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Ed reform: Major combat isn’t over

February 2, 2011 By

Education reformers seem to be winning the day, but two Education Next commentaries warn against declaring victory.

In A Battle Begun, Not Won, Paul Peterson, Checker Finn and Marci Kanstoroom warn that “nothing can be done at the national level” to transform education.

Most of the crucial decisions about how U.S. schools run and who teaches what to whom in which classrooms are still made in 14,000 semi-autonomous school districts, nearly all of them run by locally elected school boards, often with campaign dollars supplied by those with whom they negotiate collectively, and managed by professional superintendents, trained in colleges of education and socialized over the years into the prevailing culture of public education.

That culture is in no way reform-minded. It believes that educators know best, that elected school boards are the embodiment of democracy in action, that colleges of education are the path to true professionalism, that collective bargaining is necessary to protect teacher rights, and that any failings visible in today’s schools, teachers, and students are either the fault of heedless parents or the consequence of incompetent administrators and stingy taxpayers.

Teachers unions wield great power at the state level, where they’ve blocked or weakened reforms.

In Washington, reforms are limited to Race to the Top, “an executive-branch initiative lacking a clear legislative mandate.” In the new Congress, “more Republicans than ever are worshiping before the false god of local control.”

Union leaders may pose as agents of change, but local unions “almost always kill any but the mildest changes.”

Furthermore, the U.S. public is lukewarm on education reform. Many think other people’s schools are no good but their own children’s schools don’t need changes.

Pyrrhic Victories? by Frederick M. Hess, Michael J. Petrilli, and Martin R. West sees broad but shallow support for reform ideas.  In polls, Americans say they support charter schools — but don’t know what they are.  They want accountability but are reluctant to close low-performing schools or fire ineffective teachers.

Reformers push overly ambitious ideas, risking “Icarus syndrome,” the authors warn. No Child Left Behind’s mistakes could be repeated by Race to the Top, which pushes states to adopt “a very prescriptive set of policy reforms” to get federal funding.

Just as definitions of Adequate Yearly Progress, Highly Qualified Teachers, and other core elements of NCLB, circa 2001, soon grew obsolete and problematic, so too will today’s conventional wisdom around teacher evaluations, charter caps, and all the rest. Rather than encouraging problem solving and policy tinkering, these “shoot the moon” initiatives freeze reform in one moment in time. And they run the risk of backlash if and when early results prove disappointing.

Obsessed with “closing achievement gaps,” reformers “signal to the vast majority of American parents that school reform isn’t about helping their kids.” That’s not the way to build wide support.

We need less cheerleading and more humility, they conclude.

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Charters: a cure for America’s blues?

January 28, 2011 By

Will Charter Schools Cure America’s Blues? Walter Russell Mead sees the “blue social model” — government knows best — falling apart. Charter schools aren’t the magic bullet for education, he writes. (Nothing is.) He’s looking for “political and social transformation that can take us past the stagnant and dysfunctional world of Big Blue Bureaucracy into something more sustainable and more hopeful,” he writes in The American Interest.

The widening gap . . . between the interests of the consumers of government services and the producers of those services has the potential to split Blue America down the middle.

Historically, African-Americans have been very “invested in the urban public school bureaucracies and the teachers’ unions,” Mead writes. Yet black parents support charter schools.  In a recent poll, New Jersey blacks favor the expansion of charter schools by 52 to 43 percent, backing Gov. Christie. That makes blacks more pro-charter — and less “blue” — that the state’s Republicans.

Charter schools will help to produce and promote a more entrepreneurial Black middle class.  The leaders and faculty of a charter school have more responsibility than do the faceless employees of a large public school system.  If their school doesn’t attract students, it goes out of business.  A charter school must attract students who can always go elsewhere; the standard public school without competition can rely on the truancy laws to fill their classrooms.  More, the schools have to show results while keeping their eyes on the bottom line.  Charter schools can go broke if teachers adopt unrealistic work rules; public schools can stagger on for years delivering declining performance — and, with the support of the politically powerful teachers’ unions, extracting rising revenue from the public.

The proliferation of charter schools will mean the progressive replacement of teachers and principals with secure jobs for life with a new cohort of professional educators who bear the responsibility for the success or failure of their schools — and the survival of their jobs. This will make our educators smarter — and teach them valuable lessons about life in a more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic society that they can pass on to their pupils.

Charter schools don’t necessarily entail the privatization of public education, Mead writes. He sees what he calls “communitization,” power shifts to “community-based educators who organize themselves into small, accountable units to carry out functions once handled by massive bureaucracies.”

Communitization, for-profit or non-profit, in education, health care and other fields will enhance efficiency and shift “the center of gravity of American culture and society further toward entrepreneurial and creative values and institutions,” Mead predicts.

Charter school leaders will become community leaders, he writes.

School choice will make our society more flexible and entrepreneurial — and the biggest immediate beneficiaries will be the poor and those who seek to serve and teach them in creative new ways.

In Black and Blue and The Birth of the Blues, Mead writes more about the need to go from Big Blue to liberalism 5.0.

His faith in the power of charter schools to transform society sounds a bit blue sky to me, to use an older sense of “blue.”

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Charters educate high-need students

December 21, 2010 By

The federal role in charter education is a “haphazard collection of laws, rules, funding preferences and rhetoric that lacks coherence at the policy or action level,” concludes the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings. Its experts recommend:

a) collecting and using more and better data on the performance of charter schools for purposes of authorizing, research, and informed parental choice; b) requiring states to provide equitable funding for charter schools relative to traditional public schools—including support for facilities; c) supporting higher standards for authorizing; d) revising rules and definitions that unintentionally disadvantage charter schools; e) promoting the growth as well as quality control of virtual charter schools; and f) finally and most importantly articulating and following through on a coherent policy with respect to charter schools.

Some 1.6 million children attend 4,900 charter schools in 39 states, the study notes. The best-known chains “create highly structured routines with uniforms, strict rules, and numerous drills.”

But charters take many other forms, including single sex schools, schools for the performing arts, schools for science and technology, bilingual schools, schools for the disabled, schools for drop-outs, and virtual schools where learning takes place online.

Charters attract a disproportionate number of low-income and minority students, especially blacks.  “Initial test scores of students at charter schools are usually well below those of the average public school student in the state in which the charter school is located,” the report finds.

Of five randomized studies, four found charter schools improved student achievement while one found no impact, Brookings concludes. The four positive studies involved urban schools serving minority students. The no-impact study found “students from poor, minority, urban backgrounds did better in charter schools in contrast to students from middle-class, suburban backgrounds, who did worse.”

Thus all the randomized trials are consistent in pointing to the success of charter schools in large urban areas.

In addition to looking at reading and math scores, a study of charter high schools in Chicago and Florida found positive effects on both high school completion and college attendance.

Milwaukee’s charter students do as well in reading and may do slightly better in math compared to students in district-run public schools after one year, concludes a preliminary study by John F. Witte of the University of Wisconsin and Patrick J. Wolf of the University of Arkansas.

Students in independent charter schools that were converted from private schools outperformed Milwaukee Public Schools student in both math and reading after controlling for factors such as student characteristics and school switching.

Charters are schools of choice often located in minority neighborhoods, writes Nelson Smith. That’s not segregation.

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Times: Before Black, Canada said ‘no’

December 9, 2010 By

Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone and a star of Waiting for Superman, turned down the job of running New York City schools, sources tell the New York Times.  Mayor Michael Bloomberg then offered the job to Cathie Black, a publishing executive with no public-school experience.

Mr. Canada, by contrast, has gained international notice as the leader of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a network of charter schools renowned for its cradle-to-college approach. He grew up in the South Bronx and holds a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Unlike Black, Canada is black.

Still, while Mr. Canada, 58, may have been more palatable to some critics, his passionate defense of charter schools and his habit of firing teachers who fail to improve test scores would most likely be anathema to union leaders and many parents active in the schools.

It’s not surprising Canada wanted to stick with his experiment, which offers parenting classes, health care and other support services in addition to charter schools.

Gotham Schools reports that students at Murray Bergtram High School rioted for 20 minutes after the principal announced teachers would not give out bathroom passes for the day in response to a fight.

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Finally, Superman

November 22, 2010 By

I finally got around to seeing Waiting for Superman.  The scenes of parents and children waiting for the lottery results were tear jerkers, but the movie was very simplistic in its depiction of education problems and solutions.  It assumed that the children of involved parents would be doomed by going to neighborhood schools but saved by going to charters. Maybe so, but reciting the statistics for all students doesn’t make that case. I wanted to see a lot more on how successful schools teach: What’s replicable? What depends on finding brilliant principals or young teachers willing to work  insanely long hours?

The depiction of Woodside High in California, the alternative for the girl who gets into Summit Preparatory Charter School, implies that the school serves middle-class and upper-middle-class whites, some of whom are tracked into low-level classes that don’t prepare them to go college.  A majority of Woodside High students are Hispanic or black; 43 percent qualify for a subsidized lunch.  All non-disabled students are placed in college-prep classes, says the principal.  The movie’s statistics on the number of students who go to college include only California state universities, not private or out-of-state colleges or universities or community colleges.

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Inside angle on K-12 politics

November 12, 2010 By

What do the insiders think about education politics in the next two years?

Ed Week’s Politics K-12 has the juicy stuff from a subscription-only report by Andrew Rotherham (Bellwether Education Partners and Eduwonk) and John Bailey, a Bush education aide.

Nearly 70 percent think the Republican surge will slow President Obama’s education agenda. Two thirds think the federal role in education will be scaled back.

One person surveyed said: “Next Congress is going to be about cutting spending, repealing Obamacare, and setting the stage for 2012. Noises will be made about how wonderfully bipartisan education can be and Congress will even attempt to make progress, but Harkin [Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the chairman of the Senate education committee] is incapable of making the right deals to get the Senate Republicans on board, and the House won’t move forward on anything other than piecemeal bills.”

Eighty-three percent expect bipartisan consensus favoring charter schools and 61 percent predict agreement on teacher effectiveness.

. . .  just 9 percent see the possibility of agreement around extending the Race to the Top (a key Obama priority), and absolutely no one expects agreement on increasing K-12 funding or regulation of for-profit colleges (a higher education issue that many in the GOP say has poisoned the bipartisan well for agreement on K-12).

Insiders predict Republicans will revive debate over the end of vouchers in Washington, D.C.  Some think the Republican wave could slow the push for Common Core Standards. Most think states that made reforms to get Race to the Top money will stay the course, even with Republican governors.

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Reformers turn into compliance police

November 8, 2010 By

Education reformers used to push for holding schools accountable for results, writes Mike Petrilli on Flypaper. Now many reformers, desperate for change, have become compliance cops, “engaging in the same sort of regulating and rulemaking and program-creating and money-spending  that we once abhorred.”

As I wrote yesterday, for example, Race to the Top wasn’t satisfied with rewarding states that already had a track record of boosting student learning. Instead, it lavished money on those jurisdictions willing to pledge themselves to a set of prescriptive reforms that reflected the regnant progressive orthodoxy, circa 2009. Its focus was on rules, process, promises, and money.

To correct for meaningless teacher evaluations “reformers push for rigorous sheep-from-goats evaluation systems that take student learning into account.” But they’re pushing for change at the state level. Districts hire and evaluate teachers.

How do you make sure that districts, and principals, actually use the new evaluation instruments that the state develops? That they truly differentiate among teachers, and take action accordingly? There’s only one way to be sure: we’d better have a strategy to enforce compliance.

Tom Carroll, a charter leader in New York, urged charter schools to turn down Race to the Top money because it came with dictates on how to evaluate and pay teachers.

“The true test of one’s character isn’t how one handles adversity, but how one handles power,” Petrillii concludes. Now that school reformers have some power, what will they do?

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Collaborate with charters

October 29, 2010 By

Columbus City Schools (Ohio) is renting an empty school site, but charter schools need not apply, writes Stephanie Groce, vice president of the school board.  “The administration explained to me that they do not want to lease that building to any school that might compete for students with Columbus schools.” Learn to collaborate, Groce writes in the Columbus Dispatch.

Tucked away in a church in the Weinland Park neighborhood, just a few blocks from the vacant building, is Columbus Collegiate Academy, a public charter school that outperforms every middle school in Columbus City Schools. On its most recent report card, 100 percent of seventh-grade students scored proficient or better in math, a feat that none of our middle schools can claim. The students served by the academy are 94 percent economically disadvantaged and 81 percent African-American.

Columbus Collegiate needs room to expand. No dice.  The district rejected proposals from Columbus Collegiate and two other high-performing charters.  A music-education business will rent the building.

District leaders keep the city’s charters at arms’ length, she writes.

When I visited Columbus Collegiate Academy last winter to learn about its program, I asked the executive director: How many principals and administrators from Columbus City Schools have come to visit you? The answer: none. I guess there’s nothing we can learn from a school that outperforms all of our middle schools.

The district and its charter should “share best practices and resources willingly, including facilities,” Groce writes.

Fordham Institute authorizes Columbus Collegiate, notes Education Gadfly.


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Broad Prize winner fights charters

October 20, 2010 By

Everyone was talking up education reform when Gwinnett County (Georgia) Public Schools accepted this year’s Broad Prize winner, writes Rick Hess. But Gwinnett is trying to squelch charter schools in Georgia; it’s  one of several districts suing the Georgia Charter Schools Commission to stop authorization and funding of charter schools.

This is especially awkward in the case of charters like Ivy Preparatory Academy, an all-girls charter which is outperforming county schools in seven out of ten content areas.

. . . the Georgia Supreme Court is now also being asked to decide whether GCSC charter schools qualify as “special schools” under the state constitution. If the court narrows the definition, in accord with the Gwinnett-backed claim that special schools are only those schools for special needs students, the existence of various nontraditional schools across the state could be at risk.

In awarding the $1 million prize, Eli Broad called Gwinnett County the most improved large district in America. Broad is a strong charter school supporter.

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Repeat performance

October 20, 2010 By

Social promotion is less common at high-performing charter schools, writes Sarah Garland in The American Prospect.

In keeping with their focus on rigorous academics and accountability, many charter schools have adopted strict “retention” policies requiring struggling students to repeat a grade when they don’t meet expectations, sometimes even if they’re just a point shy of passing.

. . . Charter-school advocates say this allows them to help students who are far below grade level to catch up. It may also give charters an edge over regular public schools on test scores.

Students who are held back rarely catch up, according to education research.  Often they repeat the classroom experience that didn’t work the first time. Charter leaders say they provide extra help to enable students to succeed.

Charter students facing retention sometimes return to district-run schools that will place them in the next grade.

Gary Miron, a Western Michigan University researcher who studies charter schools, says the retention policies of charter schools may sound good, but they “could be a mechanism to have the weaker kids go back to traditional public schools.”

But (Stanford researcher Margaret) Raymond says her studies have found that students who leave a school rather than be retained are less likely to be minorities or on free or reduced-price lunch, suggesting that it’s the more affluent parents who worry about the stigma of repeating a grade.

In my book, Our School, I write about a San Jose charter high school’s struggle to prepare students — most from low-income and working-class Mexican immigrant families — for college success. Because of social promotion in their K-8 years, Downtown College Prep students start ninth grade with fifth- or sixth-grade reading, writing and math skills, on average. They need time to learn the skills and work habits that will let them do college-prep work and go on to earn a college degree. Pushing everyone through in four years is a guarantee of failure.

Via HechingerEd.

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