The Education Gadfly Weekly

We’ve learned a few lessons about school choice over the past few decades. Key among those lessons are that quantity does not equal quality and that conditions must be right for choice to flourish. Good intentions only take you so far; sturdy plants grow when seeds are planted in fertile ground. 

We learned as much five years ago when we teamed up with Rick Hess on America’s Best (and Worst) Cities for School Reform, a study that explored the ideal conditions for school reform at the city level. We found that too few of our big cities possessed the talent, leadership, infrastructure, culture, and resources to beckon enterprising reformers and then help them succeed.

But we also found some innovators on that list of cities, many of which served as “proof points” and role models for stodgier places. (Especially notable were New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and New York City.)

Now we’re back with a “spinoff,” America’s Best (and Worst) Cities for School Choice, which focuses on school choice specifically and considers many additional questions—but again demonstrates the spectrum of receptivity to fundamental education reform when one looks across cities.

Priscilla (Penny) Wohlstetter, a distinguished research professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, led the work, along with Fordham National Research Director Dara Zeehandelaar and Research and Policy Associate David Griffith.

So what does it mean to be “choice-friendly?” Consider three “buckets” that, taken together, provide a robust and multifaceted picture of school choice (defined inclusively—charters, vouchers, magnets, etc.) in a given city:

1. Political support: Politics reign supreme. But is the city council supportive of choice in Newark? How about in Chicago? Does the superintendent in San Diego advocate for charter schools? What about the one in Atlanta? Here we get the lowdown from observers in each city about whether their political heavy hitters support school choice.
2. Policy environment: It’s nearly impossible for choice to flourish without supportive policies and practices. Here we examine obvious issues like the relative strength of state charter laws, but also topics such as whether the city’s major school district has a policy for closing schools with low enrollment. (In fact, sixteen do.) And just how easy is it for parents to apply to schools of choice? (Not very, unless you're one of the six cities with a common application.)
3. Quantity and quality of choices: How many choices exist for students—and if they are any good—obviously matters a great deal. Here we examine factors like charter schools’ market share, and also whether students are allowed to attend schools in nearby districts. And if so, can a receiving district choose to say “no thank you” by opting out? That’s the case in Oakland. Perhaps you’d like to know where else? 

Using this approach, our analysts studied thirty cities and found that New Orleans and Washington, D.C. top the list of choice friendliness, just as they did in our 2010 school reform study. Denver earns the bronze medal this time, and New York City falls into the mediocre middle (blame the “de Blasio effect”). Unsurprisingly, Albany and Pittsburgh are near the bottom. Both lack many of the policies and practices necessary for choice to take hold, and students in those cities have very limited options besides their neighborhood schools. But there were also curveballs like Atlanta, which is notorious for its recent cheating scandal but turns out to attain a respectable ninth rank for choice friendliness. Table 1 shows the grades and scores for the thirty cities we studied.

Table 1. How friendly is your city to school choice?

Observe that the top three cities (New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Denver) are thriving, growing, and gentrifying spots. Is that a coincidence? If there’s a causal relationship, which direction does it go? Do choice-friendly conditions boost a city’s vitality or vice versa? Or both? It sure seems harder to enact big-time education reform of any sort in cities that are struggling economically (like Albany).

Meanwhile, the South is showing newfound strength. This includes New Orleans, of course, but also Atlanta. And keep an eye on Nashville, with its small but high-quality (and growing) charter sector. The history of segregation has always complicated school choice below the Mason-Dixon Line, but perhaps not for much longer.

Our hope is that cities across the country will look at these rankings and work to catch up with New Orleans, Washington, and Denver. (Although reformers love to bicker over which of this trio may be the “best” model for school reform, all three tower over the rest.) But we’re keenly aware that progress is not necessarily a permanent condition. New York City, in particular, reminds us that this whole enterprise can be buffeted by shifts in the political winds. 

Some of us policy types don’t like to get down and dirty with the politics of school choice, preferring to focus instead on cleaner technocratic issues (like common enrollment systems, fairer funding, facilities financing, and stronger authorizing). Those are all well and good. Indeed, this report shows how important they are. But if the politics crater, all of it can crumble.  So to our reform friends and allies in cities nationwide we say: Keep building smarter policies. But keep your eyes on the politics, too.

Editor's note: This post was first published on Flypaper on December 9. 

Victory is inevitable. That’s my biggest takeaway from Fordham’s new report on America’s best and worst cities for school choice.

This conclusion may strike some readers as premature, but while profiling the thirty cities included in the study, I was struck by how consistent the dominant narrative was across sites: School choice has grown rapidly in the past decade, and in most cities, that growth seems poised to continue indefinitely.

I don’t mean to advocate complacency or downplay the differences between cities (a central theme of the report). But from a national perspective, it’s increasingly clear that—despite the occasional legislative or judicial setback—school choice is winning and will continue to win. It’s easier to kill a bill than an idea, especially one that has grown into a movement because it works for kids.

Take caps on charter schools, for example: Of the thirty cities in our study, nineteen are located in states with some sort of cap; in some (such as Boston), this constitutes a needless and galling constraint on the growth of the sector. But ask yourself: How many charter caps have been lowered in the last ten years? (Answer: almost none) And how many have been raised? (At least fifteen.) Which policy change do you think is more likely to occur in Boston in the coming years?

Or consider private school choice mechanisms like voucher and tax credit scholarship programs: Despite the positive impacts of these programs, only eleven of our thirty cities are located in states where they are legal. And in every city besides Milwaukee, the number of students served is small, thanks to strict enrollment caps and eligibility requirements. But how many of these programs have been abolished, once created? And what changes would you predict based on the length of their waiting lists?

Finally, look at the politics of public choice mechanisms, such as the massive open enrollment programs that have been established in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Like charters and vouchers, these programs have their critics. But could they ever be reversed? Impossible. Once granted, the right to choose a school for your child is not easily revoked.

Given this one-sided history, it’s easy to understand why opponents of school choice are eager to deny it purchase in Washington State and prevent the virtuous cycle from taking hold there. That discouraging example notwithstanding, however, the arc of history suggests that the most important question facing supporters of school choice going forward is not how victory can be achieved, but what it should look like.

For me, this means confronting the weaknesses of the choice movement head-on rather than denying their existence. For example, the best evidence suggests that charter schools are now outperforming their district counterparts in most cities. But in Austin and Columbus, they perform no better than district schools, and in Jacksonville, they perform worse.

It also means confronting and discussing the potential downsides of choice as the movement continues to expand. For example, there’s good evidence that choice-based systems can lead to greater racial and socioeconomic isolation (likely as an unintended consequence of mild individual preferences), though the degree to which this occurs depends greatly on local context. Both the research on this issue and the issue itself are too complex to cover in a thousand words. But the impacts are likely far-reaching, and they ought to be discussed.

Finally, if victory is inevitable, it’s more important than ever for advocates of choice to admit when we are wrong—before our mistakes replace old interest groups with new ones and acquire a life of their own. In our report, for example, we give twenty-nine of our thirty cities credit for having online options for students, reflecting the rapid expansion of that sector in recent years. But the latest research on online education is deeply troubling. Maybe we’re moving too fast on this front. 

If victory is inevitable (or just extremely likely), it follows that resistance is futile. But unlike the insidious Borg, the choice movement seeks to dissimilate, rather than assimilate, so there’s still hope for humanity. And though opponents of school choice have a long list of complaints (some more valid than others), they are hardly powerless to address them, provided they recognize that working with (rather than against) the choice movement is in their enlightened self-interest.

For example, many detractors believe that poor and at-risk students will inevitably lose out in a choice-based system (and are somehow blind to the many ways in which they are shortchanged by the existing one). This is a valid concern, since the parents of these students obviously have fewer resources with which to identify, apply to, and access the best schools. But I wonder if these critics have considered how much worse this problem will be if (as is the case in at least thirteen of the featured cities in our study) we don't provide these students with choice-friendly transportation. Just as damaging would be (as is the case in at least twenty-four of our thirty cities) the failure to establish common applications that allow families to rank their options—from comprehensive district schools to magnet schools to charters—without the burden of filling out dozens of forms.

Similarly, some opponents of choice believe that traditional public schools are underfunded and that charters and vouchers are exacerbating the problem. I disagree on both counts—but for the sake of argument, suppose these folks have a point. What endgame do they have in mind? Are they aware that charters in Detroit, Indianapolis, and elsewhere already receive at least 40 percent less funding than traditional district schools? When charters are the system, will they celebrate the larger class sizes and lower pay for teachers this lack of funding necessitates? Will they revel in the knowledge that underserved kids are attending school in cramped and dilapidated buildings while district facilities stand empty? Somehow I doubt it.

As these examples suggest, most of the issues that are dear to choice opponents remain relevant under a choice-based system. But addressing them requires moving beyond trench warfare toward a larger vision of what our education system can become. Perhaps you think school choice will negatively impact race relations. Have you considered founding an intentionally diverse charter school? Or perhaps you think the choice movement spells doom for teachers’ working conditions. Have you considered founding a unionized charter?

Though they are rapidly losing ground, school choice skeptics still have many weapons at their disposal. I have no doubt that, if they put their minds to it, they can scorch the earth where the seeds of change are beginning to take root and grow. But they will then reap a bitter harvest. For the sake of our kids, it’s time that both opponents and supporters of school choice recognized the truth: The future is a choice we make together.

• To everyone except the students and educators who labor to start them, high-performing charter schools must seem like fully formed miracle factories. They sprout from Mark Zuckerberg’s largesse, produce outstanding academic results, and win facilities conflicts with crusading big-city mayors. This week, the Hechinger Report spins the incredible (and incredibly detailed) story of how these places actually come together. In three interlocking narratives focused on a first-time principal, a veteran teacher, and an incoming freshman, the account details the emergence of Brooklyn Ascend High in the daunting Brownsville neighborhood of New York City. The school, organized around an ideal of civic service and employing a nontraditional discipline structure, offers an ideal backdrop against which to examine the challenges of establishing an academic culture and galvanizing a faculty. For readers who wonder why more charter profiles can’t offer the fractured perspectives and compelling mystery of Rashomon, here’s your (regrettably samurai-less) answer.
• The Texas Board of Education rules over the state’s textbooks like a juice-drunk toddler rules over his sandbox: utterly, and hilariously. If they’re not pondering the knotty question of whether to include creationism in science curriculum (guess I thought Spencer Tracy settled that one), they’re helpfully reinserting the true history of how Moses helped write the Constitution. One McGraw-Hill text even did us the favor of outlining the migration patterns of ex-“workers” from the Southern plantations. But it suddenly looks as though there may be a limit to the board’s authority after all. The state’s Republican attorney general announced last week that its members lack the power to compel local districts to accept specific instructional materials. The news represents yet another controversial rim shot in a decades-long curricular joke—one that, because it plays out in one of the country’s largest textbook markets, carries huge academic implications even across other states. While the decision is a big win for Lone Star kids (and anyone who appreciates a depoliticized public school system), this isn’t a totally cheery development: Regrettably, we may now never know whether Sam Houston invented dinosaurs.
• There are certain items it would be difficult to imagine teaching a class without. Non-insane textbooks, sure. Whiteboards, pencils, desks? They’re all pretty important. But what if you were expected to teach a class without a full-time teacher? According to a dispiriting new article in the Washington Post, that’s exactly what many inner-city schools are attempting. Researchers from Brown University have found that urban school districts like Philadelphia and Louisville hire one in six of their teachers after the school year has begun. In classrooms where qualified instructors have either quit or failed to be hired in the first place, their places are typically taken by (often uncredentialed) substitutes. On the one hand, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for the folks trying to staff these challenging schools: In the words of one administrator, “I will have great people and train them up, and they’ll transfer and go to a school that’s not quite so complex.” But it’s galling in the extreme to see school districts fail in their central mission—putting young minds in a room with a fully qualified professional. The kids stuck in floundering academic environments are the ones who can least afford the absence of an excellent educator. It’s long past time we made sure they don’t have to.

Interstate test comparability, teacher absenteeism in high-poverty schools, special education in charter schools, and school choice in thirty American cities.

Amber's Research Minute

SOURCE: "America's Best (and Worst) Cities for School Choice," Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Teachers College (December 2015).

Based on a national sample of thirty-seven thousand public school teachers, this report from the National Center for Education Statistics’s School and Staffing Survey (SASS) looks at teacher autonomy in the classroom during the 2003–04, 2007–08, and 2011–12 school years. The news in brief: Teachers are somewhat less likely to feel that they have a great deal of autonomy than they have been in the past. But they still report a degree of professional freedom that most of us would surely envy.

To measure autonomy, researchers asked teachers how much “actual control” they have in their classrooms over six areas of planning and teaching: selecting textbooks and other classroom materials; content, topics, and skills to be taught; teaching techniques; evaluating and grading students; disciplining students; and determining the amount of homework to be assigned. Teacher autonomy is “positively associated with teachers’ job satisfaction and teacher retention,” the report notes. Those who perceive that they have less autonomy are “more likely to leave their positions, either by moving from one school to another or leaving the profession altogether.”

With nearly three out of four teachers still reporting a “great deal” of autonomy (down from 82 percent in 2003–04), it hardly seems time to push the panic button. Moreover, if teachers are frustrated, I’m not persuaded that the narrow SASS definition of autonomy gets at the issue. Does my autonomy manifest itself in control over content, topics, and skills to be taught? Control over evaluating and grading students is fine. But myriad competing demands can steal time from evaluating student work, offering meaningful feedback, building relationships with students and families, and other tasks that create a sense that a teacher’s work is fruitful.

By way of example: As a new fifth-grade teacher in a South Bronx elementary school, I spent countless hours planning lessons and writing curriculum—hours that would have been far better spent practicing and mastering my craft. Sure, I had plenty of “autonomy,” but I lacked the time to exercise it. I would have reported a high degree of autonomy on the SASS measures. Since creating curriculum and lessons from scratch each week took prodigious amounts of valuable time, however, my “autonomy” yielded more frustration and dissatisfaction.

To be sure, even though the percentage of public school teachers who report that they have a high degree of autonomy is declining, teachers still say they have a moderate or great degree of control over their classrooms. If there’s a category of public sector worker—cops, firemen, or sidewalk sweepers—with more authority to call their own shots on the job, I can’t think of it. The question is where to strike the balance of accountability and autonomy so as to maximize teacher satisfaction and student outcomes even while fostering innovation. On this, the SASS is silent.

SOURCE: Dinah Sparks and Nat Malkus, “Public School Teacher Autonomy in the Classroom Across School Years 2003–04, 2007–08, and 2011–12,” U.S. Department of Education (December 2015).

In light of Hillary Clinton’s charge that charter schools “don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids,” as well the lambasting of one of the nation’s highest-performing charter networks for its discipline practices, this report from the National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools is especially timely. It reveals that the worst of the recent allegations fall flat (at least when it comes to students with disabilities). Charter schools do have slightly lower percentages of students with disabilities compared to traditional public schools (we should note that the discrepancy is nothing like the gap that some charter opponents allege), but they also tend to provide more inclusive educational settings for those students. Suspension rates in the two sectors are roughly the same.

The study’s authors investigate whether anecdotes about charter schools failing to serve students with disabilities align with the actual data. They examine enrollment, service provision, and discipline statistics, made possible through a secondary analysis of data from the Department of Education’s biennial Civil Rights Data Collection for the 2011–12 school year (the most recent one for which data is available). Nationwide, students who receive special education support and services made up 10.4 percent of total enrollment in charter schools, compared to 12.6 percent in district schools. The authors note that “charter schools have room to improve,” especially in states with wide discrepancies (e.g., New Jersey and Oklahoma). But they caution that closing the gap shouldn’t necessarily be a “universal goal,” as some state funding systems provide incentives that result in districts over-identifying students with disabilities. Encouragingly, the enrollment gap has shrunk: A 2008–09 report from the Government Accountability Office found that students with disabilities constituted just 7.7 percent of charter enrollment (versus 11.3 percent in district schools).

Perhaps more importantly, charter schools tend to place students with disabilities in “high-inclusion settings” (defined by whether a student spent 80 percent or more of the day in regular education). Charter schools placed 84 percent of their students with disabilities in such settings, compared to traditional schools’ placement rate of 67 percent. Finally, there is no evidence that charter schools suspend students with disabilities more frequently. Neither charter schools nor traditional public schools expel students with disabilities at a high rate (0.55 percent for charters versus 0.46 percent for district schools), but charter rates are slightly higher—perhaps driven by the fact that they have slightly higher expulsion rates overall, including for students without disabilities.

The report concludes with a handful of policy recommendations, focused mainly on ensuring that data collection efforts continue and that state education agencies and authorizers rigorously monitor enrollment practices and service provision among all schools. The CRDC dataset has “methodological limitations”—some schools had incomplete information as a result of the DOE concealing enrollment numbers to protect student privacy (which was more common among smaller schools, possibly skewing the data set). And the suspension and expulsion data was non-standardized and self-reported by schools. Still, over 80 percent of traditional schools and 60 percent of charter schools were captured overall, and the comparisons are useful. While the study lives up to its goal of providing “practitioners and researchers with a solid foundation” of data to inform discussions typically fueled by rhetoric, further study is warranted. Advocates should examine how well all schools are serving students with disabilities (beyond enrolling them and placing them in high-inclusion settings), explore cost-saving mechanisms for charter schools, and offer further case studies of specialized charter schools innovating to uniquely meet the needs of this vulnerable student group.

SOURCE: Lauren Morando Rhim, Jesse Gumz, and Kelly Henderson, “Key Trends in Special Education in Charter Schools: A Secondary Analysis of the Civil Rights Data Collection 2011-2012,” National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools (October 2015).  

It’s not difficult to see what parents find so appealing about religious schools. Some put stock in the inherent academic superiority of private academies, but many others prioritize what they see as their character-building edge over traditional district schools: tighter discipline, a unitary culture, and strong ideological foundations. Of the many virtues imparted to students by religious education, though, few would have guessed that one would be religious tolerance. This new white paper suggests that Americans who have attended some form of religious school are less likely to harbor anti-Semitic animus as adults.

The study cleverly combines multiple strands of inquiry from the Understanding America Study, a nationally representative sample of 1,300 American adults conducted by the University of Southern California’s Center for Economic and Social Research. That survey’s administrators queried their subjects on the variety of their K–12 schooling experiences—but also asked them to respond to a series of eleven anti-Semitic stereotypes, which were selected from the Anti-Defamation League’s Global 100 analysis of anti-Semitic attitudes around the world. After striking from the sample those participants who had been homeschooled or received the bulk of their education abroad, the authors were left with a healthy data set of adults from both (predominately Christian) parochial and public schools.

The findings indicate that those who had received some portion of religious schooling were more likely to find fault with anti-Jewish sentiments than those who had attended only public schools. For each of the defamatory statements (for instance: “Jews have too much power in the business world”; “Jews in the United States are more loyal to Israel than to this country”), former students of religiously affiliated schools were between 9 and 18 percent more likely to disagree than their secularly educated peers. For a bit of context, this range of difference is roughly equivalent to the impact of a respondent’s parents having attended college rather than dropping out of high school.

Those attuned to the issues of economic inequality may be apt to wonder: Could these results possibly reflect the class distinctions that afford only some children the privilege of attending expensive private schools, either secular or religious? After all, kids from affluent families would seem intuitively less likely to fall prey to various forms of prejudice. According to the authors, however, these factors don’t play a significant role. “If we separate the effect of attending those religiously affiliated schools from secular private schools, we find that secular private schools are not significantly different from secular public schools in their effect on anti-Semitism,” they write. “The private school benefit we observe for lowering anti-Semitism is really a religious school benefit.”

It’s still hard to tell whether these survey responses point to a hidden advantage of religious education or simply a hidden advantage of religiosity. According to a recent and well-publicized Pew study, Jews are now the most popular individual religious group, and they are viewed most favorably by members of other faiths (69 percent of white evangelicals and 63 percent of white mainline Protestants offered a favorable impression of Jews, versus just 58 percent of those who characterized themselves as agnostic or unaffiliated). To the extent that these philo-Semitic believers are also more likely to send their children to religious schools, this tendency may be skewing the author’s conclusions. But if any Jewish education observers were anxious that such institutions were spreading sectarian animosity, that fear would seem to be unfounded.

SOURCE: Jay P. Greene and Cari A. Bogulski, “The Effect of Public and Private Schooling on Anti-Semitism,” American Enterprise Institute (November 2015).