Sorry, Dr. Ravitch, but voucher transparency still exists in Wisconsin

yes Adam Emerson / November 8, 2012

The Milwaukee voucher program remains one of the most tightly-regulated school choice programs of its kind in the nation, and it deserves better than the sloppy conclusions of Diane Ravitch. In a blog post earlier this week, Ravitch noted—correctly—that tougher standards applied to the Wisconsin state test went badly for all Milwaukee students, especially voucher recipients (just 10 percent of whom were proficient in reading, compared to 15 percent of their district peers). But then she reports that legislation expanding the Milwaukee choice program to Racine absolved private schools of the requirement that they administer the state tests to their voucher-bearing students. “Therefore,” she writes, “their proficiency rate will not be known or reported.”

Wisconsin has made a lot of progress in holding its voucher program more accountable.

This is absolutely untrue. For the past few years, students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program have had to take the Wisconsin Knowledge Concepts Examination (WKCE), which is the same test administered to all public school students. When the Wisconsin legislature expanded the voucher program to Racine last year, nothing changed this requirement. In fact, test results for private schools in Racine and Milwaukee, as well as for public schools throughout Wisconsin, were recently recalculated to comply with a higher standard of proficiency. Those results are available to the public here—and they’ll continue to be made public.

What has changed is the release of a report card that assessed public schools using measures

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Sorry, Dr. Ravitch, but voucher transparency still exists in Wisconsin

Better oversight could have weeded out a charter school scandal

yes Adam Emerson / November 1, 2012

It may be tempting for legislators to point to the scandalous payments made to an Orlando charter school principal as a reason to tighten regulations governing all charters. In the last week, we’ve learned that the principal of the now-closed NorthStar High Charter in Orlando not only received a $519,000 contractual payout from her board, her compensation exceeded the amount the school had spent on classroom instruction. (NorthStar closed before the Orange County School Board could shut it down for poor academic performance.)

Are school boards are doing enough to provide oversight of the charters in their portfolios?

But now might be a better time to set aside legislative energy and ask whether school boards are doing enough to provide oversight of the charters in their portfolios (as in many states, only school districts can authorize charter schools in Florida).

It may seem hard to hold the Orange County School Board accountable in this case. According to one official at the Florida Department of Education, the last couple of financial reports that NorthStar High sent to the school district showed that the principal earned about $73,000 a year. But her actual pay was much more. Last week, the Orlando Sentinel unearthed details showing that salary, stipends, and bonuses last year brought Principal Kelly Young’s annual pay to about $305,000.

Why would the district question the charter school’s own reporting? Because there is enough information in independent audits of the school to question

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Better oversight could have weeded out a charter school scandal

What “local control” means in the Peach State

yes Adam Emerson / October 26, 2012

On Election Day, Georgia voters will get to decide whether their state can authorize and oversee charter schools, a power that rests almost exclusively with locally elected school boards. Of course, school districts have urged Georgians to maintain the status quo by voting no on the constitutional amendment before them, contending that a new state bureaucracy would be unanswerable to their needs and concerns. But voters should consider what “local control” of public education has meant in the Peach State.

Voters should consider what “local control” of public education has meant in the Peach State.

Fundamentally, it has empowered most of the state’s larger school districts to keep charter growth (and, therefore, school choice) moderate at best. Nowhere has that been more evident than in Gwinnett County, Georgia’s largest school system (and the thirteenth largest in the nation) where charter students make up less than 1 percent of the public school population.

Perhaps Gwinnett was on Republican state Senator Fran Millar’s mind when he wrote recently in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution that “there are areas of this state where local school boards will not approve any charter school.” But Gwinnett is hardly alone, and that is why voters should say yes to a charter commission independent of Georgia-style “local control.” Promising charter providers shouldn’t have to depend only on the whims of a recalcitrant school board.

Consider that:

• In Gwinnett County, the 1,500 students that presently attend charter schools make up 0.9 percent of

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  Category: Charters & Choice

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  What “local control” means in the Peach State

Where is the promised leadership on school choice in Pennsylvania?

yes Adam Emerson / October 22, 2012

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett promised a school-choice juggernaut in the Keystone State when he campaigned for office two years ago. Not only has no crusade has ever come to pass, Corbett and the GOP-led state assembly let a modest charter school reform bill languish in the House recently without a vote. This should have been an opportunity for the state’s executive and legislative leadership to pay more than lip service to education reform. But, again, they failed.

This should have been an opportunity for the state’s executive and legislative leadership to pay more than lip service to education reform.

What’s worse, the bill the House killed had already been weakened through compromise. The effort to create an independent state board to authorize charters was removed to accommodate complaints for local school boards, which—with the exception of virtual schools—remain the sole charter authorizers in Pennsylvania. What was left was a commission to recommend a smarter funding strategy for charters, a provision to award high-performing charter schools with a ten-year  contract (up from five), an application of the state’s Ethics Act to charters, and a move to allow charter networks to oversee multiple schools with one board, among other things.

Many states have already adopted one or more of these strategies. And, it should be noted, that one of the more controversial elements of this legislation was the commission that could only recommend to the state assembly different funding measures for charters. Legislators

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Where is the promised leadership on school choice in Pennsylvania?