The Education Gadfly Weekly

Paul E. Peterson and Matthew M. Chingos
Harvard University
November 2007

Harvard political scientist Paul Peterson has devoted a good chunk of his time this year (see here and here) to correcting what he sees as methodological flaws in RAND Corporation's recent evaluation of Philadelphia's privately-managed public schools. (In 2001, the state enlisted several for-profit and non-profit organizations to run 45 failing district schools.) In his latest report, Peterson and colleague Matthew Chingos use student-level data (the same that RAND used) to compare gains in student performance among for-profit, non-profit, and district-run schools. Their analysis differs from RAND's in a couple of key ways. First, the Peterson-Chingos model compares student performance gains, while the RAND model compares student performance levels. Second, Peterson and Chingos compare the privately-managed schools to comparable (i.e., low-performing) district schools, while RAND measured them against a statewide (and, in Peterson's view, not-so-comparable) sample. Third, Peterson and Chingos break out the results of the for-profit and non-profit schools separately; RAND lumped them all together. Peterson and Chingos conclude that for-profit schools achieved greater gains than district schools by a statistically significant margin in math, but not in reading. Schools under non-profit management showed a negative, but not statistically significant impact on student gains in both subjects. In other words, the for-profit schools got the best results, then the district, then the not-for-profit ones. This raises interesting questions about the enthusiasm in many quarters (including our own) for non-profit charter school chains. Still, it's just one program--and a far-from-ideal one at that. RAND's study, for example, noted that "continued district involvement in provider schools... constrained provider autonomy," and Peterson wrote earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal of "concessions to unions that allowed many of the old regulations to remain in effect." One wonders how different the data would look were the providers given true autonomy. Read the report here (and read the Peterson/Chingos op-ed in yesterday's Journal here). We interview Peterson here.

Government Accountability Office
November 2007

We already know about this study, which was leaked to (and misconstrued by) the Washington Post and lots of others. This latest version is the actual, final report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), complete with comments from both the Washington Scholarship Fund (WSF) and the U.S. Department of Education (ED). The study primarily highlights problems with WSF's administration of the federally funded Opportunity Scholarship Program, aka D.C. voucher program. For example, the report alleges that WSF didn't create accounting and bookkeeping procedures to keep track of scholarship funds. WSF also had high staff turnover and, supposedly, failed to implement policies and procedures to ensure that scholarships were administered correctly. GAO also raises questions about parental access to information about the scholarships and the quality of participating private schools. But as ED points out, the report doesn't mention the program's high parent satisfaction rate and its immediate impact on 1,900 DC children--arguably the most important outcomes of the program. Nor does it give enough credit for the heroic efforts of WSF to inform thousands of low-income families about the program and to counsel them on making good school choices for their children. Although the report finds many flaws with the scholarship program's current structure, it doesn't call for dismantling it. These recommendations provide a way for WSF to refine its administration. You can find the study, including rebuttals from WSF and ED, here.

Just two years ago, the New York Times heaped praise upon Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina, for its schools' economic integration program, which the paper called the "main reason" that Wake's black and Hispanic students "have made such dramatic strides in standardized reading and math tests." How things change. Now the district has realized that its plan, which kept each school's low-income student population under 40 percent, is unworkable--demographic shifts make it so. But despite the statistical impossibility of achieving its 40 percent goal (42 out of 119 schools are currently out of compliance), the district is sticking to its guns anyway. Reports the Raleigh News & Observer: "School board member Lori Millberg said raising the cap to 50 percent is more realistic. But she said it might not be worth all the problems it's causing in the community. ‘To reduce the hassle, we might just want to leave it at 40 percent.'" Yet Wake County already hassles its families to no end, by busing their kids from one part of the large district to distant schools. Will it continue doing so just to appease those who deny the undeniable? Perhaps Wake could aspire to make all its schools 100 percent economically integrated by 2014, too?

"Wake may keep target for low-income pupils," by T. Keung Hui and David Raynor, Raleigh News & Observer, November 6, 2007

Tuesday brought two notable events on the education-choice front, one a clear setback, the other a surprise whose significance is yet to be determined.

The defeat of Utah's statewide voucher program at the polls was expected and widely predicted. The referendum and the battles leading up to it received widespread publicity, mostly because the debate between voucher supporters and their union opponents was overheated and the money each side spent on its campaign was significant. Washington Post columnist George Will called the Utah vote "more important to the nation than most of next year's elections will be," and he was not unique in ascribing such importance to it.

Still, this was no clear case of virtue undone by evil. Patrick Byrne, founder of Overstock.com, pushed for, and was a major financial backer of the campaign for, the Parent Choice in Education Act that passed the state legislature in February and that Utahns decided this week to repeal. Byrne said that Tuesday's referendum was "a statewide IQ test" that the citizens of Utah failed. "They don't care enough about their kids," he asserted.

Such language is unhelpful at best, and the amount of thought that went into Byrne's choice of words resembles the thought he puts into much of his education reform work, whether this voucher initiative or his ill-conceived "65 percent solution" (see here). The Utah voucher push was hasty and flawed on several fronts, and while creating more educational options for families is usually a fantastic thing, shoddy voucher programs do more harm than good--certainly they weaken the public's support of choice.

Utah's plan was, essentially, for universal vouchers on the cheap in a state without the private-school capacity to serve many students. The vouchers would've ranged from $500 up to $3,000 per child, based on socioeconomic status, but according to the Deseret Morning News, the average private-school tuition in Utah is $7,800--so $3,000 is not a lot of help for poor kids. Meanwhile, the state has only about 100 private schools boasting some 6,000 vacant seats for half a million eligible students. This design made it easy for opponents to argue that the program would have been little more than a middle class subsidy for parents seeking private school tuition while doing little to offer low-income children an escape route from failing schools.

Sure, the teacher unions deserve most of the blame for Utah's referendum outcome. They lavished enormous effort and treasure on the campaign to defeat it. But the unions usually deserve a lot of blame for the failure of most worthy education reforms to either get enacted or remain on the books.

But Byrne gave them an easy target. And insulting the people of Utah is both boorish and foolish. We hope he gives up on education reform and tries his hand at health care policy or maybe climate change instead.

As for the second and more surprising development on the education-choice front, it was the failed re-election bid of Indianapolis's Democratic mayor Bart Peterson, who on Tuesday lost his job to an inexperienced Republican challenger, Greg Ballard, a man about whom little is known. Peterson, by contrast, led Indy for eight years and is a tried-and-true commodity, and his ideas about education, and charter schools in particular, are good ones that deserve to be continued.

Peterson deserves credit for bringing charter schools to Indiana. In 2001, he teamed up with state (GOP) Senator Teresa Lubbers to push through charter-school legislation in the Hoosier State. And Peterson made sure that Indianapolis's charter schools would be directly accountable to him--he was granted the privilege both to start new charter schools and close the bad ones. It was the first time in the U.S. charter movement that a mayor became a school authorizer.

The first year Peterson wielded his authorizing powers he received 30 applications and granted four. By demanding excellence on the front end (and by closing schools when he had to), the mayor created a climate in which data mattered, performance counted, and quality was demanded.

It has paid off. Last year, the average pass rate for Indianapolis charter schools (which enroll a higher percentage of minorities than the district schools do) increased 6 points from 2005. Today, even with Peterson's rigid standards for approving new schools, over 4,000 students in the city are enrolled in charters.

The big question is this: Will Ballard continue Peterson's rigid accountability system? The mayor-elect is a charter supporter, says Kevin Teasley, president and CEO of the Greater Educational Opportunities Foundation, which operates charter schools in the state. But when it comes to accountability, he says, "who knows what Ballard's going to do?"

Ballard's background doesn't yield many answers. He earned his undergraduate degree in economics from Indiana University and then joined the Marine Corps; he served in uniform for 23 years and retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. Ballard then entered the business world, and according to his website, before winning the mayoral election, he was "a self-employed leadership and management consultant." He's written a book: The Ballard Rules: Small Unit Leadership.

Word on the street, though, is that Ballard, like many Republicans, lots of faith in markets and parental choice and little interest in government oversight.

If true, that perspective is unlikely to sustain the impressive quality of the Indianapolis charter-school system that Peterson created. Indy's high-flying charters are the result of competition, yes, but also a government that was extremely selective about who could start schools and vigilant about monitoring their performance. The market can do only so much of that.

Here's hoping that Ballard learns from Peterson's successes and Byrne's failures. School choice in Indianapolis already has a lot going for it--it'd be a shame to mess with it too much.

Why are the presidential candidates generally ignoring education, even when the issue consistently ranks atop voter concerns (in a recent Pew survey, ed came out above jobs, social security, and even terrorism)? Might the 17 aspirants eschew the subject because middle-class voters, while they certainly care about education, are generally content with their children's schools? Perhaps, but if candidates only appealed to the immediate concerns of the middle class, John Edwards, for example, wouldn't have constructed his entire campaign around poverty. Maybe the federal role in education is simply too limited to warrant presidential concern? Surely not. No--the reason education isn't getting more substantive airtime is because the public isn't demanding the substance. They may care about education. But lots of Democratic voters are satisfied when candidates say that schools are important and deserve more money, and many Republicans are pacified when candidates advocate local control. "Education, for many presidential candidates, is a great applause line," reports NPR's Larry Abramson. "They love to show up to schools and read to kids." And people love it, too. Don't blame Clinton, Romney, Obama, et al.: the real educational idea dearth starts with voters themselves.

"Education a Good-Guy Issue That Finishes Last," by Larry Abramson, All Things Considered, November 2, 2007

Once upon a time, elementary school teachers separated their classrooms into bluebirds and redbirds, fast readers and slow. It was called ability grouping and was an obvious, pragmatic, and effective way to differentiate instruction for students. But that was before Jeannie Oakes and her acolytes declared war on "tracking" (the practice of assigning students to the college prep, voc-ed, or general ed track). That controversy hurt sensible policies such as ability grouping, too. But sense might be making a comeback. Rock View Elementary School in the Washington, D.C., suburbs uses ability grouping for reading and math and has seen dramatic test-score gains. It's easy to understand why. Principal Patsy Roberson said, "When you have all the students who are academically alike for 90 minutes and you don't have to split them up and give 30 minutes to each group, you get more bang for your buck." Yet despite the school's success, the Montgomery County district was initially uncomfortable with the grouping and demanded that Rock View stop it. When that happened, test scores fell. Roberson's "rogue" methods were thus allowed back into the school, and the achievement of both red and blue birds soars to this day.

"Montgomery School's New Take on Ability Grouping Yields Results," by Daniel de Vise, Washington Post, November 4, 2007

Explain this: Two public schools, one in the South Bronx and one in Harlem, academically outperform most of their counterparts in much wealthier Park Slope, Brooklyn. Stumped? The answer, of course, is that the two schools in question, KIPP Academy and Harlem Village Academy, are charter schools--and damn good ones at that. Some Park Slope parents figured this out and are now asking, "Why shouldn't we have charter schools, too?" (Dan Rubenstein and Luyen Chou, two educators, recently wrote a proposal to start Brooklyn Prospect Charter School, which they hope to open in fall 2009.) It's a good question. Although charters won their fame for creating alternatives to broken inner-city schools, there's no reason to keep them out of wealthier areas, where schools are certainly not immune from stagnation and bureaucracy. Furthermore, as Teach For America alumna Siobhan Sheils points out in a New York Daily News op-ed, more public-school choice will prevent middle-class parents from fleeing to private schools, and thus help curb the "white flight" that has hurt urban districts. Quality schools for all kids--a fine idea.

"Ring in middle-class charters," by Siobhan Sheils, New York Daily News, November 5, 2007

Charles Sykes ends his op-ed about over-protectiveness, which appeared in today's Wall Street Journal, with a quote from the Duke of Wellington: "The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton." In other words, childhood competition shapes a nation's character. But in today's k-12 schools--Brave New Worlds of self-esteem police that they are--competition is something of a dirty word. So, too, is anything mildly unsafe or risky. In addition to the familiar stories about schools banning tag, touch football, dodgeball (don't want to pick on the chubby kids), etc., Sykes adds other bemusing details. For example, principals at several schools in North Carolina, worried that the sun's rays might be too much for little Johnny and Sally, want to spend thousands of dollars to cover their playgrounds with massive canopies. Sykes wonders: "can actual bubble-wrap be far behind?"  

"Adult Supervision," by Charles Sykes, Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2007

The charter-school scene in Ohio is not one in which education reformers can take pride. Sam Dillon writes in the New York Times that 57 percent of Buckeye State charter schools "are in academic watch or emergency, compared with 43 percent of traditional public schools." But that doesn't mean the entire charter school idea is a bad one--plenty of institutions show that, when done right, charter schools can offer great educations to kids who otherwise wouldn't have them. Unfortunately, Ohio's Governor Ted Strickland and state Attorney General Marc Dann are using the bad apples as justification to uproot the whole charter-tree. Dillon's article notes that Dann is suing several charter schools in order to shut them down, but he fails to report about how novel and overbearing that legal strategy actually is. Dillon also neglects to mention that Dann got the lawsuit idea from the state's teacher union! Lesson to states who don't want to repeat Ohio's experience: Demand quality in charter-school applications and be rigid with oversight. Otherwise, charter opponents will devalue the whole concept, with failing schools as their ammunition.

"Ohio Goes After Charter Schools That Are Failing," by Sam Dillon, New York Times, November 8, 2007

Government Accountability Office
November 2007

We already know about this study, which was leaked to (and misconstrued by) the Washington Post and lots of others. This latest version is the actual, final report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), complete with comments from both the Washington Scholarship Fund (WSF) and the U.S. Department of Education (ED). The study primarily highlights problems with WSF's administration of the federally funded Opportunity Scholarship Program, aka D.C. voucher program. For example, the report alleges that WSF didn't create accounting and bookkeeping procedures to keep track of scholarship funds. WSF also had high staff turnover and, supposedly, failed to implement policies and procedures to ensure that scholarships were administered correctly. GAO also raises questions about parental access to information about the scholarships and the quality of participating private schools. But as ED points out, the report doesn't mention the program's high parent satisfaction rate and its immediate impact on 1,900 DC children--arguably the most important outcomes of the program. Nor does it give enough credit for the heroic efforts of WSF to inform thousands of low-income families about the program and to counsel them on making good school choices for their children. Although the report finds many flaws with the scholarship program's current structure, it doesn't call for dismantling it. These recommendations provide a way for WSF to refine its administration. You can find the study, including rebuttals from WSF and ED, here.

Paul E. Peterson and Matthew M. Chingos
Harvard University
November 2007

Harvard political scientist Paul Peterson has devoted a good chunk of his time this year (see here and here) to correcting what he sees as methodological flaws in RAND Corporation's recent evaluation of Philadelphia's privately-managed public schools. (In 2001, the state enlisted several for-profit and non-profit organizations to run 45 failing district schools.) In his latest report, Peterson and colleague Matthew Chingos use student-level data (the same that RAND used) to compare gains in student performance among for-profit, non-profit, and district-run schools. Their analysis differs from RAND's in a couple of key ways. First, the Peterson-Chingos model compares student performance gains, while the RAND model compares student performance levels. Second, Peterson and Chingos compare the privately-managed schools to comparable (i.e., low-performing) district schools, while RAND measured them against a statewide (and, in Peterson's view, not-so-comparable) sample. Third, Peterson and Chingos break out the results of the for-profit and non-profit schools separately; RAND lumped them all together. Peterson and Chingos conclude that for-profit schools achieved greater gains than district schools by a statistically significant margin in math, but not in reading. Schools under non-profit management showed a negative, but not statistically significant impact on student gains in both subjects. In other words, the for-profit schools got the best results, then the district, then the not-for-profit ones. This raises interesting questions about the enthusiasm in many quarters (including our own) for non-profit charter school chains. Still, it's just one program--and a far-from-ideal one at that. RAND's study, for example, noted that "continued district involvement in provider schools... constrained provider autonomy," and Peterson wrote earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal of "concessions to unions that allowed many of the old regulations to remain in effect." One wonders how different the data would look were the providers given true autonomy. Read the report here (and read the Peterson/Chingos op-ed in yesterday's Journal here). We interview Peterson here.