The least-known side of charter schools

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / June 5, 2003

Plenty has been written about charter schools and how they are (and aren't) doing, but practically nobody has looked carefully at the organizations that give birth to them, raise them, oversee them, hold them accountable, and decide whether or not they will get their charters renewed. Variously known as "authorizers" and "sponsors," America today has more than 500 of them, ranging from local school boards (the most common by far) to state agencies, specialized boards, universities, and even mayor's offices, city councils, and nonprofit organizations.

It's remarkable that something so important to the success of the charter movement has had so little scrutiny, save for the random media alarum about some sponsor that has allowed a scandal or outrage to develop at one of the schools for which it is responsible. Those stories make for lively reading and cocktail chatter, but they're far from a full picture of what sponsors/authorizers do - and those that quietly do a good job rarely make it onto the front page.

Picture a school's charter as a contract between two parties: the "operator" who wants to run the school and the "authorizer" that determines whether or not this will be allowed to happen and, if so, on what terms. States structure authorizers' responsibilities very differently and individual authorizers go about their tasks even more differently, but how they do it is apt to have as much bearing on the success of the charter movement as what

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The least-known side of charter schools

Tough time for charters

Kathleen Porter-Magee / June 5, 2003

In recent weeks, opportunistic charter school adversaries have been having a field day - using state budget crunches and low test scores to fuel the anti-charter fire. In Massachusetts, for example, the state Senate passed a three-year moratorium on the creation or expansion of charter schools, claiming that they are "draining" limited funds from the public school system. In an op-ed in the New York Times, Francis X. Clines argued that the lack of state oversight and control over the spending and operation of charter schools in Texas has led to sub-par schools which unfairly divert "shrinking public funds to private experimentation." The evidence? That 25 of the 200 charter schools that exist in Texas have "gone under or have been closed for management abuses." And, yesterday, a Washington Post editorial questioned the value of charters by citing a comment by school board President Peggy Cooper Cafritz to the effect that "over 50 percent of our charter schools are now failing." (Why the Post singled out charter schools when over 75 percent of D.C. students do not have basic reading skills is unclear.)

Behind these "new" revelations is a lot of political opportunism by charter opponents, deploying as truths the same tired misconceptions about the role that charter schools play in education reform. The fact that 25 low-performing or poorly managed charters closed in Texas in the relatively short time such schools have existed attests to the strength of the accountability

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Tough time for charters

Boys, interrupted

June 5, 2003

"It may still be a man's world," writes Michelle Conlin of Business Week. "But it is no longer, in any way, a boy's." Conlin runs through an increasingly familiar counter argument to the 1990s social science focus on how girls were supposedly being shortchanged by education. Now it's actually boys who are hurting - with higher rates of drop out, illiteracy, drug abuse, suicide, depression, and anti-social behavior, and lower levels of academic achievement, participation in advanced courses, high school graduation, and college going. For better or worse, girls and women are outperforming boys and men across the educational spectrum, a development with enormous implications for education, marriage, families, law enforcement, the corporate world, etc. What is causing the new gender gap? Conlin says "schools have inadvertently played a big role [by] losing sight of boys - taking for granted that they were doing well, even though data began to show the opposite. Some educators feared that it was a blip that would change or feared takebacks on girls' [educational] gains." Schools have also tried to fit boys into an unnatural mold, with the reigning "sit-still-and-listen" model of teaching and the push for earlier and earlier educational achievement holding back these more boisterous and slower-developing creatures. Conlin also suggests, however, that the biggest factor causing the gap may be ideological - the insistence, never mind what is known from biology and physiology, that gender is a social construction with little

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Boys, interrupted

Hear ye the facts: schools win in court

June 5, 2003

In contrast to the general sense among school administrators that they are besieged by lawsuits, it turns out that courts tend to rule in favor of schools over both parents and teachers, the two groups most like to sue schools or districts. Since the 1985 Supreme Court case New Jersey v. T.L.O., writes Marjorie Coeyman in the Christian Science Monitor, when the Court ruled that school officials needed only a "reasonable suspicion" of wrongdoing to search a student's personal possessions, the nation's highest court has consistently ruled in favor of schools on a broad number of issues, including censorship and student conduct. The pattern also holds in lower courts, where schools have won more than half the time and parents and teachers only a third of the time. (The rest of the results are mixed.) Cases involving special education and religion are more complex but, even there, schools will usually prevail. The article suggests that "those who complain that schools must worry so constantly about student and teacher rights that they cannot do their job are simply not looking at the facts."

"Are schools more afraid of lawsuits than they should be?" by Marjorie Coeyman, Christian Science Monitor, May 27, 2003

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Hear ye the facts: schools win in court

Law would align teacher training with NCLB

June 5, 2003

Last week, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce took up the Ready to Teach Act (H.R. 2211), the first of any number of bills that will feed into reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. This one seeks to align teacher-training programs with the high standards for accountability and results mandated by No Child Left Behind. It would increase accountability by strengthening reporting measures and obliging teacher preparation programs to provide accurate data on their graduates in useful formats; allow federal funds to be used for innovative methods in teacher preparation programs); and focus training on the skills and knowledge needed to prepare highly qualified teachers. In addition, the bill authorizes three new teacher-training grants aimed at improving the quality of preparation programs and bringing a wider range of candidates into traditional and alternative certification programs.

H.R. 2211, The Ready to Teach Act

"Gingrey, House Education Committee Members Offer Bill to Strengthen Teacher Training Programs," Improve Teacher Quality, Committee on Education and the Workforce press release, May 22, 2003

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Law would align teacher training with NCLB

Students speak up on education reform

June 5, 2003

In March, a group of five education reform-minded Yale undergrads, who had won first prize and $25,000 in cash in the Yale Entrepreneurial Society's 50K competition, published the inaugural edition of Our Education, a journal of education reform put out by the student-led nonprofit "Students for Teachers." [For the Gadfly's review of this journal, go to http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=15#267.] This week, the group launched a new website as part of a movement "to reassert education as a national priority" and to give students a "forum to demand better schools." The site itself is designed to "serve as a comprehensive clearinghouse for the student movement in education reform" and includes information about the latest education reform news, the latest edition of their quarterly journal, surveys of student opinions about education reform, and an online forum where students can discuss teacher and school reform.

Our Education

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Students speak up on education reform

What's on TAP

June 5, 2003

The Milken Family Foundation has created a new (electronic) newsletter tied to its pathbreaking Teacher Advancement Program, but also addressing broader issues of teacher quality. The inaugural issue contains an interesting overview of teacher "pay for performance": where it's been tried, what's happened, what can be learned. You can inspect it at www.mff.org/tap/tap.taf or subscribe by emailing kfiretag@mff.org and asking to be put on the list.

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What's on TAP

A Community Action Guide to Teacher Quality

Terry Ryan / June 5, 2003

Public Education Network
May 2003

This "action guide" from the Public Education Network (PEN) is a handy resource for those working in communities to develop leadership, capacity, and opportunities for improving "teacher quality." It takes teacher quality to mean both the skills and experiences that teachers bring to their classrooms, and the environment in which they teach. Its core theme is that education improvement efforts are not sustainable unless community members, leaders and policy makers buy into them. "[A]n endeavor that lacks community interest and involvement," write the authors, "is unlikely to gain support from influential decision makers or become a sustainable force for change." The guide offers procedures on the use of data to assess teacher quality and ways to create school and community environments that support teacher quality. To see for yourself, surf to http://www.publiceducation.org/pdf/TQ/PEN_CommActionGuide.pdf.

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A Community Action Guide to Teacher Quality

Factors Affecting Mathematics Achievement for Students in Rural Schools

Kathleen Porter-Magee / June 5, 2003

Gene Bottoms and Kathleen Carpenter, Southern Regional Education Board
May 2003

Last month, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) came out with a research brief that seeks to explain the factors affecting math achievement in rural schools. Unsurprisingly, the authors found significant gaps today - urban/rural, black/white, etc. But they also found that both black and white students performed better when exposed to a more rigorous college prep curriculum and when teachers held the students to high expectations, which currently teachers seem more apt to do more for whites than blacks. These findings lend support to the NCLB notion that holding all children to the same high standards improves the educational opportunities for even the most low-performing students. It's an interesting, if not earth-shattering, report, which you can find at http://www.sreb.org/programs/hstw/publications/briefs/03V04_ResearchBrief_Math.pdf.

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Factors Affecting Mathematics Achievement for Students in Rural Schools

Stand by Me: What Teachers Really Think about Unions, Merit Pay, and Other Professional Matters

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / June 5, 2003

Steve Farkas, Ann Duffett, and Jean Johnson, Public Agenda
May 3, 2003

This new report from Public Agenda is based on a national mail survey of 1,345 public-school teachers, plus focus groups and interviews. (The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation was one of the project's funders and we'll have more to say about its provocative findings in a future Gadfly.) The report provides up-to-date teacher views on a wide variety of topics - some of them heartening, others discouraging, and more than a few confused, contradictory, even schizophrenic. Of course, that may well describe the state of U.S. teachers vis-??-vis a number of contemporary issues and institutions. Like the blind men's elephant, readers are apt to use these data to come to very different conclusions. Of particular interest to me, the survey sample, for the first time in Public Agenda's long history of teacher studies, was split between newcomers to the field (fewer than 5 years of experience) and veterans (more than 20 years in the classroom). Some of the attitudinal differences between these two subsets are striking, with the newer/younger teachers notably more open to a number of contentious policy reforms - and a lot less enamored of (or attached to) their unions. Whether such variations represent true differences between two population cohorts cannot be known from a one-time survey, since it's possible the newcomers will become more like the veterans as they age. But it's also possible that a number of

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Stand by Me: What Teachers Really Think about Unions, Merit Pay, and Other Professional Matters

The Condition of Education 2003

June 5, 2003

John Wirt et al., National Center for Education Statistics
2003

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has issued the latest in its annual series known as "The Condition of Education." You may not be surprised to learn that it finds "a mixed picture." The good news: American fourth graders are outperforming counterparts from a number of industrialized nations on reading tests. The percentage of high school students taking advanced courses in English is rising. Fourth and eighth graders show measurable gains in math. The worrying news: Fifteen-year-olds are merely average in reading compared to their counterparts in other industrial lands. Math scores for 12th graders, after small gains in the 1990s, have actually declined, with only 17 percent scoring at or above "proficient." Appallingly, a mere 10 percent of 12th graders are at or above proficiency in history. And the achievement gap between poor and minority students and their peers persists. To get the Commissioner's Statement summarizing the report, go to http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/2003067_CommState.pdf. For the full, 327-page, bells-and-whistles version, go to http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/2003067.pdf.

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The Condition of Education 2003

The Nuts & Bolts of Charter Districts

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / June 5, 2003

Education Commission of the States
May 2003

With funding from the federal "Public Charter Schools Program," the Education Commission of the States has produced four fine policy papers that address the timely and tantalizing idea of "charter districts," which the authors more or less define as school districts (or subdistricts, virtual districts, or parallel districts) in which every school is a charter school (or something similar) and the "central office" doesn't actually run any of them in the traditional way. This is a drum that ECS has been pounding for several years, one that I thought was mostly a fantasy. But when you construe charter districts as these papers do, it turns out that several already exist and others are in the process of becoming. (For the best tour of the present charter-district scene, go to a previous ECS paper called "Charter Districts: The State of the Field," which you can find at http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/37/04/3704.doc.) In the new quartet, Todd Ziebarth authored the paper called "State Policy Options for Creating Charter Districts," which you can find at http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/44/92/4492.doc. John Augenblick wrote "How Can We Fund Charter Districts?" (see http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/44/90/4490.doc). Bryan Hassel penned "A New Kind of School District: How Local Leaders Can Create Charter Districts" (see http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/44/91/4491.doc). And Nelson Smith is the creator of "The New Central Office: How Charter Districts Serve Schools and the Public Interest" (see http://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/44/93/4493.doc). These are smart, knowledgeable, and creative writers at the

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The Nuts & Bolts of Charter Districts

Who is Leading Our Schools? An Overview of School Administrators and Their Careers

Eric Osberg / June 5, 2003

Susan M. Gates, Jeanne S. Ringel, Lucrecia Santibanez, Karen M. Ross, and Catherine H. Chung, RAND Education
2003

This report examines data on school administrators - principals, superintendents, and others - to better understand who they are, where they come from, how much they earn, and a host of other issues. It draws on the NCES Schools and Staffing Survey, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey and much additional literature. Its seven chapters are short and easy to read and include some interesting insights - such as the fact that principals now are older mainly because schools are hiring older candidates these days. Those wanting detail can find a wealth of data in its seventy-four pages of appendices. The authors conclude that, in general, there is no "crisis" in school administration. Plenty of teachers get administrators' certificates, principals' pay has kept pace with managers' pay in other industries, and many who exit the principal's office actually move into other administrative jobs in schools. Yet such averages mask the fact that some schools and districts must struggle to find high-quality leadership. Unfortunately, RAND's cure amounts to minor mid-course corrections. The sensible ones include improving the working conditions for principals and looking to private schools for best practices. Less credible is its suggestion that "schools and districts need to attract high quality potential administrators into the teaching pool." For better advice, we hope you'll turn to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute's recently

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Who is Leading Our Schools? An Overview of School Administrators and Their Careers