The Education Gadfly Weekly

School-choice advocates have touted results of this recent study—a joint publication of the Brown Center on Education Policy (Brookings) and the Program on Education Policy and Governance (Harvard). And they have every right to: The random-assignment study (a gold standard of research often elusive in school-choice research) boasts some strong findings for choice supporters. The study began in 1997 when Harvard’s Paul Peterson began tracking students who applied for a new privately funded voucher program in Gotham. Created after Cardinal John O’Connor invited then-school chancellor Rudy Crew to “send the city’s most troubled youth to Catholic schools,” the program offered three-year vouchers of $1,400 per year to 1,300 low-income youngsters. Peterson tracked participants as well as those who did not win the lottery. Fifteen years later, Peterson, along with Brookings’s Matt Chingos, show that black elementary school students who won the voucher lottery in New York City were 7 percentage points (or 20 percent) more likely to attend college than their peers who didn’t. Moreover, the percentage of black voucher students who attended a selective college was more than double that of black non-voucher students. (There were no significant differences for white or Hispanic pupils.) Not too shabby for a program that cost just $4,200 per pupil over three years.

SOURCE: Mathew M. Chingos and Paul E. Peterson, The Effects of School Vouchers on College Enrollment: Experimental Evidence from New York City, (Washington, D.C.: Brown Center for Education Policy at Brookings; Cambridge, MA: Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, August 2012).

A version of this analysis appeared on the Choice Words blog.

This Cato Institute analysis—conducted by RAND economist Richard Buddin—conveys a stark message: “Charter schools took approximately 190,000 students from private schools between 2000 and 2008.” Cato’s Adam Schaeffer said of the findings: The shift is “wreaking havoc on private education” while only marginally improving public schools. Overall, Buddin found that 8 percent of elementary pupils in charter schools and 11 percent of middle and high school students came to their charters from private schools. The numbers were bigger in urban areas, where 32 percent of the elementary-charter enrollment was drawn from the private sector (and 23 and 15 percent of middle and high school enrollments, respectively). And they were worse still for urban Catholic schools (though enrollment in Catholics started declining before the first charters appeared). Interestingly, the effect of charter schools on private-school enrollment is much stronger in states with strong charter laws (as gauged by the Center for Education Reform). Urban charters in states with strong laws, for example, draw 34 percent of their elementary enrollment from private schools. In states with weak laws, that percentage drops to 7. Overall, Buddin concludes that this private-to-charter school shift left taxpayers with a $1.8 billion larger education bill annually from 2000 to 2008. From the parents’ standpoint, however, charters are obviously cheaper. Hence Cato’s Schaeffer would like states to make more tax-credit scholarships available. Such programs have been growing, however, even without his advice: Publicly funded private-school options today enroll 210,000 students nationwide, a number that has increased by 25 percent over the last five years and which exceeds the number that private schools bled to charters in the time frame Buddin reviewed.

A version of this analysis appeared on the Choice Words blog.

SOURCE: Richard Buddin, The Impact of Charter Schools on Public and Private School Enrollment (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, August 28, 2012).

Fifty-four: That’s the percentage of students who took the ACT math exam last spring and failed to meet its benchmark score. (That benchmark signifies that a student attaining it has a 50 percent chance of earning a B, or a 75 percent chance of earning a C, in a credit-bearing college course.) The statistics are a bit better in English (33 percent fell below the ACT benchmark) and reading (48 percent). In science, however, they’re worse: Fully 69 percent of 2012 test-takers failed to meet the ACT benchmark score in this subject. A mere quarter of those who sat for the ACT met the organization’s benchmarks in all four subjects (as has been the case in years prior). Keep in mind, too, that for the most part only kids who plan to attend college even bother with the ACT. Unlike NAEP, in other words, it’s a selective sample of the high school population (and even NAEP omits dropouts). These bleak results—and the uphill battle they portend—are important to keep in mind as the U.S. embarks upon implementation of the Common Core academic standards, which are reportedly aligned with the ACT benchmarks. A very steep slope awaits us.

SOURCE: ACT, The Condition of College & Career Readiness, (Iowa City, IA: ACT, 2012).

The nation must “[demand] the best teacher in every classroom in America,” bellowed Chris Christie from the podium in Tampa on Tuesday evening. But that’s not what it’s getting today. This Bellwether analysis appraises the teacher-effectiveness laws, policies, and regulations in twenty-one states (including New Jersey) based on thirteen criteria, including: frequency of evaluation, teacher and principal dismissal procedures, pay-for-performance, and tenure policies. The evidence is sobering: Nearly half the states analyzed earn less than half the possible points. Top-scoring Indiana (our education-reform idol) garnered 11.75 of 13. (Louisiana, Florida, and Colorado also fared well; Ohio scored in the low-middle range: 5.5 out of 13.) Note, though, that this analysis addresses only state policies—which might unfairly dock forward-thinking jurisdictions with strong local control cultures or constitutional provisions that limit the scope of state authority. For those in need of help navigating smart teacher policy—and looking for best-practice solutions from across state lines—this report is a worthwhile resource. (Though all should also investigate NCTQ’s comprehensive yearbook on the subject—which catalogs teacher policy in all fifty-one of our nation’s jurisdictions.)

SOURCE: Sara Mead, Recent State Action on Teacher Effectiveness: What’s in State Laws and Regulations (Washington, D.C.: Bellwether Partners, August 2012).

Mike and Adam discuss the future of Catholic education and what role vouchers may play. Amber analyzes how the public sees all sorts of education issues.

Amber's Research Minute

PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools

The plight of low-performing students dominates our education news and policies. Yet America’s high flyers demand innovative, rigorous schooling as well, particularly if the country is to sharpen its economic and scientific edge. Motivated, high-ability youngsters can be served in myriad ways by public education, including schools that specialize in them. In a new book from Princeton University Press, Exam Schools: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools, co-authors Chester Finn and Jessica Hockett identify 165 such high schools across America.

In this Fordham LIVE! conversation, they and others will examine some of the issues that selective-admission public high schools pose. Who attends them? How are their students selected? Are such schools the future of gifted education or do they unfairly advantage a select few at the expense of most students? Just how different are they, anyway?

Eek. Vouchers + creationism = liberal horror, teacher-union field-day, and at least a small risk to the school-choice movement. Politically and strategically, it would be so much simpler if those “voucher schools” would just behave themselves!

If only Michaelangelo had taken on voucher accountability too.  Photo by ideacreamanuelaPps

But how upset should one really be about the AP report from Louisiana that some of the private schools participating in the Pelican State’s new voucher program “teach creationism and reject evolution”?

State Superintendent of Education John White offered the correct policy response: All voucher students must participate in the state assessments, which include science. “If students are failing the test, we’re going to intervene, and the test measures [their understanding of] evolution.” In other words, the schools can do what they like but if their voucher-bearing students don’t learn enough to pass the state tests, the state will do something about it—ultimately (under Louisiana regulations) eliminating those schools from eligibility to participate in the program.

That ought to be the policy response to everything that district and charter schools do too: “You’re free to operate your school as you see fit (within the bounds of health-and-safety rules) but you’re also accountable for your students’ results, which we—the state—will check on via our standards and assessments.”

I recognize that it’s an imperfect system, since a kid can get some questions wrong but still pass the test—and what if the questions he answers incorrectly include all that touch on evolution? But that can happen even in a hyper-regulatory regimen where the state tries to prescribe curriculum and pedagogy in detail. I’m reminded of the old Sy Fliegel quip: “Define ‘taught’ as used in the following sentence: ‘I taught her to swim but every time she gets into the water she sinks to the bottom of the pool.’”

I’m not limiting this discussion to science either. Results-based accountability applies to every subject that the state deems important enough to have standards and assessments for.

If we can wrap our minds around this core proposition—that accountability is about outcomes, not inputs, practices, curriculum, staffing arrangements, budgets, uses of time, etc.—and the related proposition that families have the right to choose the schools they think best for their daughters and sons, we can save ourselves an awful lot of grief, not to mention many regulations and much bureaucracy. We would then actually allow schools to be different from each other in a dozen ways—and encourage those running the schools to decide just how they’ll differ.

Science isn’t the only subject that elicits curricular controversy.

Yes, I’m dismayed and saddened that some schools teach creationism (or what’s known as “intelligent design,” a sort of creationism-lite). It’s not correct science and it won’t do those youngsters any good in later life. But it’s not just private schools that occasionally do this. The Louisiana legislature in 2008 gave teachers in that state’s public schools the legal right to raise questions about evolution—and a dozen or more states have K-12 science standards that pussyfoot around the topic.

The plain fact is that a lot of Americans take the Bible literally and therefore have doubts about scientific explanations of the origins of the universe and of the people who inhabit this planet. Those Americans have their full share of political, cultural, and moral influence and they’re as serious as anyone about the education of their children. It’s no surprise that many states—and more than a few educators—are wary of mandating that those scientific explanations be taught in school as if they were, ahem, gospel.

Such avoidance will get harder in states that eventually adopt the Next Generation” (a.k.a., national) Science Standards now under development by Achieve—assuming, of course, that suitable assessments come along that are well-aligned with those standards. Although Fordham reviewers found plenty to fret about in the standards’ first draft, its handling of Darwin and evolution is scientifically accurate and intellectually appropriate. (They were somewhat less thrilled with the draft’s treatment of today’s other touchy science issue, “climate change.”)

Let’s recognize, too, that science isn’t the only subject that elicits curricular controversy, nor the only one that lends itself to what I regard as academic folly in public and private schools alike. Political correctness, cultural pluralism and idiotic ed-school-fostered instructional ideas all contribute to such foolishness. Consider, for example:

• Invented spelling. Particularly in the earliest grades, any number of teachers encourage their pupils to spell words however they wish.


• “Whole language” reading. This is surely the most widespread of our K-12 curricular follies, vastly more damaging to the kids’ and the nation’s futures than teachers raising doubts about evolution.


• Bilingual education. What better way to bar the door to success in America than to trap immigrant youngsters with only the language of their homeland and fail to ensure that they become fluent in English?


• Ebonics and such. These language-arts absurdities haven’t had tons of attention lately but they still rear their heads from time to time. Just days ago, the Detroit School Board hired an interim superintendent of schools who promised, inter alia, “The re-institution of Ebonics-anecdotal instruction in the English and Social Studies curricula and the re-emphasis of Afro-centered instruction in those curricula.”


• “Expanding environments” in social studies. Don’t tell kids about the Civil War or the Equator; introduce them to “my friend the postman.”


• “Fuzzy math.” It doesn’t matter whether you get the right answer so long as you tackle the problem in an interesting way.

One could easily go on. The point, of course, is that curricular craziness, often in defiance of scientific truth as well as common sense, is by no means confined to the science classroom or to private schools. In fact, most of the time it’s paid for with public dollars.

School choice doesn’t solve these problems. It does, however, let kids with wise parents avoid them. And it lets other kinds of parents tailor their children’s education as they think best, even when that includes elements that I find unproven at best, outrageous at worst.

Because K-12 education is also a public good, though, the state has an obligation to enforce minimum standards of learning for its young people, at least in those curricular realms that it deems essential to an adequately educated society. The most obvious and even-handed way to do this is through statewide academic standards and assessments in core subjects. These apply to public schools. They should—and in Louisiana do—apply to “voucher pupils” in private schools. And (thanks to compulsory-attendance laws and school-licensing criteria) they could apply to private schools, home schools, and more, though I acknowledge that state officials need to be judicious in how they approach this.

Whether such officials can navigate these curricular and political cross-currents remains to be seen. But let’s do, please, be clear about this: It’s as big an issue for public education as it is for private education and it really has almost nothing to do with vouchers!

A week after President Obama reinserted education into the 2012 presidential campaign by attacking Mitt Romney on spending and class size, Republicans kept schools squarely in the spotlight at their Tampa convention. In his keynote address, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie gleefully recounted his record of taking on the Garden State’s powerful teacher unions, detailing his success at securing meaningful reforms to teacher-retirement benefits and tenure. Jeb Bush speaks this evening, and those in the know say it will mostly be about education reform. And then there’s a refreshingly reasonable GOP education platform, featuring support for expanded school choice, merit pay, and high academic standards (and no mention of hare-brained schemes, like scrapping the Department of Education, which dogged the Republican primary). After a decade spent avoiding education (and the mixed legacy of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind act) in national politics, Republicans appear poised to position themselves as the education-reform party once again. It remains to be seen whether this will prove an effective political strategy—Obama’s record on education, if not his campaign’s recent statements on the subject, is fairly strong—all Americans stand to win if both parties engage in a spirited, substantive debate on the issue.

RELATED ARTICLE: “Republican Education Platform 2012 Emphasizes School Choice, Teacher Accountability,” Huffington Post, August 29, 2012

For seventeen years, the five-million strong National PTA urged state governments to give only local school boards the authority to grant or deny charter-school applications. That changed this month, when the group’s board struck that restriction from its platform and extended its support to “all authorizing bodies.” The National PTA says it wants to be more relevant in charter-school policy, and its old position conflicted with the plain fact that local PTAs are increasingly working with charters authorized by universities, states, or independent bodies. This is a big leap for a group that education analyst Thomas Toch once accused of being “out of step with many parents’ demands for change in public education today” and that has lobbied alongside teacher unions for decades. Of course this change in the national stance isn’t binding on state chapters that have taken contrary positions. Georgia and Washington PTAs, for instance, have opposed recent efforts to create state-level commissions that would have the power to authorize charters: They still want to keep oversight (i.e., power) over all charters “local.” (In the case of Washington State, there are no charters of any sort, thanks in part to past PTA opposition.) But let’s at least acknowledge this welcome crack in the national glacier.

RELATED ARTICLE:“National PTA Revises Policy on Charter Schools,” by Sean Cavanaugh, Education Week, August 27, 2012

A version of this analysis appeared on the Choice Words blog.

Eduwonk Andy Rotherham justifiably ripped Virginia in Sunday’s Washington Post for its “soft bigotry” of setting different goals for students based on race, ethnicity, and income as part of its No Child Left Behind waiver. While Gadfly is relieved that state and federal officials announced yesterday that they will rework the goals, the episode should serve as a reminder that increased federal flexibility, while welcome on many fronts, can also undo a decade’s worth of accountability reform.

What do principals at some of America’s best public schools do when their plans run into red tape? Many simply ignore the peskiest rules, Jay Mathews notes. Districts should heed the successes of such school leaders and remove inappropriate  requirements so that dynamic principals don’t need to break them in the first place.

Bedeviled by a school-attendance-data scandal that seems to get worse by the day and has already begun to wreak havoc by delaying the release of school-report cards for 2011-2012, the Ohio Department of Education is likely to ask the legislature for greater authority to monitor schools. Centralization rarely pays dividends in education—ensuring accurate reporting of data that underpins all efforts at accountability is one of the exceptions.

It’s been called “one of the most brazen cheating scandals in the nation.”

The Crescendo charter-school network in southern California combined strict academics with arts and music, and its schools’ past test scores were impressive—but, apparently, tainted. According to a recent Los Angeles Times report that cited two separate investigations, principals of the Los Angeles-area schools—following orders from the founder and CEO—gave copies of upcoming state tests to teachers to study, and perhaps also to students to practice and prep using actual questions from the test itself.

Cheating scandals won't stop until we learn something from them.  Photo by Casey Serin

The investigations blamed John Allen, Crescendo’s founder and CEO. According to the L.A. Times, “Allen’s biggest fixation was test scores.” Sources noted that he was driven by a desire to be “better, better, better, best.” At one point, he reportedly told the staff at one school, “You better score a 900 this year” (out of 1,000 points possible on California’s Academic Performance Index). Apparently, there were threats to principals and teachers if they didn’t “get with the program.”

As word leaked and an investigation began, Crescendo’s teachers were allegedly told to deny having seen the test: A cover-up was added to the original misdeeds.

Fallout

In the end, all six of Crescendo’s schools were shut down, 1,400 students were forced to find new schools to attend, and teachers lost their jobs.

Unfortunately, this was no isolated incident in American education. Testing scandals have dogged Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, while allegations of improprieties have also tainted schools in Florida, Texas, Michigan, Maryland, and elsewhere.

Cheating is, of course, not only a staff matter. Large numbers of high school students admit to cheating (e.g., cheating on tests, plagiarizing, copying homework, and more) according to surveys from Rutgers and elsewhere. Leaders, however, bear ultimate responsibility for the behavior that occurs in their organizations—from hiring people of character to addressing ethical questions and violations when they arise. Too often, though, we just shake our heads in disgust at evidence of cheating instead of pausing to distill the lessons and preventive steps for administrators, authorizers, teachers, and anyone else in a position to have stopped it. As a result, the cycle of scandal repeats, ad infinitum.

What could school leaders learn from the Crescendo debacle?

Leadership lessons

1. It’s not just about results; it is also about how you achieve them. As we detail in our new book, Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations, excellence alone (e.g., high test scores) is not enough. We need enduring and ethical excellence—the “triple crown” of leadership.

Leaders of schools and school systems—charter networks most definitely included—surely must insist upon good results, including high levels of academic achievement and growth for all students. But if leaders don’t address the ethical imperative along with the excellence imperative—and declare again and again that the former cannot be trumped by the latter—they risk sending the wrong signals.

“We need to a get a score of 900 this year,” Allen reportedly declared. “Do whatever it takes to make your numbers this quarter,” the CEO says, so the team borrows sales from the next quarter to hit today’s targets, and then feels the squeeze even harder the next time. And so on. Whether in the classroom or the boardroom, it’s an unsustainable shell game.

2. It’s not just about the leader. Leadership is a group performance, not a solo act. We cannot just look to the top. Teachers and other staff must step up and fight for the ethical imperative by “leading from below.” As such, they become “stewards” of a culture of character in the school. If not, they become complicit in the transgressions. It is not okay for teachers to wipe their hands and leave it to the administration.

Leadership is a group performance, not a solo act.

In the case of the Crescendo cheating conspiracy, principals and teachers went along with Allen’s scheme. The truth might not have emerged without the courage of whistleblowers, a group of teachers who reported the matter to the L.A. Unified School District, which authorized the charter schools. It was a brave act of ethical leadership in a toxic environment. We need more such acts—and more teachers who accept the responsibility of leadership, even when they lack formal authority or the official title of “leader.” One reason such scandals are widespread is  because people are good at rationalizing bad behavior: “It’s not my call”; “I was just following orders”; “everybody’s doing it”; “the students need to learn this stuff anyway.”

3. Ethical violations warrant decisive action. According to the investigations, Allen admitted cheating to the Crescendo board president, saying “he got carried away,” yet the board did not fire him immediately. In the end, however, district officials sanctioned Allen, suspended most principals, mandated ethics training, and closed the schools.

In the absence of decisive action from the Crescendo board—an egregious failure of leadership that worsened the scandal—action was left to an outside entity (the charter authorizer). But with effective internal stewardship (from teachers, other staff, and the Crescendo board) earlier on, actions by external stewards (district officials) might not have been required.

In an age awash in letdowns and scandals, educators and education leaders—principals, superintendents, charter-school CEOs, teachers, and on—would be wise to re-learn these lessons and apply them with greater care and fortitude going forward.

Bob Vanourek and Gregg Vanourek are authors of the new book, Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations. (Twitter: @TripleCrownLead.) Gregg is a former vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

The plight of low-performing students dominates our education news and policies. Yet America’s high flyers demand innovative, rigorous schooling as well, particularly if the country is to sharpen its economic and scientific edge. Motivated, high-ability youngsters can be served in myriad ways by public education, including schools that specialize in them. In a new book from Princeton University Press, Exam Schools: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools, co-authors Chester Finn and Jessica Hockett identify 165 such high schools across America.

In this Fordham LIVE! conversation, they and others will examine some of the issues that selective-admission public high schools pose. Who attends them? How are their students selected? Are such schools the future of gifted education or do they unfairly advantage a select few at the expense of most students? Just how different are they, anyway?

The plight of low-performing students dominates our education news and policies. Yet America’s high flyers demand innovative, rigorous schooling as well, particularly if the country is to sharpen its economic and scientific edge. Motivated, high-ability youngsters can be served in myriad ways by public education, including schools that specialize in them. In a new book from Princeton University Press, Exam Schools: Inside America's Most Selective Public High Schools, co-authors Chester Finn and Jessica Hockett identify 165 such high schools across America.

In this Fordham LIVE! conversation, they and others will examine some of the issues that selective-admission public high schools pose. Who attends them? How are their students selected? Are such schools the future of gifted education or do they unfairly advantage a select few at the expense of most students? Just how different are they, anyway?

School-choice advocates have touted results of this recent study—a joint publication of the Brown Center on Education Policy (Brookings) and the Program on Education Policy and Governance (Harvard). And they have every right to: The random-assignment study (a gold standard of research often elusive in school-choice research) boasts some strong findings for choice supporters. The study began in 1997 when Harvard’s Paul Peterson began tracking students who applied for a new privately funded voucher program in Gotham. Created after Cardinal John O’Connor invited then-school chancellor Rudy Crew to “send the city’s most troubled youth to Catholic schools,” the program offered three-year vouchers of $1,400 per year to 1,300 low-income youngsters. Peterson tracked participants as well as those who did not win the lottery. Fifteen years later, Peterson, along with Brookings’s Matt Chingos, show that black elementary school students who won the voucher lottery in New York City were 7 percentage points (or 20 percent) more likely to attend college than their peers who didn’t. Moreover, the percentage of black voucher students who attended a selective college was more than double that of black non-voucher students. (There were no significant differences for white or Hispanic pupils.) Not too shabby for a program that cost just $4,200 per pupil over three years.

SOURCE: Mathew M. Chingos and Paul E. Peterson, The Effects of School Vouchers on College Enrollment: Experimental Evidence from New York City, (Washington, D.C.: Brown Center for Education Policy at Brookings; Cambridge, MA: Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, August 2012).

A version of this analysis appeared on the Choice Words blog.

The nation must “[demand] the best teacher in every classroom in America,” bellowed Chris Christie from the podium in Tampa on Tuesday evening. But that’s not what it’s getting today. This Bellwether analysis appraises the teacher-effectiveness laws, policies, and regulations in twenty-one states (including New Jersey) based on thirteen criteria, including: frequency of evaluation, teacher and principal dismissal procedures, pay-for-performance, and tenure policies. The evidence is sobering: Nearly half the states analyzed earn less than half the possible points. Top-scoring Indiana (our education-reform idol) garnered 11.75 of 13. (Louisiana, Florida, and Colorado also fared well; Ohio scored in the low-middle range: 5.5 out of 13.) Note, though, that this analysis addresses only state policies—which might unfairly dock forward-thinking jurisdictions with strong local control cultures or constitutional provisions that limit the scope of state authority. For those in need of help navigating smart teacher policy—and looking for best-practice solutions from across state lines—this report is a worthwhile resource. (Though all should also investigate NCTQ’s comprehensive yearbook on the subject—which catalogs teacher policy in all fifty-one of our nation’s jurisdictions.)

SOURCE: Sara Mead, Recent State Action on Teacher Effectiveness: What’s in State Laws and Regulations (Washington, D.C.: Bellwether Partners, August 2012).

This Cato Institute analysis—conducted by RAND economist Richard Buddin—conveys a stark message: “Charter schools took approximately 190,000 students from private schools between 2000 and 2008.” Cato’s Adam Schaeffer said of the findings: The shift is “wreaking havoc on private education” while only marginally improving public schools. Overall, Buddin found that 8 percent of elementary pupils in charter schools and 11 percent of middle and high school students came to their charters from private schools. The numbers were bigger in urban areas, where 32 percent of the elementary-charter enrollment was drawn from the private sector (and 23 and 15 percent of middle and high school enrollments, respectively). And they were worse still for urban Catholic schools (though enrollment in Catholics started declining before the first charters appeared). Interestingly, the effect of charter schools on private-school enrollment is much stronger in states with strong charter laws (as gauged by the Center for Education Reform). Urban charters in states with strong laws, for example, draw 34 percent of their elementary enrollment from private schools. In states with weak laws, that percentage drops to 7. Overall, Buddin concludes that this private-to-charter school shift left taxpayers with a $1.8 billion larger education bill annually from 2000 to 2008. From the parents’ standpoint, however, charters are obviously cheaper. Hence Cato’s Schaeffer would like states to make more tax-credit scholarships available. Such programs have been growing, however, even without his advice: Publicly funded private-school options today enroll 210,000 students nationwide, a number that has increased by 25 percent over the last five years and which exceeds the number that private schools bled to charters in the time frame Buddin reviewed.

A version of this analysis appeared on the Choice Words blog.

SOURCE: Richard Buddin, The Impact of Charter Schools on Public and Private School Enrollment (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, August 28, 2012).

Fifty-four: That’s the percentage of students who took the ACT math exam last spring and failed to meet its benchmark score. (That benchmark signifies that a student attaining it has a 50 percent chance of earning a B, or a 75 percent chance of earning a C, in a credit-bearing college course.) The statistics are a bit better in English (33 percent fell below the ACT benchmark) and reading (48 percent). In science, however, they’re worse: Fully 69 percent of 2012 test-takers failed to meet the ACT benchmark score in this subject. A mere quarter of those who sat for the ACT met the organization’s benchmarks in all four subjects (as has been the case in years prior). Keep in mind, too, that for the most part only kids who plan to attend college even bother with the ACT. Unlike NAEP, in other words, it’s a selective sample of the high school population (and even NAEP omits dropouts). These bleak results—and the uphill battle they portend—are important to keep in mind as the U.S. embarks upon implementation of the Common Core academic standards, which are reportedly aligned with the ACT benchmarks. A very steep slope awaits us.

SOURCE: ACT, The Condition of College & Career Readiness, (Iowa City, IA: ACT, 2012).