Charter Schools
Sweden's "Free Schools" Incentivize Innovation, Better Prepare Kids for Future
Published October 14, 2009 @ 02:46PM PT
When the economy recovers, graduates will breath a sign of relief, but will they have skills good enough to find work? Reihan Salam, a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, writes in Forbes that the offshoring of many services — including education — may leave a generation with the wrong skills for a domestic market that has offshored so much to countries with cheaper labor.
Salam suggests that this alone is reason enough to transform the education system in the U.S. to focus more on so called 'soft skills' like creativity, problem solving, and team-work, rather than more mechanical tasks that can be done on a calculator, or rote memorization, from afar.
He cites Sweden as an example of a country that's revolutionizing its schools. Anyone — parents, non profits, or for-profits — can set up schools that have more freedom and less standardization. So called "free schools" can experiment, and compete for students, with the profit motive of attracting students having the effect of incentivizing successful innovation. We don't necessarily need to go down the privatization route, and can keep them non-profit — but is working for a profit such a bad thing?
More Evidence: Anti-Charter Bias is Reality-Based
Published June 26, 2009 @ 01:04AM PT
In his June 25 Huffington Post column, Gerald Bracey makes a really important point about the argument that charter schools don't drain public schools of funds because "charters are public schools." Responding to EdSec Arne Duncan's recent claim on Democracy Now! (video above) that "opponents often say that charters take money away from public schools. And we all know that's absolutely misleading," Bracey writes:
No, Arne, we don't all know that because it's not true. Some, and Arne appears to be one of them, contend that since charter schools are public schools, then Q.E.D., they don't take money away from the publics. The more usual argument is that the money going to charters is offset by reduced costs at the remaining public schools. But this is not the case. It might be true if all the kids going to the charter left from Mrs. Smith's class in P. S. 101. Then we could fire Mrs. Smith. Even so, the school operating costs, transportation costs, administrative costs, etc., would remain the same. But, in fact, maybe only 3 kids leave from Mrs. Smith's class. Because money is allocated on a per-pupil basis, that's three fewer allocations. Costs are not lowered but resources are reduced. And if the three kids return to the pubic school, as happens in many cases, the money does not come back with them.
As important is Bracey's straight talk about the recent report from Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), funded by many pro-charter camps, that found a two-to-one margin of bad charters to good charters, according to lead author Margaret E. Raymond, and according to its press release "reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well as their traditional public school counterparts."
Duncan has already committed himself to charters as a major pillar of his ed reform package in his speeches and, worse, in what amounts to his extortion to states to either lift their caps on charters or else disqualify themselves from his $5 billion "Race to the Top" fund. (It must be cool to have Bill Gates' ed reform clout by being given $5 billion in taxpayer dollars to push the Gates and Business Roundtable agenda.) So this study surely makes all his missionary zeal for charters a bit embarrassing. Duncan addressed it by saying,
The CREDO report last week was absolutely a wake-up call, even if you dispute some of its conclusions or its language. The charter movement is putting itself at risk by allowing too many second-rate and even third-rate schools to continue to exist.
Bracey's response:
Wake up call? Arne, was living in Chicago like living in China? Did Daley preclude you from hearing news from the outside world? Charter schools have been found to be underperforming for over a decade.
Moreover, if the CREDO results are true, Arne, why are you blackmailing states with threats to withhold stimulus money unless they permit charters or lift charter caps? The logic here is astonishing. Suppose I invent a medicine and find it helps 17% of people, doesn't do anything for 46% and hurts 37%. Would the FDA approve and tout my medicine? CREDO is a Stanford University-based think tank and its findings were that kids in charters did better than matched peers in publics in 17% of the cases, worse in 37% and neither better nor worse 46% of the time. As I closed my chapter on charters in Setting the Record Straight (second edition), "Charter schools were born of perceived failures in public schools. So, if the charters are doing worse than the publics, where is the outrage about them?" Where indeed, Arne?
It's too soon to tell, but I think it's a safe bet that Duncan will tout the brand name charters - KIPP, Green Dot, and such - as the "good charters," and promote them, and brand independent and local charters as the "second-rate and even third-rate" "bad" charters. Which means those public funds will be drained from public schools into fewer and fewer - and happier and happier - Charter Management Organizations.
Isn't it funny how the Obama administration is pushing for a public health care plan against HMO's, while he's pushing against public schools for CMO's and private charters? If the HMO's wanted a good argument against the government's faith in its ability to provide good social services, it should just point to the Department of Education.
In any case, check out Bracey's article on HuffPo. He grades a few more parts of Duncan's speech that I don't mention here.
Charters Erase Achievement Gap through Innovative ... Cheating
Published June 10, 2009 @ 07:38PM PT
Three cheers for this charter school network's silver bullet to erase the achievement gap: cheat on the standardized tests. Or so the evidence suggests:
In the past, parents languished on waiting lists before enrolling their kids in Hernandez's [Cesar Chavez Network] schools. Regularly recognized for excellence in serving mostly low-income kids, Hernandez's schools earned a nod from President George W. Bush in 2007 for "closing the achievement gap." The Chavez network was considered innovative, even inspiring.
Is it? Here are some things to consider before enrolling your kid.
Possible CSAP abuses
Cesar Chavez schools in Pueblo are part of Pueblo City Schools (PCS). Elsewhere, they're members of the Colorado Charter School Institute. All of them, like most public schools, are assessed to a large degree on students' test scores.
Robert Vise, PCS executive director of assessment and technology, says he stumbled upon some eyebrow-raising information regarding the 2008 Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) test scores at Pueblo's Cesar Chavez Academy. According to data Vise received from the state, more than 60 percent of the Academy's 684 third- through eighth-grade students were given special accommodations for the test, such as extra time to complete it. These accommodations normally are afforded only to children with established physical or developmental disabilities.
All 220 students in fourth and fifth grades were given special accommodations in the test's reading portion, Vise says, and all but two also received special accommodations on the math portion.
"I've never had a whole grade level at a school have accommodations," Vise says.
The figures were jarring, particularly because Vise's own records suggested a small fraction of the children had qualifying disabilities, and a significant number were actually classified as being "gifted."
[....] In 2005, [John] Brainard, then the Pueblo district's director of assessment and research, documented four phone calls from concerned parents of CCA third-graders, all relating the same story: Their children said CCA staff had brought them into a "CSAP review" following the test, and encouraged them to change some answers.
Along with staff from CTB-McGraw-Hill, CSAP's creators, Brainard was allowed to examine written answers on CSAP reading tests for Chavez's third-graders. Although no one ever accused the Chavez kids of cheating, significant erasures or changes were found in 62 percent of the tests, and some new answers appeared to be done in different handwriting.
Despite the evidence, the test results were never revised. (Read the rest...)
Silly Colorado. Instead of cheating to boost test scores, they could boost them honestly, a la New York, by dumbing down their state tests.
Oh never mind. As Joel Klein and Arne Duncan never tire of telling us, the fact that parents are on waiting lists to get their kids into these schools is proof not of their successful and highly-financed marketing campaigns, but of their quality.
(h/t Susan Ohanion)
Photo by Mr_Stein
Duncan's Thousand-Headed Hydra
Published June 05, 2009 @ 06:54PM PT
I really want to be sympathetic to and supportive of the Obama DoE under EdSec Arne Duncan. But for the life of me, every time I watch him speak or read him in interviews, I see contradictions that make me wonder if he's at all aware of how incoherent his vision is.
The latest example comes as Duncan explains why he rejects vouchers:
Vouchers usually serve 1 to 2 percent of the children in a community. And I think we as the federal government, we as local governments, or we as school districts, we have to be more ambitious than that. That’s an absolutely worthy or noble goal. If a nonprofit or philanthropy wants to provide scholarship money to children, that’s a great, great use of the resources.
But I don’t want to save 1 or 2 percent of children and let 98, 99 percent drown. We have to be much more ambitious than that. We have to expect more.
And this is why I would argue rather than taking one of these struggling schools, these thousands (inaudible) -- rather than taking three kids out of there and putting them in a better school and feeling good and sleeping well at night, I want to turn that school around now and do that for those 400, 500, 800, 1,200 kids in that school and give every child in that school and that community something better, and do it with a real sense of urgency.
Okay, so far, so good. Let's improve education for all students, not just 1 or 2 percent. But when he talks the "how" - closing 1,000 failing schools a year and re-opening them, often as charters, with new administration and faculty - things break down for me:
And let me tell you where I think charters can be very effective. First of all, you have to have a very high bar. This is not let a thousand flowers bloom. And some states, they'll just let anyone who wanted to open a charter open. You can't do that. This is a sacred work, and you've got to make sure that you're picking the best of the best to give them an opportunity to educate children.
Strike one: "the best of the best," we can surmise by Duncan's long history of touting KIPP and Green Dot and other "brands" - let's call them "chain schools" - perform so well on standardized tests (as if proficiency in reading and math are a full measure of what it means to be educated) because they usually don't enroll the lowest-performing students, and can expel those they do enroll for continuing to perform poorly. It's good to hear talk of high standards for charters, but that should include lowering the admissions bar to include the same students traditional public schools have to deal with.
Duncan continues:
Secondly, once you set that high bar, you have to do two things. You have to give these charters real autonomy. These are by definition education innovators. They're entrepreneurs. They have to be freed from the bureaucracy. And if you tie them too closely, they won't play.
Strike two? Maybe this isn't incoherent, but saying "set a high bar for only the best charters" implies control and a top-down definition of what a "quality charter" is. If this is true, then it undercuts the very freedom to innovate that Duncan urges.
Duncan goes on:
Second [sic], with that real autonomy, you have to have couple that with real accountability. You have to have five-year performance contracts. One without the other doesn't work. And so, if you just have autonomy without -- without accountability, you'll get mediocrity. If all you have is accountability and no autonomy, none of these education entrepreneurs would be interested. But that combination is very, very powerful.
Strike three - on several levels. First, if accountability continues to mean a math-and-reading standard of judgment, then autonomy is contrained by this emphasis. Second, closing 1,000 schools and replacing them with new operations that are given five years to succeed means, conversely, many of them will not succeed over that time. Study after study confirms that charters are often no better than the schools they replace.
The upshot: students at thousands of schools will go through five years of schooling - irreplaceable for them - that are in essence a gamble. How that's going to contribute to their salvation in this "sacred work" is something I just don't see.
The whole privatization scheme at the heart of Duncan's agenda is a Pandora's box that will be difficult, if not impossible, to remedy. If the turnaround strategy fails, there'll be a huge mess to clean up in its wake. This isn't "1,000 flowers," to be sure. If it fails, it's going to be more like a thousand-headed hydra. And how do you kill one of those?
Report: NYC Charters Do Cream, Exclude Neediest Students
Published May 20, 2009 @ 09:03PM PT
InsideSchools crunched the data and performed the oversight that the NYC DOE doesn't have to perform, and so, apparently, doesn't bother to. The results are more evidence that charter schools do "cream," are a "separate and unequal" school system, and do need a mandatory oversight body to keep their practices in line with their PR and marketing.
Vanessa Witenko writes,
Charter schools claim they outperform neighborhood schools while enrolling the same student demographic. Opponents argue that charter schools only attract children whose parents are involved and invested in their education, since the parents had to seek out a charter school and fill out an application by the April 1 deadline. Additionally, because charter schools operate independently of the city DOE, opponents say there is no oversight to protect the most vulnerable students – those who don’t speak English or require special education services.
An analysis of student data involving some of the most challenging students to educate, students who are homeless, special education students, and English Language Learners (ELL), shows that charter schools don’t serve or enroll the same students as local public schools. Read more....
Some highlights:
- "In New York City, 51,316 public school students are homeless, and only 111 of them attend a charter school."
- "Although between 14-17 percent of New York City public school [students] are still learning English, according to 2008-09 Title III allocations (federal money schools receive for students learning English), they represent just three percent of the charter school population."
- Charters that do have English Language Learners typically lump them together with Special Needs/Learning Disabled students. As an ESL specialist, I can confirm this is looked upon as very bad practice, and shunned by quality schools. Read more....
Al Sharpton recently said there should be no "sacred cows" in school reform. When pushed, he almost admitted the "sacred cow" in question was teachers unions. Let's add the charter cow to the list.
The issue here is not whether there are good and bad charter schools; of course there are, just as there are good and bad traditional public schools. The issue, instead, is the claims that charters make about their performance relative to traditional schools. Those comparisons only work if the two systems serve the same demographics. Since more and more evidence shows they don't, we need to at least demand the charter marketers be held to a higher and more transparent standard of accountability when making their claims of superiority.
(h/t to Gotham Schools)
photo by garboden
More Good, Bad, and Ugly on Charter Schools
Published May 18, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT
Quite a few interesting reads on charter schools:
Residential Charter School for Teen Mothers to Close: This one's complicated. On the one hand, the failure of the charter seems to a large degree due to sketchy oversight on the part of the DC Public School Board in approving the charter launch when it seemed far from ready; on the other, the cookie-cutter demands of the standardized-testing/accountability crowd probably guaranteed failure for this nontraditional student body from the start.
According to outside audits, interviews and staff reports, MEI lacked a coherent curriculum for its 50 students, with just two on track to graduate this spring. Last year, not one of the 15 10th-graders who took the DC-CAS standardized test achieved proficiency in reading or math.
[Executive director] Muhammad-M'Backe said those scores are not surprising, given that most students entered the school reading on a third- to fifth-grade level.
To reform the academic program, the school hired Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound, a national educational consulting firm that specializes in serving nontraditional student groups by emphasizing hands-on learning in out-of-school settings. But Gladys Graham, the firm's regional director, said constant teacher and administrative turnover made it difficult to put the program into effect.
"The school is not in a place where we could implement the design," she said.
[...]One of the most serious issues was MEI's special education program. An inspection of the individual education plans (IEPs) required by federal law for each student showed that they were identical, with only the names changed.
Charter School Expenses | GothamSchools: Separate and unequal, it seems, is the story of the differences in funding between charter and public school students in NYC:
I calculated the total expenses per pupil at 58 New York City charter schools for the 2007-08 school year. Here is the workbook with my calculations.
The total expenses for the 58 schools was $236,230,149. The total enrollment was 17,680. This comes out to a per pupil calculation of $13,361. The average school expenses per pupil was $13,520. The median school was $12,948. For the 2007-08 school year, the “base funding” per pupil, i.e. the fixed amount per pupil received from the DOE, was $11,023. So spending on the average student was $2,338 above the base amount.
Boston Review — No Ordinary Succes: James Forman, Jr. gives a much more sensitive take on the Harlem Children's Zone than David Brooks did recently in the NYTimes. It's not a slam-dunk for Klein, Bloomberg, Sharpton, and the Education Equality Project, as Brooks would have it. It's got to be Broader and Bolder, too.
If we make schools better and improve the lives of some kids (or, in Canada’s case, a whole neighborhood) but do nothing to disrupt segregation, are we simply making separate a little more equal?
Despite these misgivings, I think I know how Canada, Feinberg, and Levin would defend their choice. I know it because, when I saw the terrible schools for jailed kids in D.C., I felt an obligation to help create a better alternative, even though I knew that almost every child in the school would be African-American and that most would be poor. I recognized the urgency of offering those kids the support and resources that no other program was going to provide. But I do not want to live in a society that accepts this situation as inevitable. And I am confident that Canada, Feinberg, and Levin do not, either.
--and speaking of Forman's "better alternative" in DC, his "Out of Jail and Into Jobs" feature in Education Next, about the Maya Angelou charter, is pretty compelling reading. I don't know what that school's politics are concerning unionized teachers and so forth, but the vision seems strong, and the cause commendable.
Arne Duncan's Faith-Based Certitudes
Published May 12, 2009 @ 08:48AM PT
EdSec Arne Duncan's Fiscal 2010 Education Budget's "fourth pillar" of reform calls for "promoting innovation and excellence in America's schools by expanding charter schools, extending learning time, and turning around low-performing schools."
Enough has been said on these pages about the ambiguity of charters as a solution already, so I'll pass on saying more (though a new study of Michigan charter schools adds yet one more study to the "charters are not outperforming traditional schools" pile).
What the charter push has in common with the other two initiatives in the pillar is this: no proven track record.
Regarding longer school days, weeks, and years, I found myself surprised to agree with Frederick Hess in U.S. News and World Report last month:
Simply locking students in mediocre schools for additional hours presumes that the proper response to chaos or tedium is more of the same. And ham-handedly extending the day can disrupt fruitful activities for millions of youths who have rewarding lives after 3 o'clock.
A longer day could make sense for many students and offer a respite for stretched families. Where schools know how to use the hours, where talented teachers have the ideas and energy, and where families think the student would benefit, OK. But before proposing expensive new policies, wedging kids into lousy schools for hundreds of extra hours, and imposing substantial new demands on teachers, let's ensure schools are making good use of the time they have. (source)
As for closing failing schools and reopening them with "new adults, and the same kids"? Duncan's on fire about that one, wanting to "turn around" 5,000 schools over the next five years, saying it "could really lift the needle, lift the bottom and change the lives of tens of millions of underserved children."* But it seems another solution based on faith, not proof. The Chicago Catalyst blog knew Duncan well when he was closing ("turning around") schools in Chicago, and reports "serious questions" about whether turnarounds are "lifting Chicago's needle" at all:
CPS notes that test scores are up at Sherman and Harvard elementary schools, where an ambitious “turnaround” program (replace teachers, keep the students) has paved the way for similar efforts at four additional schools this year.
It’s true, test scores are up at Sherman and Harvard—and at a faster clip compared to district-wide gains. Sherman’s composite scores jumped from 34.9 percent to 40.2 percent; Harvard’s scores climbed from 31.8 percent to 40.1 percent.
But data from the district’s newest “value-added” measure raises serious questions. That measure compares how well individual students at each school perform on tests relative to students with similar backgrounds across the district.
A quick explanation: Schools where students make more progress compared to their peers elsewhere in the city get green lights. Red lights are stamped on schools where children are making less progress than average. A yellow light means it’s unclear whether students’ gains outpace or fall short of their peers.
Sherman got yellow lights in both reading and math. Harvard posted split results: a red in reading and a green in math.
Experts say it could take five years to determine the effectiveness of the turnaround approach, yet CPS plans to dramatically increase the number of turnarounds in 2009.
--And Arne Duncan plans to dramatically increase them across America. Never mind that we need a few more years of the data so cherished by Duncan's education management crowd before we can know if this is a "proven strategy." Faith's enough for now.
So, for the millionth time, Duncan seems a genuine and well-meaning Joe, but he's a "CEO," not an educator. I wish I could have more confidence in him when reading his remarks or watching his speeches, but usually don't, due to the simple fact that I've read research and/or had classroom experience at odds with his authoritative-yet-dubious certitudes.
And it's déja vu all over again with this "fourth pillar." It brings to mind a quote I read recently on Sharon Higgins' blog by a business professor about one benefit of a business education: It "equip[s] students with a vocabulary that enable[s] them to talk with authority about subjects they do not understand."
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*By my count, for a single ten million students to be affected by closures at 5,000 schools means each school would have an average of 2,000 students. Unless schools significanlty larger than 2,000 students are common, it seems that plural tens of millions is either hyperbole or fuzzy math. Maybe I'm wrong. [Update: I definitely am wrong, if we view the consequences (assuming they're good ones) over subsequent years. Mea culpa.]
