans who bring our scores down. We have poured a lot of money into those two groups, in particular into urban schools. Even though the gap between whites and African Americans has closed over the last couple of decades, it’s not closed as much as we had hoped it would and we still have a lot of work to do in that area.”


Story by Kelly Hochbein

Video by Stephanie Veto