No August break in charter-land

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / August 19, 2004

This week's firestorm over the performance of charter schools can be traced to mischief by the charter-hating American Federation of Teachers and a (generally very able) New York Times reporter's susceptibility to being drawn into its web.

For months, it appears, AFT analysts have been beavering away at their own analysis of new data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) regarding the scores of 4th and 8th graders attending a sample of charter schools in 2003. (The 8th grade sample, for the most part, proved too small to draw conclusions.)

I had played a tiny role (with Education Leaders Council chief Lisa Keegan) in persuading the feds that charter schools deserve to be noticed by NAEP, much as private schools have long been. If they are a legitimate, durable form of schooling - after all, there are now 3000+ of them enrolling around 700,000 kids - it's important for the "Nation's Report Card" to monitor their performance.

So the schools participating in NAEP in 2003 were selected in such a way that a representative sample of charter schools with 4th grades was included. (These schools are located in six states.) The resulting reading and math scores have been sitting for nine months on the website of the National Center for Education Statistics, waiting to be mined, massaged and analyzed by anyone with the requisite prowess and motivation. Meanwhile, NCES analysts have been (slowly) working on their own

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No August break in charter-land

Blaine strikes again

August 19, 2004

Citing the Sunshine State's controversial Blaine Amendment - which states that "no revenue . . . shall be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution" - Florida's First District Court of Appeal recently struck down the 1999 state law that allows students to use tuition vouchers (Opportunity Scholarships) to escape persistently failing public schools. The court's majority ruled that "there is no dispute that state funds are paid to sectarian schools" and that "if Floridians wish to remove or lessen the restrictions of the no-aid provision, they can do so by constitutional amendment." As the Wall Street Journal reports, far from open and shut, this case is in fact far more complicated. If the Florida Supreme Court upholds the lower court's ruling, then a host of other state funding programs could be in constitutional jeopardy, including funding for medical treatment at religious hospitals, rent to churches used as polling stations, Medicaid, subsidized child care, and state-funded scholarships used at religious universities. Since the U.S. Supreme Court opted not to take the Blaine Amendment head on earlier this year in Locke v. Davey (click here for more), other Blaine states will no doubt be watching closely to see how Florida's Supreme Court deals with this ever-dicey issue.

"Appeal court says Florida voucher law is unconstitutional,"

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Blaine strikes again

Letting principals lead

August 19, 2004

School leaders in Philadelphia, like most everywhere, are currently so hamstrung by teacher contracts and union regulations that they have virtually no control over the hiring and firing of their own staff. In the City of Brotherly Love, however, help may be on the way. Under a new proposal put forward by district leaders, principals in schools that have failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress for several years will be allowed to gut their staff and, with the help of a committee of parents and teachers, select a new team of teachers. Unsurprisingly, many teachers feel threatened by the proposal, with high school teacher Lynn Dixon complaining that under the plan "you will get nothing but puppets and Stepford wives teaching your children. No one will stand up for themselves." Dixon goes on to criticize the plan for giving too much "power" to principals - ostensibly the leaders of the school. Though the local teachers' union is vigorously contesting the proposal, the city education commission may simply opt to impose it - a right that, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, was granted when the state took over the city's schools in 2001.

"Plan would let principals pick staff," by Susan Snyder, Philadelphia Inquirer, August 10, 2004

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Letting principals lead

K12 kerfuffle

August 19, 2004

Teachers' union types are in a snit over Department of Education funding for the Arkansas Virtual Academy (AVA), an online charter school that uses curricula from K12, a venture headed by former Secretary of Education William Bennett. (Full disclosure: Fordham's Finn is on its board.) The conservative pundit is accused of using political connections to secure the federal grant and the Academy is accused of siphoning off public dollars to support home schooling. (Turns out many students using AVA - which is a public school, albeit virtual - are former home schoolers or private schoolers.) We'll let pass the absurdity of the NEA complaining about the use of political connections to get things done. To critics, the fact that AVA gets three applicants for every available spot - a clear indication that the present system is not fulfilling a need - is irrelevant. So is the fact that, according to an AVA spokesman, 80 percent of AVA students would have been assigned to a district or school on the needing-improvement list. The establishment mantra: change is bad for us, and thus bad.

"Grants to

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K12 kerfuffle

The mid-August massacre

August 19, 2004

Charter news isn't just the AFT report this week, though it doesn't get any better. The California Charter Academy, a private management organization, announced that it's abruptly closing 60 charter campuses in California, leaving some 10,000 students stranded days before the opening of school. Critics will doubtless chalk this up as one more example of charter operator incompetence - the CCA fell afoul of a state law cracking down on long-distance management of schools, as well as dwindling state aid to charters - but it's also a textbook case of poor charter sponsorship. In California, most charters are sponsored by local districts; why were they asleep at the switch as CCA imploded? As we've seen in other cases (see here), good sponsorship matters. A proactive and engaged authorizer willing to dish out tough love might have been able to forestall this catastrophe for students and parents. A sponsor in it to make money (as seems to have been the case for the California school systems that agreed to be non-resident sponsors for the CCA schools) is apt to have far laxer criteria.

"Charter Academy shuts

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The mid-August massacre

Not April Fool's

August 19, 2004

We couldn't make it up. Here's the Los Angeles Times on professional development courses that some California teachers are taking to renew their certification and earn higher salaries: "Sara Telona learned the choreography for Mexican folklore dances, mastered the words to folk songs and took a crash course in marimba and xylophone playing. . . . To complete the course 'Sharks: Myth and Facts,' the teachers must watch a National Geographic video about the great white shark and read three books. Then, they answer several fill-in-the-blank sheets and write an essay on how their lives would be affected if sharks became extinct. . . . [The] 'I'm So Stressed I Could Scream' course taught . . . stress reduction techniques and helped with classroom management. Instead of disciplining her slightly rowdy class after lunch, [one teacher] started reading a book to calm students and herself." For more on miseducation by professional development, read Sandra Stotsky's Stealth Curriculum, and stay tuned for Fordham's report on professional development follies later this fall.

"Enrichment courses let teachers be students," by Cynthia Daniels, Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2004 (registration required)

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Not April Fool's

Faulty Towers: Tenure and the Structure of Higher Education

Eric Osberg / August 19, 2004

Ryan C. Amacher and Roger E. Meiners, The Independent Institute2004

This short book offers an overview of professorial tenure and a host of other issues in higher education, not to argue that tenure should be abolished but rather to show that it's not the major problem in colleges and universities today. Rampant costs, useless departments, frivolous courses, uninterested professors, inflated grades, and stifling bureaucracies are bigger worries. (A general decline in university curricula doesn't help matters.) The solution to these ills is simple in theory: promote decentralization and competition. The former idea, embraced so long ago by business that it's become a sort of holy writ, enables those with the best information to make decisions. By contrast, in higher education too much is decided by faculty committees (in which economics professors can make decisions about physics and poetry departments). At these meetings, the authors lament, clearly reliving a personal experience or two, "[c]ompetent faculty . . . spend afternoons trapped in conference rooms with blowhards who take hours to make pompous pronouncements about any issue." Eliminating such committees would promote competition, by empowering administrators to reward effective departments and reconsider weak ones (tough decisions that faculty worried for their jobs or reputations are unlikely to make). They also recommend better course descriptions (in part so students can be informed when making choices), a voucher program modeled on the GI Bill (of which they provide an enlightening history), and transparency (such as

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Faulty Towers: Tenure and the Structure of Higher Education

Becoming An Educated Person: Toward a Core Curriculum for College Students

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / August 19, 2004

George C. Leef, American Council of Trustees and AlumniMay 2004 The Hollow Core: Failure of the General Education Curriculum Barry Latzer, American Council of Trustees and AlumniMay 2004

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni recently published these companion reports dealing with the importance and near extinction of a proper core curriculum at colleges and universities. In the first, author George C. Leef provides a guide to what an undergraduate core curriculum is and isn't, why a good one is important, and whose responsibility it is to ensure that students benefit from one. The latter half of this report describes actual core curricula in operation at fifteen colleges and universities that ACTA judges to have done a pretty good job of this. For the second report, The Hollow Core, author Barry Latzer surveyed 50 colleges in search of a "real" core curriculum - seven subjects that he and ACTA judge necessary for "every educated man and woman." (In case you're wondering: composition, U.S. government or American history, economics, foreign language, literature, math, and natural/physical science.) The news, as you might expect, is bleak: a quarter of the colleges in this group require none or just one of those subjects to be studied as part of their undergraduate core, and almost half require fewer than three. Thirty percent expect four or more of the seven. Among the least impressive performers are many of the country's most eminent colleges and universities. "Judging

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Becoming An Educated Person: Toward a Core Curriculum for College Students

Virtual District, Real Improvement: A retrospective evaluation of the Chancellor's District, 1996-2003

August 19, 2004

Deinya Phenix, Dorothy Siegel, Ariel Zaltsman, and Norm Fruchter, Institute for Education and Social Policy, Steinhardt School of Education, New York University June 2004

In 1996, then New York City Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew brought ten chronically underperforming schools into his purview, creating a geographically disconnected "virtual district" of schools. Having wrested control of these schools from their administrative sub-districts, he imposed a "Model of Excellence" that included reduced class size, extended school days and years, and mandatory staff development. This report analyzes student performance in the elementary and middle schools of Crew's "virtual district," dubbed the Chancellor's District and eventually including 58 schools. It seems they produced statistically significant gains in reading scores in only three years. Indeed, literacy improvement was a key goal of Crew's plan, and his project seems to have been quite a success in that regard. However, that focus seems to have negatively affected math testing, in which the Chancellor's District performed similarly to other chronically low-performing schools. The policy assumptions challenged by Crew's relative success should be noted, however. According to the authors, he showed how sub-district control of failing schools could be improved by "centralized management, rather than decentralized local control." Overall, a brief but thoughtful consideration of an important experiment; you can find it here.

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Virtual District, Real Improvement: A retrospective evaluation of the Chancellor's District, 1996-2003

Resolve and Resources to Get a Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom

August 19, 2004

Southern Regional Education Board2004

This useful report advocates and analyzes a number of policies that states can pursue in their efforts to attract and retain qualified teachers. The authors favor these five policies: recruiting teachers with content preparation, building connected data systems, continuing reform of teacher licensure, providing mentors for beginning teachers, and offering incentive pay. They also discuss three "emerging" policy solutions: alternative teacher preparation programs, new technologies for teacher development, and differing roles and incentives for teachers. The SREB provides current information on all of these topics and does an admirable job of emphasizing accountability and evaluation, merit-based compensation, and continuing professional development. It also features helpful examples of real reform efforts in SREB states. You can get it by clicking here.

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Resolve and Resources to Get a Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom