Do charter schools do it differently?

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / December 20, 2001

Just how different ARE charter schools? Everyone knows that their governance is freer, their budgets leaner and their longevity less certain than regular public schools, but how different is what actually goes on inside them? Is it anything that students, parents and teachers would notice? Anything that might make them produce better results? Anything that the rest of American education might learn from? If not, the whole charter enterprise may amount to little, a comet flashing across the sky, perhaps, but not the new education solar system that its boosters and backers claim.

With the charter phenomenon barely a decade old, it's too soon for definitive judgments. But evidence is trickling in. A new study conducted for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation adds to that stream. Named "Autonomy and Innovation: How Do Massachusetts Charter School Principals Use Their Freedom?" and available ONLY on the web (at http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=18), it was conducted by Bill Triant, a former Boston public-school teacher now studying education and business at Stanford, who interviewed eight Bay State charter principals on five dimensions of school operations.

He found exciting seedbeds of new approaches in which "charter principals are using the freedom granted to them to create schools that would not be possible if the charter law did not exist." With respect to personnel, for example, Triant reports that, while seven of the eight principals "believed that the system of teacher hiring in their charter school is better than the

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Do charter schools do it differently?

Congress passes Bush education plan

December 20, 2001

If you've been on another planet this week, you may not have heard that Congress passed the long awaited E.S.E.A. bill, which President Bush intends to sign in January. If you were out of our solar system all year, you might not know that this legislation requires states to test every student in grades 3 through 8 and report the results broken down by subgroup (e.g. race); to establish a minimum level of proficiency; and to take action against schools that fail to make satisfactory progress towards proficiency for all students, among other things.  There is widespread agreement that implementing this new accountability system will be a big challenge. There is less agreement on whether the bill itself is anything to be excited about.  For a good summary of what's in it, see "Education Law Biggest in 35 Years," by Gail Russell Chaddock, The Christian Science Monitor, December 18, 2001. For the story of how this legislation came about and managed to survive lobbying, political upheaval in the Senate, and the outbreak of a war on terrorism, see "Long Road to Reform," by David Broder, The Washington Post, December 17, 2001. For a look at what two skeptics about the overall legislative package regard as its most hopeful feature, see "Adding Value to Education," by William J. Bennett and Chester E. Finn, Jr, The Washington Times, December 20, 2001.

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Earliest charter schools unearthed in New Hampshire (circa 1781)

December 20, 2001

While some see charter schools as a radical experiment of the 1990's, the model is actually over 200 years old, according to an article by Susan Hollins of the New Hampshire Charter School Resource Center. A review of historical documents in the Granite State reveals that as early as 1781, New Hampshire residents were petitioning the legislature for the authority to establish free public academies, with groups of concerned citizens serving as trustees.  Once approved, their petitions (which resemble today's charter applications) became the charters for the schools.  Much like today, trustees were given the power to hire staff and make rules for the governance of the schools.  Modern day New Hampshire has a law supporting charter schools, but alas, no charter schools are operating in the state at present. To read more, including some interesting examples of early charters, see "Chartered Schools in New Hampshire: 18^th Century and Today," by Susan Hollins, Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, December 2001.

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What Stanley Kaplan taught us about the S.A.T.: it measures effort, not aptitude

December 20, 2001

A New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell tells the fascinating tale of a working-class kid from Brooklyn who turned the world of college admissions testing upside down.  As you read the article, it's hard not to root for Stanley H. Kaplan, the precocious child of Eastern European immigrants and a whiz in class who was devoted to helping struggling students succeed.  After graduating second at City College, Kaplan continued to tutor and coach students at the "Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Center" he opened in his parents' basement, and one day he was asked to prepare a student for the Scholastic Aptitude Test.  The S.A.T. was said to be designed to measure innate ability rather than acquired knowledge, and it stated clearly in the instructions that cramming was pointless. Unwilling to believe that preparation was futile, Kaplan developed a set of drills and tools that were so effective that they essentially proved that, whatever the S.A.T. was measuring, it was "eminently coachable," and thus not a true aptitude test at all. The impact of showing working-class kids how to ace the S.A.T. was to undermine that test's use as a means of social engineering by elite colleges, which relied on S.A.T. scores to separate naturally gifted students (whose success was effortless and who often had good manners) from the "grinds," lower middle class (and usually Jewish) students who were thought to excel less by intelligence than by sheer determination and who

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What Stanley Kaplan taught us about the S.A.T.: it measures effort, not aptitude

Career Academies: Impacts on Students' Initial Transitions to Post-Secondary Education and Employment

Terry Ryan / December 20, 2001

James J. Kemple, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, December 2001

Career academies have spread rapidly as states, districts, and individual schools urgently seek ways to boost the performance of high school students, but this ten-year longitudinal study by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) found that the academies do little to elevate test scores or graduation rates.  Career academies are characterized by a school-within-a-school organizational structure, curricula that combine academic and career themes, and partnerships with local employers.  The MDRC evaluation examined the performance of 1,700 career academy applicants who were randomly assigned either to their school's career academy or to other high school programs. Researchers found that the career academies enhanced the high school experiences of their students in ways that were consistent with the reform's short-term goals, but these positive effects did not translate into stronger high school graduation rates or better initial transitions to post-secondary education and jobs. In trying to explain the absence of long term effects despite the substantial differences between the educational approaches of the career academies and regular high schools, MDRC concluded that the initiative shown by all of the students in applying to the career academies in the first place led both the career academy group and the control group to relatively high outcomes. The full MDRC report is not yet available; for now, you can view the executive summary at http://www.mdrc.org/Reports2001/CareerAcademies/CareerAcad-Overview.htm.

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Dispelling the Myth Revisited: Preliminary Findings from a Nationwide Analysis of "High-Flying Schools"

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / December 20, 2001

Craig D. Jerald, The Education Trust, 2001

Craig D. Jerald of The Education Trust here provides information on how many schools in the United States are simultaneously high-poverty or high-minority AND high-achieving. The study uses a federal database developed by the American Institutes for Research utilizing school-level assessment data from nearly every state and cross-referencing it to the "Common Core of Data" maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics. (Four or five states have inadequate data for this kind of analysis.) The analysis reveals upwards of 4500 schools that have reading and/or math performance in the top third of their states AND are either high-poverty or high-minority or both. Those schools educate about two million kids and are found in cities, suburbs and rural areas. This report also NAMES the schools that meet its criteria (including, for example, 12 in the District of Columbia, 92 in Ohio). It allows for fascinating discoveries, such as the fact that, of 20 high poverty/minority/performing schools in Colorado, six are in middle-sized Pueblo while just two in the far larger city of Denver. It allowed me the depressing finding that, among the Ohio schools that are succeeding with poor and minority youngsters, only three are in Dayton where our foundation concentrates its resources. While it does not provide data on private schools, it does show which of the high-performing, high-poverty schools are charter schools (two of thirteen in Massachusetts, for example). Most important, it

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Dispelling the Myth Revisited: Preliminary Findings from a Nationwide Analysis of "High-Flying Schools"

Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / December 20, 2001

edited by Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti, 2001

This solid new collection, edited by Diane Ravitch and Joe Viteritti, has just come off the Yale University Press. Nothing could be more timely, considering the tough dilemmas U.S. educators are facing as they decide what to teach kids about civics and patriotism post-9/11 and as we confront the huge challenge of overseas schools that are busy imparting hatred, intolerance and anti-Americanism to their pupils. 350 pages long, its contributors include such clear thinkers and estimable writers as Bill Damon, Gerald Grant, Nat Glazer, Alan Wolfe and Jean Bethke Elshtain, as well as fine essays (and an incisive introduction) by Ravitch and Viterriti. The ISBN is 0300088787. Besides your usual sources for serious books, you can surf to http://www.yale.edu/yup/books/088787.htm.

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Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom

Kelly Scott / December 20, 2001

Larry Cuban, 2001

Anyone who applauded Microsoft's offer to settle its class-action lawsuits by donating lots of bargain-priced computer equipment to needy schools would do well to read this timely tome by Stanford's Larry Cuban.  He challenges the belief that technology has the power to radically transform schooling.  Too often, he says, policymakers, business leaders and philanthropists thrust new electronic gadgetry upon schools, expecting miracles but paying little heed to how educators can employ such devices to improve student learning.  Much of the book is devoted to Cuban's study of schools in Silicon Valley, where he found that fewer than ten percent of teachers used their classroom computers even once a week.  Even when computers are used,  they are not used creatively or for advanced applications. Not surprisingly, they're not doing much to boost pupil achievement.  Cuban recommends that teachers be allowed extensive input on goals and implementation, more unstructured time to master the tools themselves, and better technical support and training opportunities.  He also recommends "a critical examination of the assumptions of techno-promoters, a return to the historic civic and social mission of schooling in America, and a rebuilding of social capital in our schools."  His fundamental argument: Only when we have thoroughly analyzed how we expect technology to achieve our social and educational goals will substantial investment in such technology produce worthy outcomes.  The book's ISBN is 0-674-00602-X; you can order a copy at http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/CUBOVE.html. See also a

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School Reform: The Critical Issues

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / December 20, 2002

edited by Williamson M. Evers, Lance T. Izumi and Pamela A. Riley, Hoover Institution and Pacific Research Institute, 2001

Boston College political scientist Alan Wolfe edited this 350-page, 12-essay collection by a number of people who do and don't favor school choice. (It's based on a conference two years ago.) Wolfe describes the endeavor as an examination of the "moral, normative, philosophical, and religious concerns" posed by the school-choice debate. The book's four sections address equality, pluralism, the "social ecology" of the schools, and legal matters, the latter mainly having to do with First Amendment issues. It's a balanced treatment by smart, literate, strong-minded experts from diverse disciplines and viewpoints. It won't resolve the debate but reading it will inform the debaters! The ISBN is 0691096619, the publisher is Princeton University Press and you can get further information at http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7421.html.

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