Vouchers − Darwin= ??

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / August 30, 2012

Eek. Vouchers + creationism = liberal horror, teacher-union field-day, and at least a small risk to the school-choice movement. Politically and strategically, it would be so much simpler if those “voucher schools” would just behave themselves!

If only Michaelangelo had taken on voucher accountability too.  Photo by ideacreamanuelaPps

But how upset should one really be about the AP report from Louisiana that some of the private schools participating in the Pelican State’s new voucher program “teach creationism and reject evolution”?

State Superintendent of Education John White offered the correct policy response: All voucher students must participate in the state assessments, which include science. “If students are failing the test, we’re going to intervene, and the test measures [their understanding of] evolution.” In other words, the schools can do what they like but if their voucher-bearing students don’t learn enough to pass the state tests, the state will do something about it—ultimately (under Louisiana regulations) eliminating those schools from eligibility to participate in the program.

That ought to be the policy response to everything that district and charter schools do too: “You’re free to operate your school as you see fit (within the bounds of health-and-safety rules) but you’re also accountable for your students’ results, which we—the state—will

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Vouchers − Darwin= ??

Leadership lessons from a brazen cheating scandal

Gregg Vanourek / August 30, 2012

It’s been called “one of the most brazen cheating scandals in the nation.”

The Crescendo charter-school network in southern California combined strict academics with arts and music, and its schools’ past test scores were impressive—but, apparently, tainted. According to a recent Los Angeles Times report that cited two separate investigations, principals of the Los Angeles-area schools—following orders from the founder and CEO—gave copies of upcoming state tests to teachers to study, and perhaps also to students to practice and prep using actual questions from the test itself.

Cheating scandals won't stop until we learn something from them.  Photo by Casey Serin

The investigations blamed John Allen, Crescendo’s founder and CEO. According to the L.A. Times, “Allen’s biggest fixation was test scores.” Sources noted that he was driven by a desire to be “better, better, better, best.” At one point, he reportedly told the staff at one school, “You better score a 900 this year” (out of 1,000 points possible on California’s Academic Performance Index). Apparently, there were threats to principals and teachers if they didn’t “get with the program.”

As word leaked and an investigation began, Crescendo’s teachers were allegedly told to deny having seen

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Leadership lessons from a brazen cheating scandal

The GOP gets its education mojo back

Tyson Eberhardt / August 30, 2012

A week after President Obama reinserted education into the 2012 presidential campaign by attacking Mitt Romney on spending and class size, Republicans kept schools squarely in the spotlight at their Tampa convention. In his keynote address, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie gleefully recounted his record of taking on the Garden State’s powerful teacher unions, detailing his success at securing meaningful reforms to teacher-retirement benefits and tenure. Jeb Bush speaks this evening, and those in the know say it will mostly be about education reform. And then there’s a refreshingly reasonable GOP education platform, featuring support for expanded school choice, merit pay, and high academic standards (and no mention of hare-brained schemes, like scrapping the Department of Education, which dogged the Republican primary). After a decade spent avoiding education (and the mixed legacy of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind act) in national politics, Republicans appear poised to position themselves as the education-reform party once again. It remains to be seen whether this will prove an effective political strategy—Obama’s record on education, if not his campaign’s recent statements on the subject, is fairly strong—all Americans stand to win if both parties engage in a spirited, substantive debate on the issue.

RELATED ARTICLE: “Republican Education Platform 2012 Emphasizes School Choice, Teacher Accountability,” Huffington Post, August 29, 2012

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The GOP gets its education mojo back

PTA remembers the “P”

Adam Emerson / August 29, 2012

For seventeen years, the five-million strong National PTA urged state governments to give only local school boards the authority to grant or deny charter-school applications. That changed this month, when the group’s board struck that restriction from its platform and extended its support to “all authorizing bodies.” The National PTA says it wants to be more relevant in charter-school policy, and its old position conflicted with the plain fact that local PTAs are increasingly working with charters authorized by universities, states, or independent bodies. This is a big leap for a group that education analyst Thomas Toch once accused of being “out of step with many parents’ demands for change in public education today” and that has lobbied alongside teacher unions for decades. Of course this change in the national stance isn’t binding on state chapters that have taken contrary positions. Georgia and Washington PTAs, for instance, have opposed recent efforts to create state-level commissions that would have the power to authorize charters: They still want to keep oversight (i.e., power) over all charters “local.” (In the case of Washington State, there are no charters of any sort, thanks in part to past PTA opposition.) But let’s at least acknowledge this welcome crack in the national glacier.

RELATED ARTICLE:“National PTA Revises Policy on Charter Schools,” by Sean Cavanaugh, Education Week, August 27, 2012

A version of this analysis appeared on the Choice Words

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PTA remembers the “P”

Virginia gets a fresh start. Ohio needs one.

The Education Gadfly / August 30, 2012

Eduwonk Andy Rotherham justifiably ripped Virginia in Sunday’s Washington Post for its “soft bigotry” of setting different goals for students based on race, ethnicity, and income as part of its No Child Left Behind waiver. While Gadfly is relieved that state and federal officials announced yesterday that they will rework the goals, the episode should serve as a reminder that increased federal flexibility, while welcome on many fronts, can also undo a decade’s worth of accountability reform.

What do principals at some of America’s best public schools do when their plans run into red tape? Many simply ignore the peskiest rules, Jay Mathews notes. Districts should heed the successes of such school leaders and remove inappropriate  requirements so that dynamic principals don’t need to break them in the first place.

Bedeviled by a school-attendance-data scandal that seems to get worse by the day and has already begun to wreak havoc by delaying the release of school-report cards for 2011-2012, the Ohio Department of Education is likely to ask the legislature for greater authority to monitor schools. Centralization rarely pays dividends in education—ensuring accurate reporting of data that underpins all efforts at accountability is one of the exceptions.

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Virginia gets a fresh start. Ohio needs one.

The Effects of School Vouchers on College Enrollment: Experimental Evidence from New York City

Adam Emerson / August 24, 2012

School-choice advocates have touted results of this recent study—a joint publication of the Brown Center on Education Policy (Brookings) and the Program on Education Policy and Governance (Harvard). And they have every right to: The random-assignment study (a gold standard of research often elusive in school-choice research) boasts some strong findings for choice supporters. The study began in 1997 when Harvard’s Paul Peterson began tracking students who applied for a new privately funded voucher program in Gotham. Created after Cardinal John O’Connor invited then-school chancellor Rudy Crew to “send the city’s most troubled youth to Catholic schools,” the program offered three-year vouchers of $1,400 per year to 1,300 low-income youngsters. Peterson tracked participants as well as those who did not win the lottery. Fifteen years later, Peterson, along with Brookings’s Matt Chingos, show that black elementary school students who won the voucher lottery in New York City were 7 percentage points (or 20 percent) more likely to attend college than their peers who didn’t. Moreover, the percentage of black voucher students who attended a selective college was more than double that of black non-voucher students. (There were no significant differences for white or Hispanic pupils.) Not too shabby for a program that cost just $4,200 per pupil over three years.

SOURCE: Mathew M. Chingos and Paul E. Peterson, The Effects of School Vouchers on

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The Effects of School Vouchers on College Enrollment: Experimental Evidence from New York City

The Impact of Charter Schools on Public and Private School Enrollment

Adam Emerson / August 28, 2012

This Cato Institute analysis—conducted by RAND economist Richard Buddin—conveys a stark message: “Charter schools took approximately 190,000 students from private schools between 2000 and 2008.” Cato’s Adam Schaeffer said of the findings: The shift is “wreaking havoc on private education” while only marginally improving public schools. Overall, Buddin found that 8 percent of elementary pupils in charter schools and 11 percent of middle and high school students came to their charters from private schools. The numbers were bigger in urban areas, where 32 percent of the elementary-charter enrollment was drawn from the private sector (and 23 and 15 percent of middle and high school enrollments, respectively). And they were worse still for urban Catholic schools (though enrollment in Catholics started declining before the first charters appeared). Interestingly, the effect of charter schools on private-school enrollment is much stronger in states with strong charter laws (as gauged by the Center for Education Reform). Urban charters in states with strong laws, for example, draw 34 percent of their elementary enrollment from private schools. In states with weak laws, that percentage drops to 7. Overall, Buddin concludes that this private-to-charter school shift left taxpayers with a $1.8 billion larger education bill annually from 2000 to 2008. From the parents’ standpoint, however, charters are obviously cheaper. Hence Cato’s Schaeffer would like states to make more tax-credit scholarships available. Such programs have been growing, however, even without his advice: Publicly funded private-school options today

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The Impact of Charter Schools on Public and Private School Enrollment

The Condition of College & Career Readiness, 2012

Aaron Churchill / August 30, 2012

Fifty-four: That’s the percentage of students who took the ACT math exam last spring and failed to meet its benchmark score. (That benchmark signifies that a student attaining it has a 50 percent chance of earning a B, or a 75 percent chance of earning a C, in a credit-bearing college course.) The statistics are a bit better in English (33 percent fell below the ACT benchmark) and reading (48 percent). In science, however, they’re worse: Fully 69 percent of 2012 test-takers failed to meet the ACT benchmark score in this subject. A mere quarter of those who sat for the ACT met the organization’s benchmarks in all four subjects (as has been the case in years prior). Keep in mind, too, that for the most part only kids who plan to attend college even bother with the ACT. Unlike NAEP, in other words, it’s a selective sample of the high school population (and even NAEP omits dropouts). These bleak results—and the uphill battle they portend—are important to keep in mind as the U.S. embarks upon implementation of the Common Core academic standards, which are reportedly aligned with the ACT benchmarks. A very steep slope awaits us.

SOURCE: ACT, The Condition of College & Career Readiness, (Iowa City, IA: ACT, 2012).

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The Condition of College & Career Readiness, 2012

Recent State Action on Teacher Effectiveness: What’s in State Laws and Regulations

John Horton / August 30, 2012

The nation must “[demand] the best teacher in every classroom in America,” bellowed Chris Christie from the podium in Tampa on Tuesday evening. But that’s not what it’s getting today. This Bellwether analysis appraises the teacher-effectiveness laws, policies, and regulations in twenty-one states (including New Jersey) based on thirteen criteria, including: frequency of evaluation, teacher and principal dismissal procedures, pay-for-performance, and tenure policies. The evidence is sobering: Nearly half the states analyzed earn less than half the possible points. Top-scoring Indiana (our education-reform idol) garnered 11.75 of 13. (Louisiana, Florida, and Colorado also fared well; Ohio scored in the low-middle range: 5.5 out of 13.) Note, though, that this analysis addresses only state policies—which might unfairly dock forward-thinking jurisdictions with strong local control cultures or constitutional provisions that limit the scope of state authority. For those in need of help navigating smart teacher policy—and looking for best-practice solutions from across state lines—this report is a worthwhile resource. (Though all should also investigate NCTQ’s comprehensive yearbook on the subject—which catalogs teacher policy in all fifty-one of our nation’s jurisdictions.)

SOURCE: Sara Mead, Recent State Action on Teacher Effectiveness: What’s in State Laws and Regulations (Washington, D.C.: Bellwether Partners, August 2012).

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Recent State Action on Teacher Effectiveness: What’s in State Laws and Regulations