The Education Gadfly Weekly

A new Fordham Institute study, Charter School Boards in the Nation's Capital, asks a simple but largely uninvestigated question: Do the characteristics, views, and practices of charter boards have any bearing on charter school quality?

To answer this critical question, we enlisted two of Bellwether Education Partners’ savviest analysts, Juliet Squire and Allison Crean Davis.

The object of our analysis, Washington D.C., has both pros and cons. It’s a good place to analyze charter board governance because its scale (sixty-two boards overseeing 112 campuses) is sufficient for comparisons. And it operates under a single set of laws and regulations, a uniform set of school-quality metrics, and a single authorizer that values transparency.

Yet the sector is also atypical. It is relatively large—enrolling nearly half of the city’s public school students—and high performing. This differentiates it from many others across the country that are less established, more fragile, and include suburban and rural charter schools, so we cannot and do not claim that our findings are generalizable beyond the nation’s capital.

Nevertheless, they paint a detailed and revealing portrait of what is occurring in D.C.—and what may be, could be, or should be occurring elsewhere. Our survey response rate was strong (over 50 percent), and although this work is not causal, it reveals some tantalizing differences between board members of higher- and lower-performing schools, as well as a number of notable similarities—all of which raise questions and hypotheses worth exploring elsewhere.

Five observations are particular noteworthy.

1. D.C. charter board membership provides a route by which the “best and the brightest” of the community have an opportunity to serve. Board members are typically highly educated, affluent, civic-minded, and well informed about the characteristics of their schools. They also care enough about the education of children other than their own (62 percent don’t have school-aged children) to devote themselves to trying to make schools better. Ninety-six percent graduated from a four-year college or university, and a whopping 79 percent have advanced degrees. Fifty-one percent report household income greater than $200,000 per year, 37 percent report between $100,000 and $200,000, and just 2 percent report income below $50,000. (In D.C., the median household income in 2014 was $91,000.)  Less than a third are currently or was formerly employed in education.

Some might be tempted, in fact, to label them the oft-derided “Washington elite” that today’s populists claim have taken over our nation’s capital. The fine men and women who have volunteered to serve on the city’s charter boards don’t fit the stereotype. They are selfless, committed, and competent—and are likely one part, perhaps a vital part, of the reason why D.C.’s charter sector is so high-performing.

2. D.C. boards appear to benefit from training related to school governance. Despite the pitiful state of teacher professional development, we found a relationship between board training and school quality. Charter board members of higher-quality schools were more likely to participate in specific kinds of training. Unfortunately, we don’t know anything about the quality of that training—though we have an inkling of its content. We know, for instance, that charter boards in higher-quality schools tend to participate in training about developing and approving a school budget, as well as in how to comply with relevant legal and policy issues. Clearly we need to learn more about the quality, ideal amount, and substance of this training, given its association with school quality.

3. Charter board members in D.C. are diverse, balanced in age, and politically liberal. Members are 53 percent white, 33 percent black, and 5 percent Hispanic. Thirty percent are between the ages of thirty-one and forty, 33 percent between ages forty-one and fifty, and 35 percent over the age of fifty. Politically, 56 percent are liberal, 34 percent moderate, and just 7 percent conservative. (Of course, the District of Columbia is among the bluest political jurisdictions in the country.) Another big difference is that, unlike most board members in traditional school districts, charter board members do not have to run for election.

4. Not making people stand for election allows the charter sector to tap a deeper pool of talent for board membership. Regardless of how one might feel about elected school boards, elections might discourage otherwise willing and capable individuals from serving on a board. Campaigning in today’s fraught political environment is no picnic, especially when your plate is already brimming with a full-time job and family. Besides the cost in dollars and effort, “pro-reform” board candidates often get skewered by local unions. Therefore, an appointed board of a nonunion school might be more appealing and effective, free from the headaches of collective bargaining. There’s also a higher chance that principals and board members are likeminded and supportive of one another because, unlike superintendents and district school boards, their working relationship is not subject to the vagaries of the latest election returns.

5. One way to recruit and keep talented, busy professionals on charter school boards is to make the job doable. Part of the reason that D.C. charter boards can attract the best and brightest (other than the fact that there are lots of high-achieving professionals in D.C.) is that their workload on those boards is manageable. Many charter boards meet every six to eight weeks, and members spend an average of six hours per month on board service. External organizations—like Charter Board Partners, BoardSource, and BoardOnTrack—also equip boards to maximize efficiency by helping staff them with talented individuals and providing ongoing professional development. Charter supporters and reform leaders in other cities should take note.

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Furthermore, our research shows that board members of higher-performing D.C. charter schools, when compared to those at lower-performing ones, are more knowledgeable about their schools (particularly relative to its performance rating, demographics, and financial outlook), and more apt to evaluate their leaders using staff satisfaction as a factor in doing so.

One might take from these findings that good charter board members are the same as good board members in other organizations. They set the right priorities, do their homework, monitor performance, and evaluate the organization’s leadership.

But like the boards of nonprofit organizations—and unlike those of traditional school districts—charter boards have the potential to attract the best and brightest with little downside. You don’t have to run for election. You don’t have to bargain with an antagonistic union. You have much greater say about budgets and personnel. And you don’t spend endless hours every week on school business.

Therefore, education-minded civic leaders who want to engage directly with schools may find that joining a charter board is a terrific option. And charter schools stand to benefit from their service.

New York has become the latest Common Core state to issue rewritten learning guidelines aimed at mollifying critics of the standards. The state’s move seems to follow a familiar pattern: officials promise a “major departure” from the controversial standards while actually changing very little. Like marketers re-launching an unpopular laundry detergent with the words, “New and Improved!” the underlying standards remain largely intact, get rebranded with the state’s name (and without the words “common” or “core”), and voila!

At first glance, this would appear to be precisely the case with the “New York State P-12 English Language Arts and Mathematics Learning Standards,” which were unveiled for public comment last week. Many of the changes in the “new and improved” learning standards were “tweaks to language, or clarifying examples,” noted The New York Times, wise to the game. “But the broad concepts that students were expected to master in math and English from prekindergarten through the twelfth grade were left unchanged.”

But the devil is in the details. On closer examination, what New York has done is roughly akin to leaving a bathtub intact with all the water inside, but subtly dislodging the drain plug—a minor shift that eventually changes everything. What’s leaking out is the standards’ emphasis on “text complexity.”

One of Common Core’s original ten “anchor standards” called for students to “read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently.” This standard has disappeared from New York’s revised standards. In its place the new version says only, “Text complexity standard to be moved to supporting guidance.”

What that means is anybody’s guess, but it should alarm New York parents, who should fight tooth and nail any impulse to lower the bar on student reading. “Text complexity” is the keystone holding the entire set of standards in place.

Bear in mind that English Language Arts standards are notoriously fuzzy. Standards in math, science, and social studies are “content” standards. They describe what children should know in these subject areas: the skills of arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, the planets in the solar system, what happened in the Revolutionary War, etc.

But reading is not an academic subject with a body of knowledge to learn, practice, and master. Thus, ELA standards are “process” standards. They don’t tell what children should know, only what they should be able to do. Which novels, stories, poems, and works of non-fiction should teachers put in front of their students in order to help then read on grade level? The standards don’t say. For example, the revised standards say that sixth graders should be able to “draw on information from multiple print or digital sources, demonstrating the ability to locate an answer to a question quickly or to solve a problem efficiently.”

That may sound rigorous and sophisticated, but again, the devil is in the details. If New York’s new standards don’t explicitly specify challenging content, there’s no guarantee kids will be taught or tested with the kinds of challenging materials that put them on a path toward college.

Text complexity is, well, complicated. Broadly speaking, it refers certain physical features of a text, including vocabulary and sentence length; as well as subjective measures such as language usage, theme, meaning, and the knowledge demands a text places on the reader. (You are currently reading a reasonably complex text!)

Along with valorizing a rich, well-rounded curriculum, expecting students to grapple with complex text is—was—a centerpiece of Common Core.

This was a big shift from the standard classroom practice of “leveled” reading, which broadly speaking involves determining a child’s “just right” reading level, and asking students to read a lot at levels that are ever-so-slightly above it.

Going back nearly seventy years, there have been only about a half-dozen studies on the effectiveness of the leveled reading approach. Tim Shanahan of the University of Illinois at Chicago discovered those studies find that “student text match [leveled reading] makes no difference...or it holds kids back” and actually lowers their achievement.

By contrast, the evidence base for teaching with complex text above a student’s putative “reading level” is deep and persuasive: Common Core’s architects were particularly influenced by evidence from years of ACT college entrance exams.

When researchers divide test passages into “uncomplicated,” “more challenging,” or “complex,” a clear pattern emerges. “Performance on complex texts is the clearest differentiator in reading between students who are likely to be ready for college and those who are not,” noted a 2006 ACT study. “And this is true for both genders, all racial/ethnic groups, and all family income levels.”

In plain English, students who learn to work with complex texts during their K–12 years can handle the demands of college reading. Those who haven’t cannot.

New York’s new draft standards are now open to public comment through November 4. Parents who want their children not only to get into college but to be successful there should demand the state reverse course and restore to the standards clear and explicit language favoring teaching with complex texts.

Editor’s note: A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the New York Daily News.

On this week’s podcast, Robert Pondiscio and Checker Finn discuss James S. Coleman’s legacy, fifty years after the release of his seminal, groundbreaking report. During the research minute, David Griffith examines whether preschool programs improve attendees’ long-term academic, economic, and health outcomes.

Amber's Research Minute

Maya Rossin-Slater and Miriam Wüst, "What is the Added Value of Preschool? Long-term Impacts and Interactions with a Health Intervention," NBER (September 2016).

A new study tests the theory that pupils in a school’s oldest grade have better experiences—less bullying, heightened feelings of safety, and better academic outcomes—than those in younger grades.

Analysts examined two cohorts of New York City middle school students (sixth- through eighth-graders) totaling about 90,000 students and 500 schools between 2008 and 2011. They utilized various student-level demographic data, as well as student self-reported data on the NYC School Survey, which includes questions about school environment and other non-academic information.

Through causal analysis, the study finds that students who are in the top of the grade span in a school (most of whom are also the oldest) are indeed less likely to report bullying, fights, and gang activity and more likely to report feeling safe and welcome than those in the bottom of the grade span (who are usually a school’s youngest). The latter report the opposite on all of those measures, while, fittingly, those in the middle of a school’s grade span report experiences that fall between those of buildings’ top- and bottom-grade tiers.

Interestingly, being in a school’s senior-most grade had a greater positive effect on sixth-graders than it did on eighth-graders. Analysts found that the larger a school’s grade span, the greater the benefit to its most senior students. So sixth-graders in a building that serves grades K–6 (a seven-year span) enjoy a bigger boost than eighth-graders in 6–8 middle schools (with their three-year spans).

Data also show that being in a school’s top grade span also led to better academic achievement, but this was a secondary focus of the paper and not given much discussion.

The bottom line, according to the analysts, is that “longer grade spans that enable middle grade students to serve as relative top dogs would improve student experiences in school and academic achievement.” Less clear is how much of the effect is due to a child’s age and maturity level, not the upper grade level.

All of this raises the possibility that the 1990s-era push to create middle schools serving grades 6–8 (vs. K–8 elementary schools or 7-8 junior high schools) was a mistake. We initially carved out such middle schools because those years are difficult for young people and, the thinking went, this would ease the hard transition to high school. (We also didn’t want to mix little kids with teenagers.) This research calls that thinking into question. Now what?

SOURCE: Amy Ellen Schwartz, Leanna Stiefel, and Michah W. Rothbart, "Do Top Dogs Rule in Middle School? Evidence on Bullying, Safety, and Belonging," AERA (September 2016).

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a new report that examines private school choice programs—specifically, vouchers and educational savings accounts (ESAs)—and how they interact with U.S. Department of Education (DOE) grants. The report shows that state and district leaders are confused about how the programs affect one another, and that the DOE has failed to provide specific guidance.

Voucher programs and ESAs provide eligible students with funds towards private schooling: vouchers cover tuition expenses, and ESAs typically provide funding for a broader set of educational expenses. Many of the same students who participate in private school choice programs also benefit from two federal grant programs: one for students from disadvantaged areas (Title I, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act) and another for students with disabilities (Title I, Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act).

There were twenty voucher and two ESA programs operating in the United States as of fall 2015. Between June 2015 and August 2016, the authors studied web-based surveys of all of them, as well as relevant federal laws, regulations, and guidance. In addition, they conducted interviews with DOE, state, public, and private school officials, as well as other stakeholders. Site visits took place for ten private school choice programs in four states: Arizona, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin—comprising half of all such U.S. programs and around two thirds of participating students.

GAO found that between 2010 and 2015, student participation in private school choice programs nationwide expanded from 70,000 to 147,000. Yet this growth did not coincide with stronger guidance from the DOE about how federal grant programs were supposed to work in the context of private school choice, confusing state and district leaders and complicating the provision of much needed services for students.

State and public school officials did not, for example, know whether federal grant guidelines applied to participants in private school choice, or whether the role and responsibility of public school districts to provide these services had changed. District officials were unsure if students’ placement in private school choice programs disqualified them from federal funding (in the case of IDEA) or services (under ESEA). Such concerns were widespread on district and state levels.

Another issue was that resources for private schools were stretched quite thin. Because most voucher programs and ESAs cater to students with disabilities or who are disadvantaged, a rise in student participation in these programs led to a larger amount of private school students being eligible for federal funds. This increased the time and financial burden on districts that are required by federal regulations to provide certain “equitable services”—like reading tutors or speech therapists—to both public and private school students.

Despite all this, the DOE claims that it has been quite clear that eligible participants in private school choice programs could still draw from certain federal grant programs. Still, it promised to provide more guidance soon.

GAO’s report suggests that all levels of government could do a better job of facilitating private school choice programs in the context of state and federal legislation. As the DOE grapples with transition to the Every Student Succeeds Act, this is all the more pertinent if we are to sufficiently serve students—particularly disadvantaged ones.

SOURCE: United States Government Accountability Office, “School Choice: Private School Choice Programs Are Growing and Can Complicate Providing Certain Federally Funded Services to Eligible Students,” United States Government Accountability Office (August 2016).