The Education Gadfly Weekly

Alexander Russo, The Progressive Policy Institute
February 2005

The charter school scene in Ohio is akin to the classic spaghetti Western, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." As Alexander Russo reports, the "Good" in the Buckeye State's charter saga are: politicians who put themselves on the line to create space for charter schools in a hostile political environment, decent school operators who have started schools with minimal taxpayer support in some of the state's toughest neighborhoods,  families who elect to enroll their children in these schools, and the 60,000+ students now attending one of the state's 230+ charter schools. The "Bad" include the Ohio Federation of Teachers (OFT) and Ohio Education Association (OEA). Their weapons of choice are the lawsuit (both in state and federal court), the public smear campaign ("these bad [charter] schools are like 700-pound hogs at the dinner table eating everything in sight," seethed the Cleveland Teachers Union president in 2003), and relentless legislative action to curtail and set back charter schools. The "Ugly" are the few charter school operators who are cheating children by offering an abysmal education while paying themselves handsomely, the ineptness and inertia that prevents authorizers from closing bad schools, and paucity of decent data that prevents supporters and opponents alike from really knowing what's right and what's wrong with charter schools. In the movie "Good" eventually beats both "Bad" and "Ugly," but it's fascinating to watch the complexities of the struggle play out. The hope in Ohio is that Good is starting to win. A victory for the good guys in Ohio's charter school tale would mean a victory for the state's neediest children, and that really would be a great story. To read PPI's report, and Russo's insightful policy recommendations, click here.

Bryan Hassel, Charter School Leadership Council
February 2005

The short answer to the implied question in this report's title is: not enough but much of what we know is brighter than the New York Times wants you to think. Bryan Hassel of Public Impact looked at 38 studies of charter school achievement that meet certain criteria for timeliness, analytic seriousness, and scope. His report finds that the studies are all over the map, both in their usefulness and their findings. Some have serious methodological shortcomings (especially in looking at aggregated school performance rather than disaggregated student performance). About half, including the infamous AFT study from last August are less-useful snapshots rather than appraisals of performance over time. Of the 21 that do look at data over time, 12 find charters outpacing public school achievement gains generally or for specific at-risk populations, five call it a draw, and three say charters are behind. A murky picture, though on balance encouraging, and we should take to heart Hassel's call for more and better data and analysis of charter school performance. You can find the full report athttp://www.charterschoolleadershipcouncil.org/PDF/Paper.pdf.

Lisa Snell, Reason Foundation
January 2005

This short but useful report exposes yet another game states play to avoid the spirit of No Child Left Behind: finding ways to label few or none of their schools as "persistently dangerous" - partly because students are supposed to be given exit visas from such schools. In 2003-2004, if you believe these state reports, only 52 schools in America were dangerous, including none in New York City or California, not even the schools where "three male students . . . forced a girl into a closet and sexually assaulted her," or "a student . . . smashed his ex-girlfriend's head through a trophy case." (Click here for more.) Though this report won't solve this particular NCLB problem, other than perhaps to shame the least honest states, it does offer a number of suggestions to reduce violence in schools - the point, after all, of this provision. A starting point is to create incentives for schools to reduce crime. If better data were available to parents about crime at each school, and if parents were able to exercise real choice among schools, market forces would focus schools' attention on this problem. For school leaders already focused, Snell suggests the "broken windows" approach that has been credited with reducing ordinary crime in New York City: promptly address the little things that go wrong so as to create an environment less conducive to more serious crimes. There's no proof yet that this works in schools, but it could hardly be worse than the usual approach, which is to adopt every crime prevention fad or violence-reduction nostrum and add massive amounts of security. Snell also argues for smaller schools, which are usually less violent. Of course the data are muddied by the number of small private and parochial schools, but the results seem to hold even after controlling for factors like poverty. Whichever strategy is chosen, we owe it to our children to reduce the 5.4 percent of students who skipped school for safety concerns and the 9 percent who were threatened or injured by a weapon in school in 2003. This accessible and useful report is available online at www.rppi.org/ps330.pdf.

Commission for High School Improvement
January 2005

This January 2005 report from the Colorado Commission for High School Improvement, a project of the Colorado Children's Campaign, is very short and, within its limits, an interesting take on how to reshape the state's approach to high-school education. And it's much needed for, while Colorado has lots of well-educated adults who arrived from elsewhere, its own track record in secondary education is weak. This commission is a cross section of the public-school establishment, however, and that helps account for its limits. Most striking to me: they have a very interesting section on expanding school choice and alternatives, and another one on enhancing "school-level flexibility." Yet so far as I can tell they never even once use the phrase "charter school" despite Colorado's sizable and rather successful charter movement. Could it be because most commission members represent establishment organizations? What they recommend is worthy, as far as it goes. One wishes it went further. See for yourself here.

The President reported last evening on the state of the union. Allow me to appraise the state of America's charter-school movement in early 2005.

Now fourteen years old, it strikes me as a typical adolescent, full of promise and with some accomplishments to its credit, but also the source of exasperation and frustration to those who want it to be more and better than it is. It's headstrong, ornery, disorganized, and insistent on its independence and its rights even when not quite ready to exercise them wisely.

Like every teenager I've known, the charter movement deserves a mixed report. But it's only fourteen, for Pete's sake, and nobody should pass final judgment at this stage of its development any more than one would a boy or girl at this age. So much remains to be determined, to be developed, to be tried - and so many more mistakes are waiting to be made en route to maturity.

Six things are especially worth knowing about the charter movement in 2005.

First, the man in the street still knows next to nothing about it, maybe hasn't yet even heard of charter schools and, if he has, is unsure what they are. ("Some sort of private school, maybe?" "A school for kids with problems?") Recent polling, nationally and in California, shows that participants in the charter movement naturally have a fair notion what it is, as do many other educators and policy makers, but this entire approach to schooling is not even on most Americans' radar screen. That obliviousness creates, on the one hand, a terrific opportunity for this movement to make itself known in positive ways; but also an environment in which bad news on TV or hostile comments by public figures can easily foster negative opinions - precisely because the audience has no independent base of knowledge or experience.

Second, despite its faint public profile, the charter movement has grown large enough to threaten various established interests, hence to have developed real enemies. With 3,300 schools enrolling nearly a million kids; with a handful of cities finding upwards of ten, even 20 percent of their K-12 student in these schools; with "virtual" charter schooling spreading fast (80 or so of them today, with 28,000 pupils, says the Center for Education Reform); and with some systems (e.g., Detroit, Cleveland, Dayton, sundry Massachusetts towns) finding their budgets shrinking fast due to families exiting for charter schools, the charter challenge to traditional models of schooling has gotten beyond theory and ideology and become a bread-and-butter issue for establishment educators.

Third, in fact, the charter movement today may have more enemies than friends in high places, especially since its first generation of political backers has largely vanished from office. Nobody expects the teacher unions to vanish, nor the school board associations, nor the ed schools, and for the most part they're doing their damnedest to rein in and discredit charter schools, which they see as eating their lunch, threatening their monopoly, and challenging their assumptions. On the pro-charter side, one doesn't see lots of governors or legislative leaders any more. For the most part, the business community is sitting on its hands. And the White House is mute.

Fourth, the charter movement's spotty academic performance record to date, though readily explained by and to its friends, empowers its enemies. So do its occasional financial screw-ups, melt-downs and signs of unbridled greed, not to mention its slipshod self-policing. (Teenagers don't pick up their dirty clothes, either.)

Fifth, like an adolescent, the charter movement needs to mature, which includes, above all, getting beyond some favorite myths from its childhood. Foremost among these:

• That just about anyone can run a good school and should be allowed to try.
• That authorizers (a.k.a. sponsors) and authorizing aren't very important.
• That academic results aren't too important, either, so long as people are eager to attend the school.
• That great schools can make it on a financial shoestring.
• That the charter movement can succeed in decentralized fashion, without coherent leadership, common agendas, and structured organizations.

Sixth, the No Child Left Behind act poses new challenges to charter schools and their movement, including its single-minded emphasis on academic achievement; its impatience with school autonomy and diversity (and tendency to wrap all schools in uniform rules and measures); and the mixed blessing of its threat to "reconstitute" failing district schools as involuntary charter schools.

There's good news, too. The re-energized Charter School Leadership Council introduced itself to the world this week at the National Press Club, along with an important and encouraging synthesis by Bryan Hassel of numerous studies of charter-school performance. (See below for more.) The California Charter School Association held an awesome conference last week in Pasadena. Florida's attorney general recently held that the state must fund charter schools the same as district schools. The massive Gates Foundation is taking charter schools seriously as a reform strategy. And more.

Will the good news trump the bad? I'm not sure. It's a teenager, remember. It's neither predictable nor well-disciplined. For it to mature successfully, I submit, the facts outlined above need to be faced and the challenges addressed.

Why bother? Because this kid matters a lot. He points the way to a brighter and very different future for American public education itself, a "tight-loose" structure in which results count hugely but schools can produce them through the structures and means they see fit, in which "systems of schools" replace "school systems," in which flexibility triumphs over bureaucracy, competition supersedes monopoly, and consumers wield at least as much influence over their children's education as do providers.

The fate of the charter movement is thus enormously important to the future of American K-12 education. But this teenager could end up in jail or out on the streets instead of college. He and those who care about him have some heavy lifting ahead.

Nothing is more challenging than opening a charter school except for closing it, which can be a public relations disaster. Of course, not closing a failing school can also be a disaster when it implodes: Recall the scandal that accompanied the shuttering of the California Charter Academy this past summer, leaving thousands of students in the lurch. But, as Education Week notes, "most authorizers who take their responsibilities seriously agree that weeding out bad schools is a vital component of the autonomy-for-accountability bargain at the heart of the charter school concept" and are now "getting serious about sharing their experiences and finding better ways to pull the plug." According to Mark Cannon, executive director of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, authorizers are working on ways "to develop a triage team that swoops in quickly before an unscrupulous operator is able to do damage" so that they can protect both "the kids and the money." Of course, one major obstacle to closing weak charter schools is parents. Notes Jim Goenner, head of the charter schools office at Central Michigan University and one of America's foremost authorizers, "When you preach the accountability message - if they don't perform, we'll shut them down - it's a complete red flag to parents. Parents of the kids say, 'If the school's not performing, change the leadership, don't put my child on the street.'" So the challenge becomes convincing the public that sometimes closing a school is the right thing to do.

"Charter authorizers eye rules on closings," Caroline Hendrie, Education Week, February 2, 2005

Two related stories this week touch on issues of school leadership and reform, in particular, who's in charge of setting school policy and who should be. In the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina) school district, Superintendent James Pughsley wants principals to have the flexibility and autonomy to run their schools as they see fit. Toward that end, he hopes to institute a new plan to draw stronger leaders to struggling schools by offering incentives - in the form of pay and increased autonomy - to take on these high-risk positions. According to the Charlotte Observer, the district would use "national headhunters and hefty signing and retention bonuses to recruit principals for high-poverty schools" and would give these new school leaders the flexibility to replace a "high percentage" of the staff, by firing ineffective teachers or transferring "decent teachers" who aren't succeeding in that type of school. In addition, the plan would offer incentives to teachers who choose to work in these schools. By contrast, in Rockford, Illinois, Superintendent Dennis Thompson seems hell-bent on consolidating power for himself, rather than affording successful principals the freedom to set policy for their schools. Specifically, he decided to transfer Tiffany Parker, the principal at an elementary school with a student body that is 80 percent nonwhite and 85 percent poor, because she dared use "direct instruction" and phonics instead of the district's mandated "balanced literacy" approach to teaching reading. Never mind that, on a reading test, Parker's third graders trailed only those third graders from a district school for the gifted, or that parents and students welcomed Parker's approach. According to Samuel Freedman, "instead of serving as beacons for what is possible, the school and its principal have been portrayed as impediments to progress." In fact, Thompson admits that "this is not a curriculum issue along with [Parker]. It is a leadership issue. Good leaders need to be good followers first." Read that sentence again and ask yourself: is this the thinking we want from the top of our school systems?

"A fight over reading instruction in a district weary of change," by Samuel Freedman, New York Times, February 2, 2005

"CMS chief's reform plan to be unveiled tonight," by Ann Doss Helms, Charlotte Observer, January 25, 2005 (registration required)

This week, the U.S. Department of Education confirmed in writing the message it conveyed to North Dakota educators in December: that state's plan for designating elementary teachers as "highly qualified" does not meet NCLB requirements. In December, legislators were "shocked" that their plan was not in compliance with NCLB, despite an earlier warning from the state's own Department of Public Instruction. Now it seems that education officials and lawmakers are beginning to heed the ruling and tweak their "highly qualified teacher" definition. It remains to be seen just how serious they are, and whether they will seek to exploit some of the loopholes that have allowed other states to maximize the number of existing teachers who are labeled "highly qualified" even though they're not really.

"State must comply with federal education ruling," by Sheena Dooley, Bismarck Tribune, January 25, 2005

A local district administrator tells the Woonsocket (Rhode Island) Call that the district has cancelled the annual spelling bee because of . . . the No Child Left Behind act. You overlooked that NCLB spelling bee ban, huh? So did we, but Woonsocket assistant superintendent Linda Newman told reporters that the spelling bee doesn't pass NCLB muster since "it's about one kid winning, several making it to the top and leaving all the others behind. That's contrary to No Child Left Behind." Give Ms. Newman points for plodding literal-mindedness. As you know, NCLB has been blamed for the demise of social studies, for cheating teachers, and even for hastening the Rapture. But when it goes after the spelling bee, that's just too far!

"School district cancels spelling bee," by Ronald R. Blais, Woonsocket Call, January 27, 2005

Alexander Russo, The Progressive Policy Institute
February 2005

The charter school scene in Ohio is akin to the classic spaghetti Western, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." As Alexander Russo reports, the "Good" in the Buckeye State's charter saga are: politicians who put themselves on the line to create space for charter schools in a hostile political environment, decent school operators who have started schools with minimal taxpayer support in some of the state's toughest neighborhoods,  families who elect to enroll their children in these schools, and the 60,000+ students now attending one of the state's 230+ charter schools. The "Bad" include the Ohio Federation of Teachers (OFT) and Ohio Education Association (OEA). Their weapons of choice are the lawsuit (both in state and federal court), the public smear campaign ("these bad [charter] schools are like 700-pound hogs at the dinner table eating everything in sight," seethed the Cleveland Teachers Union president in 2003), and relentless legislative action to curtail and set back charter schools. The "Ugly" are the few charter school operators who are cheating children by offering an abysmal education while paying themselves handsomely, the ineptness and inertia that prevents authorizers from closing bad schools, and paucity of decent data that prevents supporters and opponents alike from really knowing what's right and what's wrong with charter schools. In the movie "Good" eventually beats both "Bad" and "Ugly," but it's fascinating to watch the complexities of the struggle play out. The hope in Ohio is that Good is starting to win. A victory for the good guys in Ohio's charter school tale would mean a victory for the state's neediest children, and that really would be a great story. To read PPI's report, and Russo's insightful policy recommendations, click here.

Commission for High School Improvement
January 2005

This January 2005 report from the Colorado Commission for High School Improvement, a project of the Colorado Children's Campaign, is very short and, within its limits, an interesting take on how to reshape the state's approach to high-school education. And it's much needed for, while Colorado has lots of well-educated adults who arrived from elsewhere, its own track record in secondary education is weak. This commission is a cross section of the public-school establishment, however, and that helps account for its limits. Most striking to me: they have a very interesting section on expanding school choice and alternatives, and another one on enhancing "school-level flexibility." Yet so far as I can tell they never even once use the phrase "charter school" despite Colorado's sizable and rather successful charter movement. Could it be because most commission members represent establishment organizations? What they recommend is worthy, as far as it goes. One wishes it went further. See for yourself here.

Lisa Snell, Reason Foundation
January 2005

This short but useful report exposes yet another game states play to avoid the spirit of No Child Left Behind: finding ways to label few or none of their schools as "persistently dangerous" - partly because students are supposed to be given exit visas from such schools. In 2003-2004, if you believe these state reports, only 52 schools in America were dangerous, including none in New York City or California, not even the schools where "three male students . . . forced a girl into a closet and sexually assaulted her," or "a student . . . smashed his ex-girlfriend's head through a trophy case." (Click here for more.) Though this report won't solve this particular NCLB problem, other than perhaps to shame the least honest states, it does offer a number of suggestions to reduce violence in schools - the point, after all, of this provision. A starting point is to create incentives for schools to reduce crime. If better data were available to parents about crime at each school, and if parents were able to exercise real choice among schools, market forces would focus schools' attention on this problem. For school leaders already focused, Snell suggests the "broken windows" approach that has been credited with reducing ordinary crime in New York City: promptly address the little things that go wrong so as to create an environment less conducive to more serious crimes. There's no proof yet that this works in schools, but it could hardly be worse than the usual approach, which is to adopt every crime prevention fad or violence-reduction nostrum and add massive amounts of security. Snell also argues for smaller schools, which are usually less violent. Of course the data are muddied by the number of small private and parochial schools, but the results seem to hold even after controlling for factors like poverty. Whichever strategy is chosen, we owe it to our children to reduce the 5.4 percent of students who skipped school for safety concerns and the 9 percent who were threatened or injured by a weapon in school in 2003. This accessible and useful report is available online at www.rppi.org/ps330.pdf.

Bryan Hassel, Charter School Leadership Council
February 2005

The short answer to the implied question in this report's title is: not enough but much of what we know is brighter than the New York Times wants you to think. Bryan Hassel of Public Impact looked at 38 studies of charter school achievement that meet certain criteria for timeliness, analytic seriousness, and scope. His report finds that the studies are all over the map, both in their usefulness and their findings. Some have serious methodological shortcomings (especially in looking at aggregated school performance rather than disaggregated student performance). About half, including the infamous AFT study from last August are less-useful snapshots rather than appraisals of performance over time. Of the 21 that do look at data over time, 12 find charters outpacing public school achievement gains generally or for specific at-risk populations, five call it a draw, and three say charters are behind. A murky picture, though on balance encouraging, and we should take to heart Hassel's call for more and better data and analysis of charter school performance. You can find the full report athttp://www.charterschoolleadershipcouncil.org/PDF/Paper.pdf.