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Charters get $4,000 less per student

April 18, 2013 by

Charter schools received one third less per-pupil funding — about $4,000 less per student — than district-run schools in Denver, Milwaukee, Newark, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles in 2007 to 2011, according to a University of Arkansas study commissioned by the pro-charter Walton Family Foundation. “In the large, urban school districts evaluated, traditional public schools receive substantially more local, state and federal funds than public charter schools,” said lead researcher Larry Maloney.

As of 2011, the charter funding gap ranged from $2,684 in Denver to nearly $13,000 in Washington D.C.

Denver—$11,139; $2,684 less than regular public schools
Los Angeles—$8,780; $4,666 less than regular public schools
Milwaukee—$10,298; $4,720 less than regular public schools
Newark—$15,973; $10,214 less than regular public schools
District of Columbia—$16,361; $12,784 less than regular public schools

The research will appear in the September issue of The Journal of School Choice.

A 2010 Ball State study of charter school funding in 24 states and the District of Columbia found that charter school students received 19.2 percent (or $2,247) less per-pupil funding than students in regular public schools.

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Report: Close bad charters, expand good ones

March 18, 2013 by

Urban charter schools outperform traditional public schools in five cities, concludes Searching for Excellence, a Fordham report conducted by Public Impact. However, urban charter students trail students in their home states, who are much less likely to be living in poverty.

The study looked at charter performance in Albany, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, and Indianapolis. In each city, charter quality varied greatly from school to school.

 . . . there are deeply troubled charters—some whose academic results can’t even match up with their long-suffering district peers. but on the other hand, there are fantastic charters—some whose academic performance competes with the best schools in their states.

Fordham calls for closing the worst-performing 10 percent of charters and expanding the top 10 percent.

In Cleveland, the policy of closure and aggressive replication of high-performing schools would, Public Impact estimates, result in charter schools vastly outperforming the district schools in five years. Moreover, this policy would put Cleveland’s charters on track to perform on par with the state average by year five.

Charter schools educate 30+ percent of public school students in seven cities — New Orleans, Detroit, Washington, DC,  Kansas City, Flint, Gary; and St. Louis — and 20+ percent in 18 cities.

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Reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic and revolution in Denver

October 12, 2012 by

“Students in the Denver Public Schools need to know reading, writing and ‘rithmetic, but what about the fourth “r” — revolution? asks the Washington Times.

New teacher-assessment criteria described a “distinguished” teacher as one who “encourages students to challenge and question the dominant culture” and “take social action to change/improve society or work for social justice.” The district’s “Framework for Effective Teaching” also said teachers would be scored on whether “[s]tudents appear comfortable challenging the dominant culture in respectful ways.”

After critics complained, the district eliminated references to the “dominant culture” and “social change.”

The updated language says a top teacher “encourages students to think critically about equity and bias in society, and to understand and question historic and prevailing currents of thought as well as dissenting and diverse viewpoints,” and “cultivates students’ ability to understand and openly discuss drivers of, and barriers to, opportunity and equity in society.”

Schools Superintendent Tom Boasberg said the “real intent” was to produce students who are “critical thinkers.”

But what if they want to think critically about the meaning of “social justice” or question the prevailing definition of “equity?”

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Merit pay is ‘blocked, diluted, co-opted’

February 27, 2011 by

Merit pay plans are blocked, diluated and co-opted, according to an Education Next study by Jay Greene and Stuart Buck of the University of Arkansas.  Even “symbolic” plans are rare. Only 3.5 percent of districts have some form of merit pay, including token plans.

To be truly effective, pay for performance must mean in education what it does in other industries—salary increases for the successful, and salary reductions, even dismissals, for poor performers. State laws governing teacher tenure in most states make implementation of such plans unlikely.

Many plans reward teachers “mostly or entirely for inputs (e.g., professional development, graduate degrees, national certification) rather than for outputs (test scores, graduation rates, or even supervisor assessments).”

Arizona’s Classroom Site Fund (CSF) required districts to allocate 40 percent of the money to “teacher compensation increases based on performance and employment related expenses.” Only 29 of 222 districts created “strong performance pay plans” that linked teacher pay to student achievement, according to a 2010 report from the Arizona Auditor General.  One example:

One district awarded performance pay to eligible employees if freshman students’ algebra test scores increased by at least 10 percent between a pre- and post-test. The actual increase in test scores was almost 90 percent. Since the pre-test is given to freshman students who have never been exposed to algebra and the post-test is given to them after receiving a full year of algebra instruction, it should be expected that scores would increase significantly more than 10 percent.

Denver’s much-hyped ProComp program rewards earning a degree more generously than improving student learning.

The largest monetary award is for earning a graduate degree: a $3,300 permanent salary increase plus a tuition or student loan subsidy of $1,000 per year for up to four years. By comparison, teachers receive a one-time award, not a bump up in base salary, of up to $2,403.26 if their students exceed “district expectations” for student growth.

Moreover, as Paul Teske, a principal evaluator of the ProComp program, noted in the Christian Science Monitor, bad teachers face no penalty under the ProComp or similar merit-pay programs: “I guess your salary stays low, and maybe that sends the message that you should look at another career. But ProComp doesn’t directly address that.”

Many districts turn merit pay into a small across-the-board pay boost, write Green and Buck. In Houston, 88 percent of teachers qualified for a small “merit” bonus. That’s nothing compared to Minnesota, where 22 school districts gave Q Comp bonuses to more than 99 percent of teachers.

Schools that don’t need to compete for students have no incentive to design pay schemes that attract the best teachers, Greene and Buck write.  In the 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey, only 6 percent of traditional public school administrators said they used salaries to reward “excellence.” By contrast, 36 percent of charter administrators and 22 percent of private school heads offer performance pay.

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Money isn’t everything

December 28, 2010 by

Money isn’t everything. Five years ago, donors offered to pay college tuition for all graduates of public schools in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  Students can use the offer at any public college or university in the state. While 81 percent of graduates receive a scholarship, only 54 percent have earned a degree or remain on track to graduate, according to the Hechinger Report.

College-funding programs exist in 15 to 20 cities, including Denver, Pittsburgh, New Haven, Connecticut and Hammond, Indiana.

In Pittsburgh’s program, the percentage of scholarship recipients who return to their public four-year colleges after freshman year trails the state average by nearly three points, said Saleem Ghubril, executive director of the Pittsburgh Promise, which launched in 2007 with a $100 million commitment by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The picture for community college students on Pittsburgh Promise scholarships is brighter: 70.3 percent return for their second year, about 10 points above the national average. Graduation data are not yet available because the program is so new.

In Denver, half of the 199 students in the first class eligible for that city’s promise-style program came back for their fourth year of college, said Rana Tarkenton, director of student services at the Denver Scholarship Foundation.

Most promise-style scholarships reward residency in a school district, city or state, rather than academic merit, though some set minimum grade-point averages or college-entrance exam scores. The effect is to encourage less-prepared students to try college.

To keep their scholarships, Kalamazoo Promise students must be enrolled full time in a two-year or four-year college and maintain a C average. The program’s graduation rates are lowest at two-year colleges, as they are in the rest of the U.S: only a third of the Class of 2006 who attended community college had graduated by the fall of 2010, program statistics show. The following year’s class didn’t do much better. Nationally, just 11.6 percent of students at public two-year colleges complete degrees within six years.

Many students aren’t prepared for the academic or social challenges of higher education, said Stan Jones, president of Complete College America, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit.

“It’s especially hard for students who come from poor areas and don’t have support networks,” said Jones, one of the founders of Twenty-First Century Scholars, a promise-style program founded in Indiana in the 1990s. “Just giving them the opportunity to go to college isn’t enough. They need support once they get there – mentoring, ways for students to connect.”

Students who are the first in their family to attend college have to learn how to navigate the system, said University of Michigan freshman Adwoa Bobo, a pre-med student on a Promise scholarship. While her tuition is covered, she has to pay for room, board, books and other expenses.

“The hardest adjustment for me is being able to manage my time, and being able to study effectively,” Bobo said. “In high school, I was able to pass through without studying too much. In college, you cannot get good grades without taking notes and studying every night for each class and reading your books thoroughly. You must work hard. I’ve been told that college was harder than high school, but you never know what they mean until you’re here.”

Students who live at home while attending community college or a four-year commuter school can earn a degree at a very low cost in dollars, but those who aren’t willing to invest their time and energy aren’t going to get very far.

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Discipline by race

October 8, 2010 by

If  schools discipline more blacks or Hispanics than white students, federal officials warn they’ll use “disparate impact analysis” to charge civil rights violations, reports Education Week.

Under “disparate impact,” schools can be in violation if discipline policies affect one racial group more than others, even if there’s no evidence of unequal treatment for the same offense or an intent to discriminate.  An education agency would be found out of compliance if an equally sound policy would have less of a disparate impact, Russlyn Ali,an Education Department official, told Ed Week.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said at a conference he was “deeply troubled by rising discipline rates and disparities in discipline” in the nation’s schools.  The department has launched compliance reviews in the Christina School District in Wilmington, Del.; the Salamanca City (N.Y.) Central School District; Winston-Salem/Forsyth (N.C.) County Schools; San Juan (Utah) School District; and Rochester (Minn.) Public Schools. All involve both different-treatment and disparate-impact analyses.

Roger Clegg, president of Center for Equal Opportunity, warned the policy could push schools to manipulate the data rather than enforce rules fairly.

“In education, with respect to discipline, my concern would be that school districts are afraid they will be hauled before a court or some administration agency and threatened with a loss of federal funding whenever they have a racial imbalance of one kind or another,” he said. He explained that educators might become hypersensitive to students’ race or ethnicity in discipline decisions, resulting in disciplining some students who shouldn’t be and not disciplining others who deserve it.

In most districts, suspension rates are much higher for black and Hispanic students. Denver Public Schools changed its policies in response to complaints from a local community group, says Allegra “Happy” Haynes, the chief community-engagement officer.

The district implemented a “discipline ladder,” for example, that spelled out the level of the disciplinary action students would receive for specific kinds of infractions, such as chewing gum in class or talking back to teachers. The policy emphasized that students should receive out-of-school suspensions or be referred to police only for serious misconduct, such as causing harm to someone in a fight.

The result was that referrals to law-enforcement officers dropped by 63 percent and out-of-school suspensions declined by 43 percent in the district from the 2008-09 school year to the 2009-10 school year, she said.

Denver’s policy seems to make sense: Why kick kids out of school or call in the police, unless it’s necessary to maintain safety? But it doesn’t make Hispanics as likely to be suspended as Asian-Americans or whites. For that matter, boys are far more likely to get in trouble than girls. Should the rules be changed to tolerate boy-typical misbehavior?

The “different treatment” rule, used in the Bush administration, is simple: The black kid who curses the teacher shouldn’t get a harsher punishment than the white kid who curses the teacher.  It doesn’t matter if blacks are more likely to curse and therefore to get in trouble.

When student misbehavior is tolerated, it’s harder for teachers to teach and for students to learn.  The wild kid who gets away with it pays in the long run because he doesn’t learn self-control, a critical life skill.  All the high-achieving, high-poverty schools teach students to follow the rules so they can learn in a safe, orderly atmosphere.

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Endless school

April 9, 2009 by

To compete with students abroad, U.S. children should be in class at least six days a week and 11 months a year, Education Secretary Arne Duncan told Denver students this week. AP reports:

“Go ahead and boo me,” Duncan told about 400 middle and high school students at a public school in northeast Denver. “I fundamentally think that our school day is too short, our school week is too short and our school year is too short.”

“You’re competing for jobs with kids from India and China. I think schools should be open six, seven days a week; eleven, twelve months a year,” he said.

Instead of boos, Duncan’s remark drew an unsurprising response from the teenage assembly: bored stares.

I think disadvantaged students would benefit from a longer school day and year — or from summer programs that keep them learning. But school six or seven days a week? Booooooo.

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Change pay, change teaching?

March 21, 2009 by

Would changing the way we pay teachers change teaching? The Christian Science Monitor looks at Denver’s experiment with performance pay.

Taylor Betz will make a lot more as a high school math teacher this year than her normal salary might suggest.

There’s the $2,300 bonus she gets for working at a “hard-to-serve school,” the $2,300 for filling a “hard-to-staff position,” the $2,300 that all teachers at her school are likely to get for raising student scores on state tests, the $2,300 “beating the odds” bonus she gets for significantly raising the math scores of her own students, and a few smaller bonuses.

Rookie teachers want their pay linked to results, reports NPR, looking at D.C.’s younger teacher corps. Experienced teachers tend to be dubious.

Update: Speaking to the National Science Teachers Association, Education Secretary Arne Duncan called for differential pay.

“We need to respond to the market by paying more to teachers in high-need subjects like science and math,” Duncan told the audience. “I’m a big believer in differential pay. I want to reward excellence by paying teachers and principals who do a great job in the classroom.

“I want to reward them for going into struggling school districts,” he continued. “That’s where the challenge is. If you’re going to take on a tough job, you should be rewarded.”

Differential pay is much easier to implement than performance pay.

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Denver superintendent named U.S. senator

January 6, 2009 by

Denver Superintendent Michael Bennet, a well-respected reformer, has been picked as Colorado’s new senator.  He’ll replace Sen. Ken Salazar, who is stepping down to serve as Interior secretary.

A Yale-educated lawyer who made millions working as a corporate restructuring specialist before entering government work, Bennet was an aide to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper before taking over Denver’s schools in 2005.

An earlier Obama supporter, Bennet advised the president-elect on education and was mentioned as a possible Education secretary. This New Yorker profile is well worth reading.

It will be great to have a U.S. senator who’s grappled with the toughest education challenges.

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