Governance in the charter school sector: Time for a reboot

Adam Emerson / April 4, 2013

When the charter school movement started twenty-plus years ago, charters represented a radical innovation in governance: School districts would no longer enjoy an “exclusive franchise” on local public schools; they would compete with public, independent, autonomous (but accountable) charter schools too.

In the last twenty years, American education and its charter sector have evolved in important ways.

Much has happened in the charter sector since then—in fact, what began as a community-led, mom-and-pop movement has evolved to include a burgeoning assemblage of charter school networks, as well. But the laws ruling charter school governance remain largely the same. It’s time for a reboot in order to address three critical problems.

First, state laws and authorizer policies often require a full-fledged governing board for every charter school, and these policies make no exception for high-performing charter networks (such as KIPP and Rocketship Education). Thus, replicating at scale is difficult. In fact, only ten states explicitly allow for networks to operate multiple schools under the oversight of one governing board* and three states (Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Iowa) explicitly prohibit the practice.

Second, management organizations—especially for-profits—often control their schools’ governing boards, leading to serious questions about accountability and conflicts of interest. The Fordham Institute, both as an education think tank and a charter school authorizer in Ohio,

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Governance in the charter school sector: Time for a reboot

The good news from Pakistan

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / April 2, 2013

Sir Michael Barber is no stranger to education reform—indeed, he is well known to serious policy reformers, education leaders, and wonks in the U.S. and around the globe, thanks to his key roles in British reforms under Tony Blair, his penetrating analyses of diverse systems while at McKinsey, his writings on “deliverology” and other education topics, and—most recently—his work as “chief education adviser” at Pearson.

What practically nobody (outside Pakistan) knew about Barber until a week or two ago is that he has also served these past three years as “special representative on education in Pakistan” for Britain’s Department for International Development (the U.K. counterpart to USAID). In that capacity, he has spearheaded a remarkable ed-reform initiative—indeed, an education transformation, albeit just getting beyond the pilot stage—in Punjab, the largest province in Pakistan with 94 million people. Considering that nearly all the news about Pakistan that reaches American eyes and ears is so grim—political upheavals, terrorism, assassinations, floods, poverty, corruption, illiteracy—I was blown away to learn that Michael and his team of change-agents in the Punjab government, with help from several international donors, have been successfully beavering away at this hugely ambitious endeavor to bring a decent education to children throughout that vast chunk of south Asia.

Now he’s described that project in a short, readable book that is informative and

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The good news from Pakistan

What can education reformers learn from the gay marriage movement?

Michael J. Petrilli / April 3, 2013

There’s a lot of interest in this question in ed-reform circles today; Alexander Russo sketches the line of thinking here. It’s understandable, considering how successful proponents of gay marriage*  have been in changing public opinion, state statutes, and, perhaps soon, constitutional law on the issue. If only education reformers could be so lucky!

Some of the lessons being bandied about include the following:

• Picking one issue and rallying the whole movement behind it (gay marriage instead of gays in the military, for example)
• Reframing the debate (in this case, from “gay rights” to embracing the “responsibilities” that marriage brings)
• Making sure that movement leaders keep a low profile

So can we make a plausible education analogy? I think it’s a stretch, and not just because ed reformers love to appear on magazine covers. Gay marriage is fundamentally a moral issue. Legalizing it doesn’t cost taxpayers any serious money; it won’t balloon the deficit; there are no “vested interests” in terms of employee unions protecting their pensions or rapacious corporations seeking to make a fast buck. It’s simply a matter of inclusion and freedom on one side, tradition and gut feelings on the other. It’s a classic social issue.

Not so with education reform. Though all sides of its debates try to claim the moral high ground and use moralistic rhetoric, making schools work better is largely a management/service/governance challenge.

Take the question of “picking one issue” to rally around. Which would

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What can education reformers learn from the gay marriage movement?

Fraudulence gets checked—but not without excuses

The Education Gadfly / April 4, 2013

The dramatic test-cheating scandal in Atlanta—which has seen the indictment of thirty-five educators, including the former superintendent, for messing with the scores—has fingers pointed every which way. AFT president Randi Weingarten placed the blame squarely on our “excessive focus on quantitative performance measures,” arguing that the incentives make cheating inevitable. We disagree; we respect teachers enough to believe that most will resist wrongdoing, and submit that you don’t fix cheating by refusing to keep score.

Saturday’s New York Times sounded the alarm: The early results from states that have recently overhauled their teacher-evaluation systems have seen very little change, with 97 percent of Florida’s teachers still deemed effective or highly effective, 98 percent of Tennessee’s judged to be “at expectations,” and 98 percent of Michigan’s rated “effective or better.” This is certainly newsworthy (though Ed Week’s Stephen Sawchuk beat the Times to the punch). For our take, listen to this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast.

Policymakers in the Texas House of Representatives have passed legislation that would reduce the number of required high school courses, as well as the number of statewide end-of-course exams, thereby rolling back the Lone Star State’s present ambitious graduation expectations, damaging the value of students’ high school diplomas, and taking a big step back from college readiness. And we’re not the only ones who

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Fraudulence gets checked—but not without excuses

Mayoral Governance and Student Achievement: How Mayor-Led Districts Are Improving School and Student Performance

Amber M. Winkler, Ph.D. / April 4, 2013

In the world of education reform, the biggest, baddest elephant in the room is, without question, the broken manner in which American schools are governed. This latest attempt to dispel our romantic attachment to the traditional school board comes from Kenneth Wong, who has long studied the impact of mayoral control and who here examines the effects of it on student achievement and resource allocation. He and his colleague analyze eleven districts that were governed by some version of mayoral control from 1999 to 2010—meaning, the mayor had direct authority over at least some of the schools. They find that mayoral-control districts have generally improved district-wide performance relative to average school-district performance statewide, though the results vary from place to place. Specifically, five of the eleven cities (New York, New Haven, Chicago, Philly, and Baltimore) significantly narrowed achievement gaps, while the other six (Hartford, Harrisburg, Boston, Providence, Yonkers, and Cleveland) saw patchier outcomes. The researchers also looked at performance on the NAEP for the seven districts that participated in the Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) and found that students in New York, Boston, and (to some extent) Chicago outpaced their peers across various subgroups. What’s more, an in-depth, school-level analysis in New York showed that mayoral control increased the percentage of students in a school

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Mayoral Governance and Student Achievement: How Mayor-Led Districts Are Improving School and Student Performance

Middle Class or Middle of the Pack? What Can We Learn When Benchmarking U.S. Schools Against the World’s Best?

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / April 4, 2013

In September 2011, Jay Greene’s and Josh McGee’s Global Report Card rattled America’s sleepy suburbs with its declaration that none of America’s affluent districts performed at a level that would place them among the top third of developed nations’ PISA results. This new report from America Achieves, finds essentially the same thing for middle-class schools (as gauged by PISA’s somewhat shaky indicators of socioeconomic status). U.S. students in the second-to-top SES quartile (i.e., 50th–75th percentile) are bested by students of similar demography in twenty-four countries in math and fifteen in science. (These same U.S. students are also outdone by Shanghai’s poorest quartile of pupils.) Alarming, yes, but maybe not too surprising. What’s probably more consequential about this short report—and the trove of online data that underpins it—is that it signals the beginning of an ambitious effort to bring PISA testing (and international comparing) down to the school level. Some 105 U.S. high schools took part in the pilot, supported by several major foundations, and beginning in the autumn, every American high school that is game to submit to this kind of scrutiny can join in. There is terrific potential here to awaken those sleepy suburbs to the state of learning in their own smug schools. There are, to be sure, limitations. Schools don’t necessarily have to make their results public. (A lamentable concession, in my opinion, though it may boost participation.) And because PISA tests fifteen-year-olds, they

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Middle Class or Middle of the Pack? What Can We Learn When Benchmarking U.S. Schools Against the World’s Best?