The Education Gadfly Weekly

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Last Friday, in a 6-3 decision, the Washington State Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the state’s voter-approved charter school law, threatening the future of nine new schools with more than 1,200 students.

The ruling was not based on the merits of the law (one of the strongest in the country on accountability). Nor was it based on the words of the state constitution. Instead, the majority cut off all funding from charter schools (the specifics on when and how to be determined by a lower court) by relying on an obscure 1909 judicial interpretation of the words “common schools.” These words are found in the state constitution, but aren’t defined. The majority held that under this century-old definition, the charter school law did not subject those schools to enough “local control,” and therefore is unconstitutional.

The holding hinged on this idea of control—despite the fact that these charters are subject to more accountability than the state’s traditional public schools. Parents choose whether their children will attend. Charters performing in the bottom quartile of all public schools must be closed if they continue to fail. And local school boards are free to sponsor charters. (In fact, Spokane Public Schools has sponsored two already.)

The decision holds legal implications that likely go beyond charter schools. As the dissenting opinion pointed out, this ruling likely also applies to state-run programs like tribal schools and Running Start, a popular program that allows high school students to take community college courses. The court also sent a strong message of deference to district decision making, despite the movement to push responsibility for school accountability to states.

To charter advocates, this all appeared to be politically motived. The announcement was handed down on the Friday afternoon before Labor Day, a week after most of the schools had started. The court declined to suggest remedies that would satisfy voter intent, even though the dissenting judges thought there were viable ones. And most of the judges accepted campaign contributions from the Washington Education Association, the state’s biggest teachers’ union—and also the plaintiff.

A more generous interpretation of this ruling is that the court was simply constrained by an antiquated notion of fairness that was defined more than a century ago. In 1909 Washington State, fairness was synonymous with sameness (thus “common schools”). And this was defined by local elections (thus “local control”).

These dearly held ideals aren’t working today, especially for our most vulnerable kids. School board elections, like all elections, favor the politically powerful and well-funded. Iron-clad seniority and tenure rights codified in state laws and collective bargaining agreements make it nearly impossible for boards to remove ineffective teachers. High-quality educators migrate to more advantaged schools, which come equipped with parent support and strong leadership; meanwhile, low-income kids are stuck with “displaced” teachers that no other school wants. Combined with the challenges of high-poverty, these dynamics create schools with toxic cultures and ever-descending outcomes for students.

My own kids attended a school like this in South Seattle. There were some great teachers, but many more mediocre ones. One of my son’s teachers struggled to do simple subtraction. Kindergarten and first-grade teachers regularly yelled at their students. We finally moved to ensure that our kids would be academically challenged and in a positive school environment. The great teachers we knew at that South Seattle school have since moved elsewhere, as have nearly all of the families that could afford to change neighborhoods or pay for private schools. It’s sad. The remaining students have simply been left behind.

Of course, one of the great ironies in Friday’s ruling is that charter schools were created in large part to address these very injustices. By giving these schools true control over their programs, staff, and curricula, and by opening them to all families, authors of the charter school law resurrected the true American vision of public schooling: equal access to great instruction and accountability for results.

With its ruling, the court has locked Washington State into a defunct, hundred-year-old notion of public schooling that makes it impossible for the citizens or the legislature to experiment with more flexible and effective ways of educating the state’s children. Equal treatment without choices and without true accountability may have made sense in Soviet Russia, but it doesn’t hold water in America.

Ultimately, the court has prioritized institutional control over outcomes. It’s a decision that flies in the face of voter intent and is out of step with the rest of country, where courts have consistently upheld charter schools as a normal part of the fabric of public schooling.

We need to stop romanticizing an obsolete version of “local control.” Community members ought to have input in area schools and hold them accountable. But checks are also needed to protect poor and minority students from the neglect of the powerful. These families need better options—which are what these charter schools provided. If we insist on clinging to these arcane, injudicious definitions, kids will pay the price who can least afford it.

As many have forcefully opined, this decision should be reconsidered by the court (a motion to reconsider is likely). Barring that, the legislature could pass a new charter that doesn’t use the term “common schools,” or pass a constitutional amendment. If lawmakers have any decency, this will happen quickly. That’s the only way to make sure that students and their families don’t have to endure any more needless chaos.

Robin J. Lake has studied public charter schools and urban school system reforms since 1993. She is the director the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education and an affiliate faculty member at UW Bothell’s College of Arts and Sciences. She is also a Seattle Public Schools parent.

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Between 2010 and 2012, more than forty states adopted the Common Core standards in reading and math, setting dramatically higher expectations for students in our elementary and secondary schools. Now comes a critical milestone in this effort. In the coming weeks, parents in most states will receive for the first time their children’s scores on new tests aligned to the standards. The news is expected to be sobering, and it may come as a shock for many. Parents shouldn’t shoot the messenger.

It is important to remember why so many states started down this path in the first place. Under federal law, every state must test children each year in grades 3–8 to ensure they are making progress. That’s a good idea. Parents deserve to know if their kids are learning, and taxpayers are entitled to know if the money we spend on schools is being used wisely.

But it is left to states to define what it means to be “proficient” in math and reading. Unfortunately, most states have historically set a very low bar (often called “juking the stats”). The result was a comforting illusion that most of our children were on track to succeed in college, carve out satisfying careers, and stand on their own two feet.

To put it plainly, it was a lie. Most states set absurdly low academic standards before the Common Core, and their tests were even worse. In some cases, children could even randomly guess the answers and be all but guaranteed to pass. Imagine being told year after year that you’re doing just fine—only to find out, when you apply for college or a job, that you’re simply not as prepared as you need to be.

Such experiences were not isolated cases. Every year, about 20 percent of incoming students at four-year colleges and half of those at community colleges must take “remedial” courses when they arrive on campus. The vast majority of those students will leave without a degree, or any other kind of credential. That’s a lousy way to start life.

The most important step to fixing this problem is to stop lying to ourselves and ensure that our children are ready for the next grade (and, when they turn eighteen, for college or work). Several national studies, including analyses of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), show that just 38–40 percent of high school graduates leave our education system at the “college-prepared” level in reading and math. Considering that almost 20 percent of our children don’t even make it to graduation day, this means that maybe one-third of our kids nationally are getting to that college-ready mark. (Not coincidentally, about a third of young people today complete a four-year college degree.)

The Common Core should help to boost college readiness and completion by significantly raising expectations, starting in kindergarten. But we shouldn’t be surprised if, in the early goings, we find that just a third of elementary or middle school students are on track for college. In fact, that’s what we should expect.

This is a painful shift from the Lake Wobegon days, when all children were above average. States that used to claim that 80 or 90 percent of their students were “proficient” will now start to admit that one-third or less are on track for college and career. No doubt, the truth will hurt.

So what does this mean for parents, especially those that learn that their kids aren’t currently headed for success (and even though their kids have been getting good grades and glowing reports from their teachers)?

Let’s be honest: For the parents of older students especially, this will be tough medicine to take. No one likes to hear bad news, but without an accurate diagnosis, you can’t get well. Talk to your children’s teachers as soon as possible and make a game plan for getting them extra help at home and at school.

Some tough questions might also be in order for your schools or school boards: Are their standards for grading too easy? What are they doing to help teachers understand and implement the new standards? Are they up to the task of getting your kids—and your neighbors’ kids—up to the new, higher expectations? Local communities are still in charge of setting curricula, designing teacher training, and pulling all of the other levers that might help them lift kids to these higher expectations. Standards provide sunshine, nothing more. We must demand local action to set things right.

Finally, parents should resist the siren song of those who want to use this moment of truth to attack the Common Core or associated tests. They may not be perfect, but these tools are finally giving parents, educators, and taxpayers an honest assessment of how our students are doing—a standard that promises to end the lies and statistical games. Virtually all kids aspire to go to college and prepare for a satisfying career. Now, at last, we’ll know if they’re on track to do so.

This column first appeared in USA Today.

comzeal/iStock/Thinkstock

• With the Washington State Supreme Court’s ruling against the constitutionality of charter schools and a sudden teachers’ strike breaking out in Seattle, education observers across the country would be justified in wondering whether anyone will actually be starting school this month in the Evergreen State. The court’s decision, which hurls the future of nine freshly opened schools into immediate uncertainty, has been greeted with more drama thus far (no surprise, since its legal rationale has been deemed quixotic, and its consequences will certainly be disruptive to the 1,200 students who may now have to seek schooling elsewhere). But dumping labor unrest atop this catastrophe will make matters inconceivably worse. Leaders in all three branches of the state’s government simply must come together to resolve this double crisis.
• We’ve all got portmanteaus that we despise. For the Gadfly’s money, “telephone” worked perfectly well without being combined with “marketing.” But the New York Times has introduced a new mashup that may be as promising to students as it is painful to the ear: “teacherpreneur.” Using online tools like Youtube and TeachersPayTeachers.com, skilled instructors have been able to develop markets for their unique lesson plans and materials—and make pots of well-deserved income in the process. According to representatives from the company that runs TeachersPayTeachers, roughly three hundred teachers have made over $100,000 by providing high-quality materials to fellow educators across the country. As the demand for excellent, Common Core-aligned curricula grows, so will the number of (ugh) teacherpreneurs looking to upend the top-down market run by textbook companies. Kids get better lessons, teachers get rich—not such a bad outcome.
• Teacher quality is a sine qua non of reform success: We can extend more choice to students and families, set higher standards across the board, and work to get minority and low-income kids ready for kindergarten; but if they’re not being taught by capable, confident professionals, classroom work is always going to lag. The indispensable Dan Willingham has some great suggestions this week for how to boost the preparedness of the eager graduates about to enter the classroom. First, we need to test teacher candidates more rigorously before they receive certification—and this testing should focus on core subject matter like math and English, not airy child development theory. Second, we need to better classify the stuff that instructors absolutely need to know to do their jobs better. “A list like this could be used as the guiding framework not only to evaluate whether a teacher is well trained,” he explains, “but also whether he or she should be certified to teach and whether a training program should be accredited.”
• What do you call a recently released convict with three job offers—including one with a starting salary of $50,000? A miracle, sure. But more specifically, he’s a beneficiary of career and technical education. NPR has a brief, startling look at a program to teach critical and sought-after skills like welding in the Georgia prison system. Graduates, including men whose criminal histories would normally lock them out of the job market, are being welcomed with open arms by manufacturers who can’t find candidates with similar skills elsewhere. As one source from the Washington, D.C.-based Manufacturing Institute lamented, “We made the decision that all kids should go to college and as a result you saw the elimination of a lot of the technical programs at the high school level." It’s great that businesses are filling jobs and men on the margins of society are getting a second chance. But if we made this kind of pathway available to low-income students earlier, maybe they wouldn’t end up accessing it from jail cells.

The Washington State Supreme Court's attack on charters, New York State’s Common Core review, mindfulness in education, and charter schools' impact on Georgia property values.

Amber's Research Minute

SOURCE: Carlianne Patrick, "Willing to Pay: Charter Schools’ Impact on Georgia Property Values," Fiscal Research Center, Georgia State University (August 2015).

Transcript

Mike:                       Hello, this is your host, Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, here at the Education Gadfly show, and online at edexcellence.net. Now, please join me in welcoming my co-host, the Tom Brady of education reform, Robert Pondiscio.

Robert:                   The rejoinder that I could ... Are we a family podcast?

Mike:                       Look, you have been vindicated, is what I mean. You know? You're the golden boy.

Robert:                   Okay.

Mike:                       Only you can bring down the establishment. That's what I mean, Robert. You, for example, have been saying for years all this mumbo jumbo about core knowledge and content and literacy. Look how you're vindicated. SAT scores plummet.

Robert:                   Oh, there you go.

Mike:                       See? Vindicated? That's what I mean. I'm not calling you a cheater like Tom Brady, or an accused cheater. I'm saying you've been vindicated, that's all.

Robert:                   And Giselle is not waiting for me at the end of the podcast either, is she?

Mike:                       I don't think that she is. The thing I love about the Tom Brady thing is it gave Rick, our good friend Rick Hess, an excuse to write a blog post about deflate gate over the weekend, because he is, of course, a huge Patriots fan. I found the rest of his blog to be a little bit of a stretch, but at least we got to hear him spout off on the NFL and it's unfair treatment towards the hero Tom Brady.

Robert:                   I'm looking forward to football season, as a Bills fan, and I can almost admit that now. They're achieving respectability. We hate the Patriots. Just because they've had their wicked way with us for many a year now, but this year is going to be different.

Mike:                       No pun intended. Wicked, because they're wicked good up there in New England. Okay, enough of the sports talk. We're here to talk education reform, so let's get started. Kate, let's play Pardon the Gadfly.

Katie:                      The Washington State Supreme Court ruled on Friday that charter schools are unconstitutional in the state. Is there something about Washington's constitution that makes this decision inevitable?

Mike:                       Oh, Robert, let us count the ways. This was a very creative decision from the Washington Supreme Court. Shall I mention this court is an elected court? Shall I mention that one of the largest campaign contributors to the folks who voted in this way was the Washington Education Association?

Robert:                   Shocking, right?

Mike:                       Shocking.

Robert:                   It came out of nowhere.

Mike:                       Follow whose money.

Robert:                   Friday afternoon, who was expecting it, and then boom.

Mike:                       Oh yeah. Friday afternoon before Labor Day, good way to try to bury the news.

Robert:                   Labor Day, of course!

Mike:                       But, hey guys, it's going to be news because there's 2,000 kids in charter schools, including some that just opened days ago, who are now thrown into total chaos. Here's why they found it unconstitutional, because there's some phrase in the constitution that the state is supposed to provide for "common schools." There are similar phrases in state constitutions across the country. Sometimes they talk about a uniform system of public education, so on and so forth. No other state's supreme court has found that language to bar the state from creating charter schools, but going back to a 1909 decision in Washington State this court did so. They said that these common schools have to be under direct control of locally elected school boards, and because charter schools are not, they cannot be common schools and therefore they cannot be funded by the state.

Robert:                   Here, there's some wonderful language if you go back to that 1909 decision. I've got it in front of me. I'll read it to you. The reason that local control of common schools was so important back in 1909 is because "it protected the right of the voters, through their chosen agents, to select qualified teachers with" - this is the important part, ready - "with powers to discharge them if they are incompetent."

Mike:                       Yeah.

Robert:                   Yeah that happens a lot.

Mike:                       How does that work right now in Washington state?

Robert:                   Come on.

Mike:                       By the way, did we mention that there's a teacher's strike coming in Seattle?

Robert:                   Gee, you don't say.

Mike:                       Boy, it all comes together. Look, this is obviously terrible news for the children of Washington and difficult. The legal bit, look it's the state supreme court. It's a state constitutional issue. This is pretty much the end of the road. There's no appeal process per se. Now what you can try to do is have the legislature work towards a constitutional amendment, but that's a tough lift. This was, of course, one of the last states to adopt a charter school law. In the end, it was by voter referendum and not clear where this goes from here. A lot of effort on behalf of charter school supporters out there and nationally to keep these schools open, but more than anything else, let's call it what it is: rank hypocrisy when the unions still try to say, "Hey, we support charter schools."

Robert:                   With our campaign donations to the judges and the supreme court.

Mike:                       Tell that to these 2,000 kids.

Robert:                   Yeah. It's a shame.

Mike:                       Topic number 2, Kate.

Katie:                      New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced last week that he would be launching a review of the common core standards and related tests and curriculum. Is this an appropriate response to the state wide opt out?

Mike:                       Here's Cuomo, riding the populist wave.

Robert:                   Come on.

Mike:                       We're seeing this right now.

Robert:                   I'm embarrassed to be a New Yorker.

Mike:                       We've got Donald Trump. You've got Ben Carson out there. You've got Bernie Sanders. We are at populist moment right now, and Andrew Cuomo, he is trying to be with the people. You've got all these parents out there angry. They're opting their kids out. They're saying, "Something's not working." He puts his finger in the wind and says, "I agree with you," but is what's happening in New York, and let's face it there is something big happening in New York-

Robert:                   Sure.

Mike:                       Is it about common core?

Robert:                   Great question. Let's unwind this a little bit. What infuriates me, frankly, about my governor because I live in New York, his pronouncement that he's reviewing common core. We were talking football before, so this is like watching one series of downs in the second quarter and deciding which team is good or not, which is insane.

Mike:                       You're saying it's early in the game?

Robert:                   Not just early in the game. It's a small sample size. Where did he get the idea that common core was going to change everything over night?

Mike:                       Right.

Robert:                   I just think that's disingenuous. He knows better than that. To your point, I think he's just got his finger to the wind and he's checking which way the wind blows and he can do this to mollify angry parents and teachers. The thing that infuriates me about this even more is if he wants to review something, it's not common core, it's not the assessments that need to be reviewed, it's his own teacher evaluation program because he's trying to have it both ways. He's trying to say, "Well let's review the standards, but I'm going to keep this incredibly aggressive teacher evaluation system." That's what's driving, I believe, the discontent. Teachers are upset. The common cores become the receptacle for this, but what they're really - and I think what parents are upset about - is their kids schooling becoming test driven? That's not common core; that's Cuomo's evaluation plan.

Mike:                       He is one of the only governors in the country who has moved ahead with these test based teacher evaluations at the time that we're moving to higher standards and more difficult tests. These teachers understandably, I think, feel like hey, they've got the Sword of Damocles over their head and it is hard to make the instructional shifts and try new things and work collaboratively on these new standards when you feel threatened.

Robert:                   It's not hard - it's impossible.

Mike:                       All right, so is this asking too much? Cuomo, because he's really dug in before on the teacher evaluation thing. Frankly, part of the reason is, he hates the teachers unions which is interesting. He's a democrat but he's been at war with the teacher unions and so rather than do something where he could side with the teachers and the parents and figure out some other approach than teacher evaluation, he's trying to figure out some way to be with the parents, against the unions, a little too cute by half.

Robert:                   You can never know.

Mike:                       Governor Cuomo, here's the deal - ditch the teacher evaluations, stick with the common core.

Robert:                   What you said. It just feels very, very cynical.

Mike:                       Robert, I think you and I are kind of in a bad mood today.

Robert:                   Are we? I'm not cranky.

Mike:                       We just seem cranky. It's hard, you know. It's after Labor Day weekend, we're tired, I don't know. The summer's over. Is that what this is about?

Robert:                   No. Well, I know what you're cranky about is the Nationals are not going to make the post season.

Mike:                       Oo! It's actually more that my sons have lice, but that's a whole other story. Topic number 3.

Katie:                      A recent article in the Atlantic reports that the mindfulness and education movement is gaining traction in California, New York and Washington DC. Is this a hoax or could an ancient Buddhist tradition actually have lasting positive effects for students?

Mike:                       This is what we need, Robert. If we would only meditate more I think we'd both feel a lot better.

Robert:                   Om.

Mike:                       Thank you. You're good at that. I actually now feel better after hearing you say that.

Robert:                   Yeah. Chilling.

Mike:                       This, I feel like we see these articles every couple of years. There's a new one in the Atlantic and it basically says that some schools are experimenting with teaching kids mindfulness, or teaching kids meditation basically. This is part of the movement towards building non-cognitive skills. The idea here-

Robert:                   Social emotional learning.

Mike:                       Social emotional learning, to try to help kids if they're feeling anxious, if they're feeling stressed, to help them calm down, but also help them make good decisions by noticing what they're feeling and before they act on these feelings is to be able to take a pause. All of us could benefit from this, right?

Robert:                   Sure. Let me not dump on it too much. I'm enough of a traditionalist, as you know, to look at something like this and my knee-jerk response would be, "You've got to be kidding me." But, look, there is some tantalizing evidence out there that this could be significant. This could be a real thing. Now, we've both been around long enough to know this is how fads start, right? You get one little bit of evidence that says, "Hey maybe this is promising. Let's looking into this," and suddenly this is the thing to do. Let's examine that evidence. Is it small scale evidence or is it A-B longitudinal studies? It's a lot more the former. I don't think there's anything-

Mike:                       Let me ask you this. Does this violate the separation of church and state? Is this religious practice when you have a bunch of kids cross their legs and put their hands palm up on their knees and say, "Om"?

Robert:                   Maybe, but wasn't this challenged by at least one parent group in a school district saying it was religious based?

Mike:                       Well, that's what some people thing.

Robert:                   Maybe so. To be serious about this for a second, promising research, follow it up, but let's not follow this potentially good idea off the end of a cliff like we do with so many other potentially good ideas.

Mike:                       Okay, there you have it. Come on, Robert, that was supposed to be a real debate. I thought you were going to take the hook on that one. I'm a little disappointed. After all that "om-ing" you were so calm, I took the fight out of you.

Robert:                   Exactly. You did. It's mindfulness.

Mike:                       Man, I should have done that in the beginning. All right. That's all the time we've got for Pardon the Gadfly. Now it is time for everybody's favorite, Amber's Research Minute. Amber, welcome back to the show.

Amber:                   Thank you, Mike.

Mike:                       Are you as deflated by deflate gate as Robert and I are?

Amber:                   I am so over it.

Mike:                       You're over?

Amber:                   I'm over it, like let's move on.

Mike:                       Do you believe that Tom Brady got-

Amber:                   I think he probably knew because he's been around a long time and he probably knows what an inflated and deflated football feels like I think, but I guess I just don't care that much anymore. Sorry should I care more? Do you care?

Mike:                       I don't know. Rick wrote this whole blog post about this, about how this demonstrates why we need unions is because managers are capricious.

Amber:                   Right. I forgot about that particular link. You know Rick. He can just kind of make it relevant.

Mike:                       Well, he clearly wrote that blog post while he was watching a pre-season Pats game.

Amber:                   Had a few drinks.

Mike:                       All right, what have you got?

Amber:                   We've got a new report out by the Fiscal Research Center at Georgia State University called "Willing to Pay - Charter Schools Impact on Georgia Property Values." It seeks to quantify how much families are willing to pay for a higher likelihood of access to a charter school between the years of 2004 and 2013 was the analysis. The analysis, however, has a few flaws. We'll go through those first. First, we aren't looking at all of Georgia as the title would suggest, but we're looking at 13 metro Atlanta charter schools. Kind of a big title for a very small study. They're looking at startups and conversions only that have priority admission zones within their designated attendance zones. The rules for where the priority - there's like three pages talking about when the priority zone comes into play and how it interacts with the lottery. Very complex, it differs for each of the different types of charter schools. The idea is that you get a higher chance of getting into a particular charter school if you reside in the priority zone.

                                    Analysts limit the analysis to sales within close proximity to the border between priority one and two attendance zones since they presumably represent a change in admission probability. They claim that residents as close the border, less than a half a mile, should be similar and observable and un-observable ways, including access to jobs, amenities, the style of house, the foreclosures, et cetera. The outcome measure, because it gets a little tricky, is the effect of being on the priority one side of the border which is situated between zones one and two. They control for transaction date which helps with the housing fluctuations over time, and they limit the sample to arms-length. Do you know what that means? My husband's in the real estate business.

Mike:                       No.

Amber:                   Arms length means you didn't sell it to your cousin Louise or whatever. You don't know these people. Single family residential transactions. Their key finding is that households are willing to pay a premium to live in zone one - 7 to 13% more for homes there than in zone two. Yet again, the sample is small and then I started just kind of thinking what else would I want to know to believe this finding? We're told nothing about the quality of the schools. We're not told how long they've operated, how often and which schools have had to make use of the zone preference, nor do we know how familiar parents are with the rules surrounding the zones at all, nor do we know about the relative difference in probability between zones one and two, so how sharp is that probability difference. There's no methods appendix. That's the first place, I'm like, all right I'm a little wonky, let me dig through page 28 on the methods appendix. It's not there.

                                    I don't think we know whether these differences are random or not, and I'm not convinced that the zone comparison they've come up with actually takes care of all the un-observables that might be occurring. Then you've got to think, okay, so let's say it's true that households do indeed sort along this priority zone boundary and then we'd have to think, okay, well then that's an un-observable right there. What's making them, what is it about them that's causing them to sort of do this sorting on this boundary? Anyway, I think on the outside I thought this is a pretty cool way to think about how the public values charters, but I just don't think - at least for me - there wasn't enough care taken in the analysis for me to really buy into it.

Mike:                       Let me understand. Then it must be the case that these 13 charter schools are serving at least middle class families if not affluent families, families that are wealthy enough to be buying homes, right? I assume that much of the population of charter school kids out there that are lower income are probably not in homes where they're buying their homes. They're probably renting instead to begin with.

Amber:                   Yep.

Mike:                       Which is fine. Certainly, I believe there's a place in the charter movement for middle class type schools as well, but that's interesting. Also, it's a little strange. I know the folks in Georgia were excited about this charter folks, but one of the arguments for charter schools forever has been that we want to actually sever the link between real estate and quality and access, right?

Amber:                   Yeah, there's an irony there, isn't it?

Mike:                       Right. I guess they probably, these kinds of studies have been done before for traditional public schools, and you certainly do find that there is a premium for quality schools measured by test scores, although I think there has been some question. I feel like somebody, was it Marty West or somebody else, that looked at whether that held if you looked at growth scores or if it was just things like proficiency rates, which of course are much more related to demographics and it may be that the people are basically paying more to be able to send their kids to schools that have very few poor kids.

Amber:                   Could be.

Mike:                       Could be, and maybe that's an issue here as well. Bottom line, what, Amber? You're not convinced?

Amber:                   I'm not convinced, but I thought it was creative. I really like creative studies, and I think this was creative but just give me more info about those methods. I just want to-

Mike:                       I love it and you know what, it is creative and it's maps. We love maps. There's now this new tool out where you can map school attendance boundaries all over the place and you can measure all kinds of cool things we can do. We've been brainstorming here.

Amber:                   We've been brainstorming so if our listeners know of any cool, nifty map ideas what's our educationgadfly.com email? Something like that?

Mike:                       Sure, or they could just email us, Amber.

Amber:                   Oh, yeah yeah.

Mike:                       What are suddenly celebrity now that you can't even, I know you're not on Twitter but people can Tweet me.

Amber:                   I'm not on Twitter. [email protected].

Mike:                       Thank you. That is all the time we've got for this week. Until next week.

Robert:                   Om. I'm Robert Pondiscio.

Mike:                       I'm Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, signing off.

A new study in the Journal of School Choice explores whether charter schools open in “high-demand” areas of New York City. In particular, the authors ask whether they situate themselves in high-density areas with lots of children, near schools with low academic performance, or in neighborhoods where parental satisfaction is low.

The study examines fifty-six new elementary charter schools that opened between 2009 and 2013, along with 571 traditional elementary schools. Data sources include parental satisfaction survey data from the New York City Department of Education (with 2008 as the base year for the traditional public schools), school proficiency rates on math (because math scores are more school-dependent than reading scores), and Census data on poverty and population.

The analysts compare parents’ dissatisfaction with their children’s current schools (relative to the number of charter openings in the area) and that area’s poverty rate. They find pockets of parental dissatisfaction scattered throughout southwest Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens. Yet charter schools didn’t open in these areas. They tended to locate instead in clusters around central Brooklyn and along a stretch in western Manhattan, where parent satisfaction varied but was generally moderate or high.

Next, they detect a modest but imperfect relationship between community poverty and charter locations. A majority of new charters opened in communities with at least 20 percent of residents living in poverty. Yet twenty-one of the fifty-six new charters located in areas with less than 20 percent poverty, and other really poor areas have no charters at all.

The strongest correlation observed by the authors was between weak math proficiency rates and charter openings. Forty-nine of the new charters opened in locations close to low-performing traditional schools.

Finally, it was found that many charters sprouted up in comparatively sparsely populated areas. Conversely, there were no charters at all in many dense areas.

Of course, charter school locations can also be influenced by many factors that the analysts don’t examine, such as the cost and availability of real estate in a city, the politics of school authorization, the influence of a city’s charter school cap, and the overall quality of a given charter. Nevertheless, the fact that low parental satisfaction with neighborhood schools appears not to inform charter school location is good to know. The more charter advocates know, the better.

SOURCE: Andrew Saultz, Dan Fitzpatrick, and Rebecca Jacobsen, "Exploring the Supply Side: Factors Related to Charter School Openings in NYC," Journal of School Choice: International Research and Reform, vol. 9 no. 3 (August 2015).

“Programmatic series of studies”—that’s how one of my psychology professors described research on learning and memory around twenty years ago. Do a study, tweak it, try again. Persist.

I was reminded of that while reading this new volume by Tony Bryk and colleagues. After thirty years of constant reform and little improvement, it’s clear that there’s a fundamental flaw in how the education field goes about effecting change. Quick fixes, sweeping transformations, and mandates aren’t working. Ongoing professional development isn’t working either.

What might work much better is a sustained, systemic commitment to improvement—and a willingness to start with a series of small pilots instead of leaping into large-scale implementation. Guided by “improvement science” pioneered in the medical field, Learning to Improve shows how education could finally stop its reform churn. As Bryk et al. write:

All activity in improvement science is disciplined by three deceptively simple questions:

  1. What specifically are we trying to accomplish?

  2. What change might we introduce and why?

  3. How will we know that a change is actually an improvement?...

A set of general principles guides the approach: (1) wherever possible, learn quickly and cheaply; (2) be minimally intrusive—some changes will fail, and we want to limit negative consequences on individuals’ time and personal lives; and (3) develop empirical evidence at every step to guide subsequent improvement cycles.

That sounds an awful lot like schools across the country engaging in a programmatic series of studies—a change that likely would result in huge improvements. Even better, the book explains how educators can form networks to grow together. Progress is much faster with pilots in multiple locations, as adaptations for each context generate ideas for further tests.

This application of improvement science seems to be the best possible path forward. But it still suffers from a (perhaps inevitable) problem—you don’t know what you don’t know. An example of this problem is sprinkled throughout the book: The Literacy Collaborative is profiled as a network of educators improving their reading instruction. I don’t doubt that their instruction is improving and student achievement is increasing. I also don’t doubt that even better results could be attained with an entirely different approach.

The Literacy Collaborative is dedicated to guided reading, which begins with the teacher selecting a leveled text. As Tim Shanahan has explained, there’s no real research base for leveled readers. The whole notion of assessing a child’s reading level and then selecting (or letting the child select) a text at that level is essentially a farce. Once children are fluent in sounding out words, their reading level primarily depends on their knowledge level, which means it varies by topic. 

Neither today nor in the future called for by Learning to Improve is there a way to guarantee that the improvement process begins with the best possible ideas. But improvement science may still be our last, best hope. The type of slow, steady progress that would result from widespread application seems to characterize the few examples we have of dramatic—and sustained—improvement, such as in Massachusetts, Finland, and Singapore:

Think of a future in which practical knowledge is growing in a disciplined fashion every day, in thousands of settings, as hundreds of thousands of educators and educational leaders continuously learn to improve. Rather than a small collection of disconnected research centers, we could have an immense networked learning community.

The book’s vision is ambitious—and far more likely to succeed than the reform churn we’ve tolerated for decades.

Lisa Hansel is the communications director for the Core Knowledge Foundation.

SOURCE: Anthony S. Bryk, Louis M. Gomez, Alicia Grunow, and Paul G. LeMahie, Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2015).

In a few months, education reformers will begin celebrating the twenty-fifth birthday of Minnesota’s groundbreaking charter school legislation, which passed in 1991 and inspired a wave of similar laws across the country. The charter movement can now vote, drink, and carry a concealed weapon. (But hey, maybe not all at once.)

The millennial era has been a time of rapid growth in the sector: Over six thousand charter schools now serve almost three million kids across the country. And all those ribbon-cutting ceremonies have given rise to a simultaneous flowering of research into the effects of charters. This meta-analysis from Columbia University’s National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education set out to comb through the existing data to identify the specific impact of “no-excuses” charters on math and reading. Offering a brisk tour through the mission and methods of no-excuses schools, it should make handy reading for a public audience that still trips over some of the details even at the quarter-century mark.

After wading into an ocean of some five thousand initial titles, the authors finally ended up weighing the results of sixty-eight relevant studies published on schools that generally fit the no-excuses model (serving urban, high-poverty populations with a mix of lofty academic expectations, tight discipline, and beefed-up instructional time and tutoring resources).

The study’s headline finding provides wondrously encouraging news for advocates of chartering and school choice: When compared with their peers enrolled in traditional public schools, students at no-excuses charter schools experience improvements in math and reading totaling .25 and .15 standard deviations respectively. (Using the same analysis, they calculate the benefits of charters that don’t follow the no-excuses formula to be a still-healthy .15 and .07 standard deviations on math and reading.)

Even better was this easy-to-miss nugget: “Our results suggest that No Excuses schools are more effective in middle and high schools. This pattern appears to differ from the broad literature which indicates that charter schools are more effective at the elementary school level.” That’s more than many educators would dare dream given the persistently flat progress of reform at the secondary level.

We might have expected some optimism after witnessing the stupefying results at world-beating charter networks like KIPP and Success Academy. But it’s still nice that high-performing charters have both passed the eye test of policy commentators and are consistently feted by researchers as well. Now the only question is how the little guys grew up so fast.

SOURCE: Albert Cheng, Collin Hitt, Brian Kisida, and Jonathan N. Mills, “’No Excuses’ Charter Schools: A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence on Student Achievement,” National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Occasional Paper No. 226 (2015).