The Education Gadfly Weekly

Sean Conlan, Alex Medler, and Suzanne Weiss
National Association of Charter School Authorizers
May 2010 

NACSA’s second nationwide survey of authorizers (aka “sponsors” in Ohio) contains several policy insights (as reviewed by my colleague, Janie Scull), as well as interesting findings regarding “practitioner basics” for those of us that authorize schools (the Fordham Foundation sponsors six charter schools). The survey examines how authorizers approach key practices that are critical in the life of a charter school: application process, performance contracting, oversight and evaluation, and charter renewal.

NACSA identified 872 total authorizers across the nation, and found that 86 percent of those authorize five or fewer charter schools; 6 percent authorize six to nine schools; and 8 percent authorize ten or more schools. Authorizers in this last category oversee well over half (64 percent) of all the charter schools in the nation. One of the most interesting findings for those of us here in Ohio relates to services provided by authorizers. Specifically, among small authorizers (ten or fewer schools), 66 percent provide financial services; 89 percent provide training on improving instruction; 72 percent provide special education services; 74 percent provide data analysis; and 85 percent provide training on special education requirements.

Interesting stuff, considering we recently found that of Ohio’s approximately 67 active authorizers, two authorize one-third of all Ohio charter schools, and 52 authorize two or fewer schools. Ohio’s authorizers vary in their roles and the degrees to which they provide services to their schools. And, it’s fair to say that there’s something of an identity crisis going on regarding the appropriate role of the authorizer (so much so, in fact, that the State Board of Education is considering rules that would require authorizers to competitively bid the “administrative services” that authorizers sell to the schools they monitor and oversee in an effort to avoid conflicts of interest).

The report provides good insight on how different types of authorizers operate, and what they deem important. Read it here.

Institute of Education Sciences
May 2010

Add this to the list of high-dollar federally-supported gold-plated randomized studies showing “no impact” of an education intervention. A second year follow-up evaluation, it investigates the effect of three supplemental reading curricula: Project CRISS, ReadAbout, and Read for Real. The original (first year) study examined use of the curricula in ten urban districts and its impact on the academic performance of over 6,000 fifth graders after one year (2006-07). Not surprisingly for an intervention with such a short time period, there was no effect. This new installment analyzes a second year of data for the original cohort, who did not use the programs in year two, to see if there were any longer-term effects from exposure to the curricula during year one. There weren’t. Analysts also added a new cohort of fifth-graders in year two (2007-08); these students used the curriculum the second year and tended to have teachers who had experience with the curriculum (having taught it to the previous cohort). Here, one of the curricula (ReadAbout) had a moderately positive impact on reading comprehension in social studies (but not on general reading comprehension or reading comprehension in science). There were no impacts elsewhere. If you’re not snoring yet, there is one interesting tidbit: None of these programs led to an increase in teachers’ use of “informational texts” (also known as content-based reading). Scholars such as E.D. Hirsch maintain that the teaching of reading comprehension and content go hand in hand—in other words, you can’t teach reading as an isolated skill—so the fact that these programs did not do this may have contributed to the nill results. You can find the 374-page (and the 24-page executive summary) here.

Paul T. Hill
Hoover Institution Press
2010

Why haven’t school choice programs—especially charters and vouchers—been the smashing success many of us expected? In this new book (which was the subject, along with Paul Peterson’s new work on choice, of a recent Fordham event), Paul Hill explains. For the most part, it was a matter of misplaced assumptions, namely that choice would stimulate a “virtuous cycle” of school improvement. Think flow chart: Schools of choice create competition; parents vote with their feet and enroll their students in such schools; public schools feel pressure to improve; entrepreneurs create more new schools based on rising demand; new schools pay “premiums” for better teachers; and so on. But there are numerous realities, explains Hill, which throw a wrench in this circuit, none of which should come as a surprise. Most notably, education systems are “entrenched” in procedure, compliance, and employee protection, and often debilitated by nonsensical state and district laws and policies. But all is not lost, says Hill, and we certainly shouldn’t give up on school choice. He provides several recommendations to fix these problems, including “re-missioning” education toward continuous improvement (via performance-based “portfolio-run” districts, a topic Hill has engaged with before). We agree; school choice is worth the wait—and the fight. You can buy the book here.

National Center for Education Statistics
Sarah Grady, Stacey Bielick, and Susan Aud
April 2010

This statistical analysis from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) breaks down trends in enrollment in all major venues for K-12 education: public and private, charter and district, plus homeschooling. The report also examines characteristics of students as well as parents’ satisfaction with and involvement in such schools.

The study is an update to previous NCES reports on school choice and at 77 pages contains more data than any review can thoroughly describe. But, a few trends during this 14-year span stand out:

• The percentage of students in grades 1-12 attending assigned public schools decreased from 80 percent to 73 percent. In effect, more students and their families are availing themselves of school choice options.
• In 2007, just two percent of students in grades 1-12 were enrolled in charter schools. A much higher percentage of charter students hailed from cities (64 percent) when compared to students in other public schools (30 percent).
• Public school options account for most of the increase in the use of school choice. In 1993, 11 percent of students chose to enroll in a public school other than their assigned neighborhood school. By 2007, that number grew to 16 percent. In the meantime, the number of students in both private religious and private non-religious schools grew by one percent each (from eight to nine percent, and two to three percent, respectively).

Thus, the expansion of school choice has occurred mostly in public schools. But while NCES’s trend data is very useful for broad comparisons, the report doesn’t drill down to indicate whether public school choice trends reflect intra-district or inter-district choice, or charter schools. Still, NCES provides a thorough outline of school choice trends, and illuminates that “choice” doesn’t undermine public schools. Ohio would benefit greatly by collecting and tracking such robust data on school choice that could highlight similar trends. Read the report here.

Madeleine Sackler, director
The Lottery, LLC
Spring 2010

Classroom educators may have Stand and Deliver, Freedom Writers and Lean on Me for inspiration, but thanks to a spurt of new documentaries, education reformers now have an excuse to pop some corn too. One of the best is The Lottery. Compellingly understated in its delivery, it tracks the springtime lottery at Harlem Success Academy, a high-achieving New York City charter school run by Eva Moskowitz. Each year, thousands of families apply for one of the few hundred seats available at the school. The movie follows four black Harlem families in the months leading up to the lottery, highlighting their aspirations and family situations and juxtaposing these against the political backlash and hostile community atmosphere in which Harlem Success Academy operates. Fusing all aspects of the education reform debate—from the struggles of the school choice movement to the political clout of the Goliath teachers’ unions—The Lottery reminds us that our outdated and outmoded system is seriously broken. Watch the trailer and get inspired here.

Think domestic identity cards went the way of Apartheid? Think again. The Chinese hukou system is alive and well. Every Chinese man, woman, and child is identified by their place of origin, a locale passed from mother to child, and classified as “urban” or “agricultural.” And it’s very hard to change your stars—even children who’ve never even visited their “home” town are classified by their mother’s hukou. So what does this have to do with education? Many rural Chinese are moving to urban centers, but their hukou basically denies them access to many of the urban services provided in those centers, including education. Migrant children are forced to attend and pay for private schools (often run by other migrants), while their urban hukou holding neighbors attend free state schools. Universities operate on hukou quotas, with huge numbers of spots held for Beijing and Shanghai residents. Migrant students often have to travel halfway across the country back to their “home” village to take annual tests, a prohibitive measure for the less well-off. All of this denies an affordable education to an entire class of children, while also crushing their university aspirations or any chance at social mobility, just because of a piece of paper. As if China wasn’t doing enough to oppress its citizens.

“Invisible and heavy shackles,” The Economist, May 6, 2010

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously gave birth to analytic philosophy by declaring, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” As we enter the second decade of the most globalized century in human history, we can ill afford to be bound by our linguistic limits. The world is changing rapidly—faster than many of us can keep up—and the growing importance of Asia to the future of the United States has now been a fact of life for decades.

Asia Society has been working since 1956 to strengthen relationships and promote understanding among the people, leaders, and institutions of the United States and Asia across the fields of education, the arts, policy, and business. Asia Society’s work to build a Confucius Classrooms Network of U.S. schools with exemplary Chinese language programs is part of a broader strategy to help prepare Americans to communicate effectively with the rest of the world and compete in the global economy.

There is perhaps no country in the world today more important to the prosperity and stability of the United States than China. A 2007 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research forecasts that by 2040 China’s GDP will be larger than that of the entire rest of the world, and that the Chinese market will be larger than those of the U.S., European Union, Japan, and India combined. Success in that market and cooperation between the U.S. and China on a range of issues is critical to our future, and while there will, of course, remain areas of disagreement between the two countries, it is important that we prepare our next generation of leaders with the ability to communicate with China. The 300 million or so Chinese students in primary, secondary, and tertiary education learning English, and the 100,000 Chinese students here in the U.S., certainly seem to understand the value of being multilingual and globally competent.

Asia Society’s Confucius Classrooms Network focuses on improving the quality of Chinese language programs in the United States, building models for the effective teaching and learning of critical languages in American schools, and creating strong links between world language proficiency and twenty-first century skills.

The activities of the Network depend on ongoing guidance from a forty-member Expert Advisory Committee of national leaders in world languages and international education. The Network currently includes twenty schools in fourteen states and the District of Columbia, all with a strong commitment to making their Chinese program a core part of a larger mission toward helping students be more globally competent. The program supports the teachers and principals in each school in designing an instructional program tailored to the needs of their students, in coordination with their local superintendents and school boards. It should be noted that there are other programs that carry the name of “Confucius Classrooms,” most notably a statewide initiative in North Carolina, and those being established throughout the country by Confucius Institutes, but that these programs are unaffiliated with Asia Society.

There is a long history of governments supporting language and culture programs overseas. The U.S. State Department, British Council, Alliance Francais, Japan Foundation, Cervantes Institute, Goethe Institute, etc. all have such programs, and the Consulates of France, Italy, Spain, South Korea, the Netherlands, etc., all fund language programs in American schools. Japan and Italy recently announced three-year grants to school districts to support Japanese and Italian teachers during difficult budget times, and the government of France has worked with six schools in New York alone to establish dual language programs in French. Spain has a large and well-established guest teacher program. Furthermore, according to the National Education Association, there are approximately 10,000 foreign teachers working in the United States to fill shortages in science, mathematics, foreign languages, and special education because there are not enough qualified American teachers to take these positions.

We should perhaps pay close attention to the words of an eleven year-old middle school student on Long Island who was recently asked whether it would not just be easier if everyone in China learned English, instead of his trying to learn Chinese. His response was far beyond his years: “It’s good if they learn English, but it should be mutual. They can learn some English and we can learn some Chinese, and then we can communicate.” Young people have a way of stating truth simply and without pretence, and this student clearly understands both the urgency of making America more globally competitive, and of making himself more globally competent. Not surprisingly, this same eleven year-old decided to take Chinese so that he could help his engineer father on trips to China and see for himself the architectural wonders of the Great Wall and contemporary Shanghai. And don’t ask him who the guy in that huge portrait in front of Tiananmen Square is—he thinks “mao” is just the word for “small change” in Mandarin.

By Chris Livaccari

Livaccari is the Associate Director for Education and Chinese Language Initiatives at Asia Society. 

It was a long time coming, but education reformers have realized a new political necessity: bucks to back their bang. And the bucks seem willing and able. A number of New York financiers have taken an increasing interest in education reform, charter schools in particular, under the leadership and guidance of Democrats for Education Reform. These folks (and their firms) are giving speeches, attending fundraisers, and sitting on charter school boards—and could be the much needed counterbalance to the political and monetary heft of the nation’s teachers’ unions, by far the biggest political spenders. DFER, along with Harlem Village Academies and Teach For America, has even hired a top-notch lobbyist and PR firm to advance their cause in the statehouse. Undemocratic? Maybe, but no less so than teachers’ unions extracting dues from their (taxpayer-supported) members to fill the coffers of friendly candidates and pols. Some will say “two wrongs don’t make a right” but we’d prefer to call this leveling the playing field.

“Charter schools’ new cheerleaders: Financiers,” by Trip Gabriel and Jennifer Medina, New York Times, May 9, 2010

“Reformers’ secret weapon: Class-act lobbyist,” New York Post, May 5, 2010

In this new section, which will appear occasionally, we will present two points of view on the same topic. In our inaugural edition, Fordham's own Chester Finn and Asia Society's Chris Livaccari debate Confucius Classrooms, a K-12 Chinese language program for American schools subsidized by the Chinese government.

Is it possible that money-strapped U.S. educators—school and college alike—are selling their students’ birthrights to Beijing for a mess of free Mandarin lessons? Are we in the early stages of outsourcing our education system to the same country to which we’ve surrendered our manufacturing sector and entrusted our national debt?

Okay, that’s probably too dire, at least for now, but watch the Chinese education ministry extend its tentacles worldwide, from some 550 higher-ed programs (“Confucius Institutes”) already operating in ninety countries (including almost seventy on American shores) to the newer but no less worrisome K-12 language programs that are taking the U.S. by storm. These “Confucius Classrooms” are multiplying like, well, like everything else about China. One of Beijing’s chief U.S. partners in this venture, the Asia Society, has already opened twenty pilot sites in American public schools and seeks to launch eighty more by fall 2011. Besides that, some districts and states—notably North Carolina—are working directly with the Chinese government, while still more districts are turning to their local university-based Confucius Institute to get started.

The basic offer is surely tempting, and doubly so in a down economy: At little or no cost to you, offers the government of China, we will teach your students our language and culture. Indeed, we’ll staff the program with Chinese nationals to handle instruction (almost 5,000 of them currently roam the globe, secondary and higher education combined); we’ll subsidize their salaries and pay their airfare. We’ll even provide a free curriculum, textbooks, and materials. All you need do is give us the opportunity—and, of course, thank us and think well of us.

Although a noisy dust-up is underway in a middle school near Los Angeles (Hacienda Heights is the heavily-Hispanic community with a majority-Chinese school board), Confucius Classrooms are rolling along in public schools from Rhode Island to Oregon as their postsecondary counterparts multiply at colleges from Rutgers to Texas A&M to the University of Alaska. According to recent coverage in the New York Times, 325 Chinese teachers are now in U.S. classrooms via the College Board's "guest teacher" program, and many more when combined with the other avenues for winning Chinese dollars—er, yuan.

One can, of course, argue that this is a wonderful windfall that will assist young Americans to prepare for the myriad transactions they will inevitably engage in tomorrow with the world’s other superpower (assuming, that is, that the U.S. remains one).

One can also cite as precedent earlier powers that sought to cement their empires and solidify their dominance—of commerce, shipping, gold, cotton, slaves, political control, you name it—by getting the locals to learn their languages. That’s part of the histories of Spain, France, and England, even Portugal, Holland, Italy, Germany and, of course, Russia. Why shouldn’t China do the same?

And one can rue the apathy that most young Americans show toward learning other world languages, except possibly Spanish. We tend to assume that everyone on the planet is learning English in order to converse with us. That’s one reason the State Department, the military, and multinational corporations wind up training their own folks in the languages of the places they will work. Indeed, State has even helped pay for some of the Confucius Institutes as part of the post-9/11 push in critical-need languages.

I’m open to the possibility that America’s interests will be advanced if more of today’s children become fluent in Mandarin. Perhaps our schools and universities should substitute it for Italian, maybe even French. But we probably want more of them to learn Arabic, too, for similar reasons. Does that mean we should be receptive if the government of Syria or Yemen offers to pay for it in our public schools? Do we want the government of Myanmar subsidizing the study of Burmese?

China is in many respects more worrisome. The country itself is no friend. Rather, it’s our chief competitor, our chief creditor, and our chief rival or adversary in much of the globe. It is, in fact, the one nation on this planet that poses the greatest and most multifaceted threat to the United States. It already wields enormous influence in our economy, our foreign policy, our defense strategy—not to mention the clothes we put on our backs and the toys we buy for our kids. It is hacking everybody’s computers and emails. It is censoring communications and information whenever and wherever it can. It endangers its own schoolchildren in shoddy buildings and fails to protect them from cleaver-wielding assailants. It takes people it doesn’t like and shoots them in the head. It imprisons political dissidents till they grow sick and weak. It is the main impediment to serious sanctions against Iran. It is a menace to Japan, South Korea, and lots of other places.

China has its linguistic gun sights trained on those lands, too. A few days ago, the Times reported on Indonesia’s warm reception of pre-paid Mandarin instruction. The Chinese know full well that swaying the minds of young Indonesians will gradually ease the long-standing hostility that Jakarta has shown toward Beijing.

Similar reasoning in other neighborhoods is prompting the “Hanban”—part of China’s education ministry—to create Confucius language-training and culture-imparting programs around the globe. It’s all part of Hu Jintao’s strategy of projecting “soft power” around the world.

Is nobody alarmed by this development besides me and a few parents in Hacienda Heights?

Note: This piece reflects a correction. In a previous version, we erroneously attributed the 325 College Board "guest teachers" to Asia Society's network. Guest teachers are provided to Asia Society and other Confucius Classroom programs through the College Board (public schools) or National Association of Independent Schools (private schools).

National Center for Education Statistics
Sarah Grady, Stacey Bielick, and Susan Aud
April 2010

This statistical analysis from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) breaks down trends in enrollment in all major venues for K-12 education: public and private, charter and district, plus homeschooling. The report also examines characteristics of students as well as parents’ satisfaction with and involvement in such schools.

The study is an update to previous NCES reports on school choice and at 77 pages contains more data than any review can thoroughly describe. But, a few trends during this 14-year span stand out:

• The percentage of students in grades 1-12 attending assigned public schools decreased from 80 percent to 73 percent. In effect, more students and their families are availing themselves of school choice options.
• In 2007, just two percent of students in grades 1-12 were enrolled in charter schools. A much higher percentage of charter students hailed from cities (64 percent) when compared to students in other public schools (30 percent).
• Public school options account for most of the increase in the use of school choice. In 1993, 11 percent of students chose to enroll in a public school other than their assigned neighborhood school. By 2007, that number grew to 16 percent. In the meantime, the number of students in both private religious and private non-religious schools grew by one percent each (from eight to nine percent, and two to three percent, respectively).

Thus, the expansion of school choice has occurred mostly in public schools. But while NCES’s trend data is very useful for broad comparisons, the report doesn’t drill down to indicate whether public school choice trends reflect intra-district or inter-district choice, or charter schools. Still, NCES provides a thorough outline of school choice trends, and illuminates that “choice” doesn’t undermine public schools. Ohio would benefit greatly by collecting and tracking such robust data on school choice that could highlight similar trends. Read the report here.

Paul T. Hill
Hoover Institution Press
2010

Why haven’t school choice programs—especially charters and vouchers—been the smashing success many of us expected? In this new book (which was the subject, along with Paul Peterson’s new work on choice, of a recent Fordham event), Paul Hill explains. For the most part, it was a matter of misplaced assumptions, namely that choice would stimulate a “virtuous cycle” of school improvement. Think flow chart: Schools of choice create competition; parents vote with their feet and enroll their students in such schools; public schools feel pressure to improve; entrepreneurs create more new schools based on rising demand; new schools pay “premiums” for better teachers; and so on. But there are numerous realities, explains Hill, which throw a wrench in this circuit, none of which should come as a surprise. Most notably, education systems are “entrenched” in procedure, compliance, and employee protection, and often debilitated by nonsensical state and district laws and policies. But all is not lost, says Hill, and we certainly shouldn’t give up on school choice. He provides several recommendations to fix these problems, including “re-missioning” education toward continuous improvement (via performance-based “portfolio-run” districts, a topic Hill has engaged with before). We agree; school choice is worth the wait—and the fight. You can buy the book here.

Sean Conlan, Alex Medler, and Suzanne Weiss
National Association of Charter School Authorizers
May 2010 

NACSA’s second nationwide survey of authorizers (aka “sponsors” in Ohio) contains several policy insights (as reviewed by my colleague, Janie Scull), as well as interesting findings regarding “practitioner basics” for those of us that authorize schools (the Fordham Foundation sponsors six charter schools). The survey examines how authorizers approach key practices that are critical in the life of a charter school: application process, performance contracting, oversight and evaluation, and charter renewal.

NACSA identified 872 total authorizers across the nation, and found that 86 percent of those authorize five or fewer charter schools; 6 percent authorize six to nine schools; and 8 percent authorize ten or more schools. Authorizers in this last category oversee well over half (64 percent) of all the charter schools in the nation. One of the most interesting findings for those of us here in Ohio relates to services provided by authorizers. Specifically, among small authorizers (ten or fewer schools), 66 percent provide financial services; 89 percent provide training on improving instruction; 72 percent provide special education services; 74 percent provide data analysis; and 85 percent provide training on special education requirements.

Interesting stuff, considering we recently found that of Ohio’s approximately 67 active authorizers, two authorize one-third of all Ohio charter schools, and 52 authorize two or fewer schools. Ohio’s authorizers vary in their roles and the degrees to which they provide services to their schools. And, it’s fair to say that there’s something of an identity crisis going on regarding the appropriate role of the authorizer (so much so, in fact, that the State Board of Education is considering rules that would require authorizers to competitively bid the “administrative services” that authorizers sell to the schools they monitor and oversee in an effort to avoid conflicts of interest).

The report provides good insight on how different types of authorizers operate, and what they deem important. Read it here.

Institute of Education Sciences
May 2010

Add this to the list of high-dollar federally-supported gold-plated randomized studies showing “no impact” of an education intervention. A second year follow-up evaluation, it investigates the effect of three supplemental reading curricula: Project CRISS, ReadAbout, and Read for Real. The original (first year) study examined use of the curricula in ten urban districts and its impact on the academic performance of over 6,000 fifth graders after one year (2006-07). Not surprisingly for an intervention with such a short time period, there was no effect. This new installment analyzes a second year of data for the original cohort, who did not use the programs in year two, to see if there were any longer-term effects from exposure to the curricula during year one. There weren’t. Analysts also added a new cohort of fifth-graders in year two (2007-08); these students used the curriculum the second year and tended to have teachers who had experience with the curriculum (having taught it to the previous cohort). Here, one of the curricula (ReadAbout) had a moderately positive impact on reading comprehension in social studies (but not on general reading comprehension or reading comprehension in science). There were no impacts elsewhere. If you’re not snoring yet, there is one interesting tidbit: None of these programs led to an increase in teachers’ use of “informational texts” (also known as content-based reading). Scholars such as E.D. Hirsch maintain that the teaching of reading comprehension and content go hand in hand—in other words, you can’t teach reading as an isolated skill—so the fact that these programs did not do this may have contributed to the nill results. You can find the 374-page (and the 24-page executive summary) here.

Madeleine Sackler, director
The Lottery, LLC
Spring 2010

Classroom educators may have Stand and Deliver, Freedom Writers and Lean on Me for inspiration, but thanks to a spurt of new documentaries, education reformers now have an excuse to pop some corn too. One of the best is The Lottery. Compellingly understated in its delivery, it tracks the springtime lottery at Harlem Success Academy, a high-achieving New York City charter school run by Eva Moskowitz. Each year, thousands of families apply for one of the few hundred seats available at the school. The movie follows four black Harlem families in the months leading up to the lottery, highlighting their aspirations and family situations and juxtaposing these against the political backlash and hostile community atmosphere in which Harlem Success Academy operates. Fusing all aspects of the education reform debate—from the struggles of the school choice movement to the political clout of the Goliath teachers’ unions—The Lottery reminds us that our outdated and outmoded system is seriously broken. Watch the trailer and get inspired here.